TerrorismUN: Hamas rocket, not Israeli air strike, killed BBC Gaza journalist's family

Published 12 March 2013

UN says that a BBC journalist’s son and two other family members who were killed during the first hour of last November’s Israeli campaign against Hamas in Gaza, were not killed by an Israeli air strike, as was assumed. Rather, the family was killed by a misfired Hamas rocket.

It was assumed that the son of a BBC journalist and two relatives who were killed last November during the first hours of Israel’s attack on Hamas, were killed by an Israeli missile.

Yesterday, however, the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) said the three were killed by misfired Hamas rocked which fell on the house .

The UN report concluded that at least 169 Palestinians were killed by Israeli attacks during the November campaign, of which more than 100 were civilians, including 33 children and 13 women.

Military campaigns against Hamas and Hezbollah typically result a large number of civilian casualties because the two organizations use their own populations as human shield.

The BBC journalist’s son, Omar, was killed, along with an aunt and an uncle, after an explosion at the family home in Gaza City.

The explosion occurred only one hour after Israel began its operation with the killing of Hamas’s top military commander.

The family, supported by Hamas, announced that the house was hit by an Israeli missile. The BBC reports that the Israeli military made no comment at the time of the incident but never denied carrying out the strike.

Israel said that it was carrying attacks against militants in the area.

UN officials who visited the partially destroyed house said that the structure sustained damage which was not consistent with an Israeli air strike.

The UN said it could not “unequivocally conclude” it was a misfired Palestinian rocket, and that another possibility was that the house was hit by a secondary explosion after an Israeli air strike on Palestinian weapons stores nearby.