WHY we know the UN observers were targets

Israeli spokemen feigning sorrow over "mistakes" is a cosmic level joke.
The pundits on the Friday News Roundup apparently didn't read these:

Ireland: UN peacekeeper in Lebanon warned Israel
Associated Press, THE JERUSALEM POST Jul. 26, 2006

Ireland on Wednesday filed an official protest with Israel alleging that its senior United Nations peacekeeper in Lebanon made six telephoned warnings about IDF shelling near a UN border outpost - hours before it suffered a direct hit and the four soldiers inside were killed.
Speaking after a 40-minute meeting with Israeli Ambassador Daniel Megiddo, two senior Cabinet ministers said they doubted Israel's claim that the attack was accidental.
Megiddo said his government would do all it could to avoid hitting United Nations positions and firmly rejected suggestions that Israel would ever target one. "You can't forget, however, that this is a war zone," he told reporters outside the Department of Foreign Affairs, where he had been summoned.
Defense Minister Willie O'Dea and Foreign Affairs Minister Dermot Ahern said what the ambassador told them was not credible.
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Copyright 1995-2006 The Jerusalem Post - http://www.jpost.com/

New York Times
July 27, 2006
U.N. Says It Protested to Israel for 6 Hours During Attack That Killed 4 Observers in Lebanon
By WARREN HOGE
UNITED NATIONS, July 26

— The United Nations said Wednesday that its top officials in New York and its officers on the ground in Lebanon made numerous calls on Tuesday to the Israeli mission and the Israeli military to protest repeated firing on its outpost in Lebanon where four unarmed observers ended up being killed.
Jane Holl Lute, the assistant secretary general for peacekeeping operations, said at an emergency meeting of the Security Council that over the six-hour period in which the United Nations’ warnings were being conveyed to the Israelis, the observation post at Khiam, in southern Lebanon, continued to come under fire.
The firings persisted even after rescuers reached the hilltop site, she said, and in all it was subjected to 21 strikes, 11 of them aerial bombardments and at least 6 artillery rounds.
She described the observation post as “well known and clearly marked” and added that no Hezbollah activity was reported in the area.
The four dead observers were from China, Finland, Canada and Austria.
Ms. Lute said the United Nations became so alarmed by the continuing attacks that she enlisted Mark Malloch Brown, the deputy secretary general, to join her in placing the calls.
In Lebanon, Khaled Mansour, the United Nations spokesman, said that he and Maj. Gen. Alain Pellegrini, the commander of the United Nations force there, known as Unifil, had contacted Israeli military commanders repeatedly during the same period.
When the United Nations lost contact with the outpost on Tuesday evening, it secured safe passage from Israel to send in a rescue party of Indian troops. They found the shelter collapsed and the remains of three of the four observers. The fourth is presumed dead, Ms. Lute said.
“Firing continued during the rescue operation despite repeated requests to the I.D.F. for an abatement,” she said, speaking of the Israeli Defense Forces.
She said that Unifil had reported 145 incidents of “close firings” in recent days with several patrol bases taking direct hits and sustaining damage to buildings, equipment and vehicles.
Ms. Lute said Secretary General Kofi Annan, who in a statement on Tuesday night issued in Rome had called the attacks “apparently deliberate,” now accepted Israel’s assurance that they were not.
She said the United Nations welcomed Israel’s promise to conduct an immediate investigation and added that the United Nations would make a formal request that the inquiry be carried out jointly by the United Nations and Israel.
A formal statement on the incident that the Security Council was working on Wednesday evening originally incorporated language from China also calling the strikes “apparently deliberate.” But Wang Guangya, the Chinese ambassador, agreed to drop the reference after a morning meeting with John R. Bolton, the American ambassador.
The working draft of the statement said that attacks against United Nations personnel were “unacceptable.” And it stressed that “any hostile action against peacekeepers must not occur.’’
Mr. Bolton warned that the statement should not be exploited by those countries seeking an immediate end to hostilities.
“We should not make this statement a backdoor way of getting into cease-fire or other larger political and military questions,” he said. “That’s not appropriate here.”
Mr. Bolton noted that the Israelis had called the killings “an operational mistake,” and he said he had seen “no evidence to the contrary.”
The French ambassador, Jean-Marc de la Sablière, said: “When you have four blue helmets hit, the whole international community is hit. We think it should be condemned.”
Vitaly V. Churkin, the ambassador from Russia, said the initial reaction of United Nations officials on Tuesday was understandable, given the circumstances.
“I think I can sympathize very strongly with the people in the Secretariat who were trying for hours to prevent the tragic consequences of the shelling, and I can easily understand their feelings when they realized that the people they were trying to help for a very long time, for hours, were killed,” Mr. Churkin said. “I am certainly not blaming the Secretariat.”
He added, “One would expect to see more respect for peacekeepers if one wants to rely on them in the future.”
The Security Council this week is considering the renewal of the mandate of Unifil, which ends next Monday. France, which is the president of the council this month, has suggested a one-month extension to give time for planning the expanded new force being widely called for.
Hassan M. Fattah contributed reporting from Beirut, Lebanon, for this article.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company