Four Questions About Qana

I am of the opinion that the "massacre" at Qana was faked, that it is physically impossible for it have occurred in the way The AP and others claim happened. And I have decided to publish my questions about Qana - maybe there is an explanation

Four Questions
There are four major reasons for thinking that Qana was faked: that the earthslip said to have killed the victims would have had to move laterally on a hill; that the pictured "earthslip" implies loose earth or topsoil to a depth of eight feet on the top of a hill in Lebanon's stony desert country; that, as we can see by counting cinder blocks in the cellar, the earthslip is too small to completely cover 26 bodies and too shallow at its further end to hold down and suffocate the adults whose bodies were "dug out;" that the testimony of those present is that the 26 people supposedly buried and suffocated under the earthslip were shouting.

The EU Referendum has published an account of Qana which is the first and only account that makes the geography and topography of the area clear.

Originally, I supposed that the cellar roof fell on a group of people sheltering from an air raid. But pictures showed an intact cellar roof.

Then I was given to understand that bombs cracked a cellar wall which later gave waythus launching an earthslip on unprepared victims. Looking at pictures of rescue workers walking up a hill, I just assumed that the house in which the tragedy occured was at the bottom of a hill and tunneled back into it. That's how I thought the earthslip occurred. I also assumed that the room in which the tragedy occurred (for 26 people ARE dead somehow) was quite large.

Question 1 Apparent Lateral Movement of Earth






As this picture from the EU Referendum report shows [I have added an arrow to show the direction of earth movement], the house was on a hill or ridge with land sloping away in front of it. The earth is supposed to have moved in the direction of the arrow. It is said that the collapse of the house broke the wall of concrete blocks which was the cellar foundation of the small room on the right. Moving laterally across the hill, a large mass of earth is then supposed to have piled across the small room into the larger room on the left. I do not think that earth moves laterally.

Question 2 Eight Feet of Loose Topsoil on a Ridgetop.

In this picture of the earthslip, we are in the part of the cellar below the large room in the picture above. We are looking toward the part of the cellar below the small room in the picture above. Notice that the roof has not fallen. The berm is not caused by a house falling down; it is a mixture of earth and stone coming from, it is said, the collapse of the wall in the small adjacent cellar room caused by or followed by an earthslip (laterally across the hillside). This earthslip was so sudden that the victims were buried before they could escape. The manner of this, we are to imagine, is suggested by the picture of the unfortunate victim in the picture above. We have to imagine then an eight-foot-high wall of earth and stone; we have to imagine it as fast-moving and therefore loose. Loose earth and stone is the condition of top soil but top soil is nowhere eight feet except possibly in the Mississippi river valley. The soil in Lebanon is not loose or deep; the soil on top of hills is particularly thin since hills are caused by up-thrusting rock and subject to erosion. I simply cannot believe in the presence of an eight-foot depth of loose topsoil anywhere in Lebanon, let alone on top of ridge.

Twenty-six People Buried under Rubble Heap 9' high, 12' long and 11' feet high

Next we ask how large that pile of rubble is. In the picture above it is dark, vast and ominous but we know that it is all inside the cellar directly below the two rooms of the house in the first picture. This next picture shows us size.

In this picture we see very clearly that the cellar walls were made of cinder blocks. We can guess their approximate size because of the tape player lying directly against the wall. Tape players like that are about 11 inches long so the cinder blocks are slightly less than one foot high and one foot long If then we count upward and across we can find the approximate length, width and height of the cellar and from this approximate the size of the berm. The cellar is nine and half cinder blocks high. I can count 11 cinder blocks in the picture of above as the width of the berm.

To get the back wall we need two pictures. First, this one of the inside to count the cellar cinder blocks from the inside.
Counting along the top or bottom row of blocks the back wall of the large cellar room is 10 blocks wide. This agrees with the count of cinderblocks in the picture below of the outside (which has been enhanced using Picasa to bring out the cinder block lines.) In this picture we can see that the inner room of the cellar which is hidden by earth is two cinder blocks long at the back. The whole length of the two rooms across the back is twelve cinder blocks.


Now the point of these calculations is that they show that the berm was much smaller than it looks in pictures where there is no reference point. The berm was 9.5 cinder blocks high at its highest point, 12 cinder blocks across the cellar back and 11 cinder blocks long on its side. Thus it was not more than 9.5 feet high, 11 feet wide and 12 feet long. The everage person is 5.5 feet high so two people sleeping head to toe would be eleven feet long. The average person is two feet wide so six people sleeping side by side would be twelve feet wide. Twelve people would cover the entire floor area of the berm where twenty-six people supposedly died.
If we suppose a second layer then twenty-four would fit. (How we are to suppose the victims were originally arranged so to be pushed into two layers with no arms and legs showing on the sides or top is a puzzle.) But if there were a second layer, then the victims in that layer would not be buried under eight or nine feet of laterally-moving top-soil because the berm is not 9.5 feet high for its whole length. Toward the front of the berm those in the top layer would be within inches of the surface. Right at the front both layers would have beeen so close that if those in the top layer had fought for their lives and scrambled out they would have lifted the dirt off those below. So how did twenty-six people come to be crushed and suffocated? These victims were not knocked out by falling rubble; they were not cut and bruised.

On Flickr sites belonging to "Olwan and Marcy Newman, there are pictures of victims being dug from less than a foot of rubble. Here is one




In this picture a Red Cross worker at the very front of the berm lifts out someone from a trench about a foot deep. This a very sad picture, which, I suppose, is why no has looked very closely at the depth of the earth this woman was supposedly buried in. In the foreground is the greenclad leg of a second victim in that same area.

Here someone is lifted from almost the same area – this is the front of the berm a little to the side as you can tell by the wall and light from behind the two workers.

In short, three people were allegedly buried alive very close to each other and within inches of the surface in two cases. Yet none of them fought their way out though, according to the newspapers, none were cut and bruised as if they had been stunned.

This is generally true ofthe rest of the berm - if twenty-six people had been covered by the berm many of them would have been close to surface and in escaping would have freed many more.

[These two photos are from the Flickr sites, Olwan and MarcyNewman. ]

Eyewitnesses Claim Victims Shouted for Help
Those who claimed to have been in the cellar at the time of the earthslip said the ceiling fell but, of course, they may have had no idea what was happening. What's harder to explain is their claim that the victims shouted for help. How could deeply buried people shout for help? So I wonder about the "eyewitnesses".
Are they relatives perhaps of Capt. Jamil Hussein?

If anyone can supply explanations for these four questions, I would be interested.