Soccer Dad

Now he tells us

Ethan Bronner:

The accusations caused a furor here and abroad because they came on top of others that the civilian death toll was high and that soldiers took an unusually aggressive approach in Gaza.

The accounts that have received the most attention came from a taped conversation of Gaza veterans at a pre-military course. The soldiers there told of a sniper killing a woman and her two children walking in a no-go zone and of another case in which an elderly woman was shot dead for approaching a commandeered house.

The army's advocate general has opened an investigation and has not yet issued a report. But officers familiar with the investigation say that those who spoke of the killing of the mother and her children did not witness it and that it almost certainly did not occur. Warning shots were fired near the family but not at it, the officers said, and a rumor spread among the troops of an improper shooting.

The second killing may also not have occurred, they said, although a similar event was recounted by Col. Herzl Halevy in January in the newspaper Yediot Aharonot.

Recall that Bronner reported the supposed war crimes without any scrutiny. By the time Bronner wrote about the Ha'aretz charges, Ynet had published a story contradicting the charges. Bronner also researched the unsubstantiated claim he reported last week that suggested that rabbis were encouraging the soldiers to be more violent. His conclusion this week, is that there's no evidence to support that conclusion.

(h/t Yaacov Lozowick)

CAMERA Snapshots notes the article with a dose of cynicism.

Noah Pollak concludes:

Having reported extensively on Operation Cast Lead while it was happening, Bronner surely knows that the nature of combat in Gaza demands the careful treatment of civilian-killing stories; as a journalist, he surely sensed that the original claims were thinly-sourced; and as a reporter covering Israel, he surely knows that false atrocity stories are a standard Palestinian PR tactic -- and that none of them have ever proven true, from Mohammad Al-Dura in 2000 to Jenin in 2002 to the UN school bombing in 2009. It's good that he wrote a responsible followup. It's bad that he gave so much attention to the story in the first place.

UPDATE: On a related note, please see Barry Rubin.

Crossposted on Yourish.