Downer’s unfounded faith in the internet

Late in the evening of July 23, Qassem Shalin, a volunteer member of the Lebanese Red Cross for 13 years, set off in his ambulance for a cross road near the village of Qana in southern Lebanon. His job that night was to collect, with a second ambulance, six people who had suffered minor injuries the day before during fighting between Hezbollah and Israel.

It was a call-out that almost cost Shalin his life and, according to Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, has since cost him his reputation as an impartial protector of war's wounded.

The run sheets that night of the Lebanese Red Cross in Beirut and the International Committee for the Red Cross, who were working closely with them, show the two ambulances waited at the intersection just north of Qana for another ambulance carrying wounded from the village of Tibnin.

Just after 11.30 a large explosion thundered into Shalin's ambulance. Both drivers were wearing body armour and had just loaded two stretchers carrying Ahmed Mohammed Fawaz and his 14-year-old son, Abdullah.

Shalin is not the only one to have come under attack in the wake of the incident. Representatives of the world's media who covered the aftermath, including this correspondent, are in the Foreign Minister's sights for reporting that the ambulance had been struck by an Israeli missile, in a serious contravention of the rules that govern warfare.

In a speech to Australian newspaper publishers this week, he accused us all of willingly falling for a Hezbollah-contrived conspiracy, our eagerness to do so being dishonest and irresponsible and, according to Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt, fuelled by an anti-Israeli bias.

"What concerns me greatly is the evidence of dishonesty in the reporting out of Lebanon," Downer said, adding later that "it is beyond serious dispute that this episode has all the makings of a hoax".

The source of his findings was a right-wing Florida-based website, zombietime.com, which had devoted 28 pages to discredit the story and lambasted the world's media for covering it.

Downer finds the blog to be a compelling condemnation of the foreign media's competence and ideological stance in Lebanon. Key planks of zombietime.com's allegations are that a missile would not cause the type of damage done to Ambulance 782; rust around the damaged roof showed the damage was done some time prior; neither driver was seriously injured; Shalin's injuries seemed to heal miraculously; and the Israeli apology was merely a matter of course.

I was in Tyre on the night of the attack and investigated the incident closely the next day. On July 24, with photographer Stewart Innes, we spoke to Qassem Shalin, who was recovering from a minor wound to his chin that nurses had bandaged to stop it from turning septic. We also visited Ahmed Mohammed Fawaz, whose lower left leg had been amputated and whose severe burns ironically had saved his life by sealing blood vessels and arteries. His son writhed in pain nearby, his stomach riddled with shrapnel and the rear of his scalp opened up.

We inspected both ambulances, whose mangled roofs were not rusting at the time. By the time the photos used on the blog site were taken, rust had appeared. But this is entirely normal in Lebanon's sultry summer climate, where humidity on the coast does not drop below 70per cent.

Downer's spokesman, Tony Parkinson, said on Tuesday: "Those (website) pictures do not show an ambulance that has been struck by a missile nor do they sustain the argument the ambulance was struck by a missile."

He is wrong. The damage done was consistent with ruined cars and vans that I saw elsewhere in Lebanon and earlier in Gaza, which had been hit by a missile fired from a drone. The Israeli-made drones have many types of missiles, but the most regularly used has a small warhead designed for use in urban areas. It aims not to kill anyone outside a small zone and rarely leaves a calling card outside its target.

Downer and Parkinson should know this. The Australian Government last year signed a deal to buy drones from Israel. They would surely have come with a buyer's guide.

The small warhead partly explains the driver's lack of serious wounds. But more telling is the fact that Shalin was lifting the rear ramp of the ambulance when the missile hit. His colleague was stepping into the side door. The concussion wave from the missile easily dispersed through the open spaces. Shalin was protected as he fell under the ramp. The other driver was blown out the side door.

Working in the Lebanese Red Cross operations room in Beirut the night the ambulances were hit was field manager George Kettaneh. "Every ambulance that moved in Lebanon I had to know about," he said. "I received phone calls from the ambulance drivers and it took us one hour to negotiate a ceasefire through the ICRC."

The man doing their bidding for them was Antoine Bieler, the field co-ordinator for the ICRC who yesterday confirmed to Media that he had negotiated a ceasefire with the Israeli Defence Force. "Yes absolutely, that happened," he said from Beirut. The ICRC in Geneva later said there was nothing to support Downer's claim that the events of that night were an anti-Israeli hoax.

I returned to Tyre on Saturday to speak again to Qassem Shalin and inspect the damaged ambulances. "Everything I said happened that night did happen," he said. "There was not a sound in the sky before the explosions. And after that there was a battle for the next hour. We hid in a building nearby convinced we were going to die. It was only when George (Kettaneh) called me that we could leave safely."

The events of July 23 and the reporting that followed was newsworthy and important. The ICRC has documented two other occasions when Lebanese ambulances were hit during the war and to report the incidents does not reflect anti-Israeli bias. The blog site's attempts to create a smokescreen around a shameful truth fail on tests of scrutiny that Downer was happy to overlook.

Beyond serious dispute? Only if you want to believe it, Minister.