This week, according to reports in the Israeli media, even Marc Garlasco, a Pentagon expert on the effects of battlefield weapons hired by Human Rights Watch to investigate the deaths, "conceded" that he could not contradict the findings of the Israeli army's own inquiry.

Presumably that is because Israel is not letting him or anyone else near their evidence. But Garlasco's slight change of tune -- even if it is not exactly a ringing endorsement -- leaves the door ajar just wide enough that the Israeli army will doubtless slip through it to escape being held accountable yet again.

The army has been claiming for more than a week, based on its own evidence, that the lethal explosion was not caused by a stray shell landing on the Gaza beach but most probably by a mine placed there by Palestinian militants to prevent an Israeli naval landing.

The army's case could be dismissed outright were it not for the racist assumptions that now prevail as Western "thought" about Arabs and Muslims.

To be plausible the army account requires two preposterous assumptions: first, that Palestinian militants are so fanatical that they consider it acceptable to lay a mine secretly in an area frequented by local families; and second, that they are so primitive that their best military minds could not work out the futility of placing a single mine along miles of coastline that could be used for a landing (or are we to assume that there are many more of these mines waiting to explode?).

To support its case, the army has produced two pieces of evidence that apparently make its denials of responsibility "airtight".

First, it claims that a piece of shrapnel removed by doctors from an injured Palestinian transferred to an Israeli hospital was not from one its shells but more likely from a Palestinian explosive device.

Given that, unlike Israel, the Palestinians do not have any factories manufacturing mines or rockets and are forced instead to make them out of any spare metal parts they can get their hands on -- doors, pipes, wrecked cars, fridges -- this evidence is meaningless. Palestinian witnesses have already said the beach victims were standing close to taxis when the shell exploded. So if the shrapnel was not from an Israeli shell, it suggests only that the missile also damaged other metal objects -- possibly the cars -- sending a shard into at least one of the victims.

The army will have a lot of explaining to do if reports on Israeli TV, not usually noted for its independent approach, confirm that another piece of shrapnel found in a victim is from an Israeli shell. So far, of course, the army is denying the report.

The second piece of evidence is supplied by the army, which says one of its many drones that circle overhead spying on Gaza round the clock shows the families calmly still on the beach, and later an ambulance arriving, tens of minutes after the army had finished shelling the area.

The problem with the Israeli evidence is that we have to take the army's word for it: that the families shown are the ones who were about to be shelled, and that the timings given are accurate.

It also means we have to discount a lot of counter-evidence supplied by Garlasco, journalists, doctors and Palestinian witnesses -- and even the Israeli army. The army, for example, has admitted that one of the shells it fired in the area is unaccounted for, a striking admission in itself. The drones apparently were no help in locating this "missing" explosion, even though they were spying on the area.

Garlasco has already determined that the injuries sustained by the beach victims accord with a blast above ground -- an Israeli shell -- rather than one underground -- a Palestinian mine.

The many Palestinian witnesses have all put the time of the blast close to when the shelling occurred, and report that the reason they were queuing for taxis was because of panic sown by the shells they were hearing landing nearby.

Independent journalists have shown that, according to the clocks on the hospital computers that admitted the dead and injured, the timing of the first blood tests were taken soon after the Israeli army shelling -- and certainly too soon to accord with the army's account of when the Palestinian mine supposedly exploded. Doctors have also confirmed that they were called to the nearest hospitals well before 5pm -- at about the time, or even before, the army claims the mine went off.

The outrage expressed in some quarters at the failure simply to believe the army's version might sound more convincing were Israel welcoming an international investigation to adjudicate on the matter. But of course it is not. Just as in spring 2002, following the deaths of many civilians in the Palestinian town of Jenin and the destruction of the heart of the local refugee camp during a prolonged attack by the Israeli army and air force, Israel is rejecting all suggestions of an independent inquiry.

So why not just take Israel's word for it? Its army is the most moral in the world, after all, and a state of law like Israel would gain nothing from lying in such a bare-faced manner.

The only problem is that Israel and its security forces have been caught out lying repeatedly during this Intifada and before it, not just to people on the other side of the world who cannot verify the facts but also to its own courts and public.

This week, for example, the Supreme Court ordered the army and Ministry of Defense to pull down several kilometers of the steel and concrete barrier they have erected on Palestinian land in the West Bank after it was proved that the security considerations behind the choice of the wall's route were entirely bogus. Official documents reveal that the wall was located there to allow for the future expansion of nearly illegal Jewish settlements on yet more Palestinian land. The army and government concocted the fib and then stuck to it for more than two years. Chief Justice Aharaon Barak called their systematic lying "a grave phenomenon".

And at the start of the Intifada, back in October 2000, the government and police covered up the fact that live ammunition and sniper units trained to deal with terror attacks had been used against unarmed Arab demonstrators inside Israel. For more than six months the government and security services denied that a single live round had been fired, despite mounting evidence to the contrary that lawyers and journalists like myself had unearthed.

They might have got away with their brazen lies too, had it not been for an unusual series of events that led to the appointment of a state inquiry headed by a Supreme Court judge, Theodor Or, who quickly exposed the truth.

That happened not because of any urge by official bodies to come clean or the inevitable triumph of Israeli justice. It happened for one reason alone: the prime minister of the day, Ehud Barak, feared losing the impending general election to his rival Ariel Sharon and thought he could buy back Arab votes by setting up an inquiry.

The inhabitants of Gaza have no such leverage inside the Israeli legal and political system. They have no friends inside Israel. And now it looks like they have no friends in the international community either.

-Jonathan Cook, a writer and journalist living in Nazareth, Israel, is the author of "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State", published by Pluto Press. His website is www.jkcook.net

He said that of the injured, three children were in critical condition and the rest sustained moderate injury.

Palestinian witnesses said that an Israeli drone fired at least one air-to-surface missile at a car that drove on a road between Gaza and the town of Jabalya, adding that those who were in the car managed to jump out of the car and ran away. They added that the missile directly hit the car, and its shrapnel hit 14 people, most of them children.

Palestinian security sources said that the three militants in the car were members of the al-Aqsa Brigades, the Fatah movement's armed wing.

An Israeli army spokesman told Israel Radio that the Israeli air forces targeted a group of Palestinian militants involved in firing homemade rockets at Israel.
The airstrike came shortly after the Israeli Defense Ministry decided to carry out tough measures against Palestinian militant groups which fire homemade rockets at towns in southern Israel.

The three children -- a five-year-old boy, a six-year-old girl and 16-year-old teenager -- were killed late Tuesday when Israeli aircraft targeted militants in the
Gaza Strip connected to Abbas's Fatah party.

The raid was condemned by Russia, one of the four sponsors of the stalled Middle East peace process, with Moscow expressing "extreme concern" and calling attacks on civilians "inadmissible".

In Geneva, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan deplored the strike, called on the Palestinian leadership to prevent attacks by militants and urged Israel to respect international law.

In Gaza City, hundreds of Palestinians attended the children's funerals as gunmen fired volleys into the air.

Almost simultaneously, militants fired three makeshift rockets at Israel, amid a surge in cross-border violence that has seen more than 140 missiles launched this month, an Israeli military source said.

Speaking at a World Zionist Congress meeting in Jerusalem late Tuesday, Olmert vowed there would be no immunity for Palestinians who attack Israel.

"I want to say here to those who want to attack us, we will take hard measures, very hard, more hard and more painful that those taken in the past.

"There will be no immunity for those implicated in terrorism, no matter what they do or what movement they belong to," he said, making it clear Israel would not refrain from striking Hamas members involved in attacks.

The army said Tuesday's air strike had targeted an Al-Aqsa cell involved in rocket attacks on Israel and that it regretted civilian casualties.

Israel has recently been embarrassed by a series of deaths of children and innocent Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Nine civilians were killed in an air raid on June 13, four days after eight civilians died in an explosion while picnicking on the beach in an attack a rights group blamed on an Israeli shell.

The Palestinian leadership condemned Tuesday's "new crime", insisting it was making efforts to preserve a ceasefire. Abbas earlier called for a halt to rocket attacks, warning that Israel could launch a ground assault in Gaza.

Olmert has repeatedly called on Abbas to dismantle armed Palestinian factions, including the armed wing of Hamas, as a precondition for resuming stalled peace talks.

The two leaders are set to hold their first "informal" top-level meeting on Thursday at a breakfast hosted by King Abdullah II at a forum of Nobel laureates in Jordan.

The meeting at Petra will be a first between Abbas and Olmert as leaders, and the first top-level Israeli-Palestinian contact since June 2005.

In the occupied West Bank, Israeli troops shot dead a wanted Palestinian from the Al-Aqsa Brigades near the volatile city of Nablus, after the faction urged its fighters to turn the Israeli desert town of Sderot, bombarded by rockets, into "a hell".

Four Palestinians were later wounded by Israeli rubber bullets when troops entered Nablus, witnesses and medical sources said.

Roughly 7,400 people living in Israel have liquid assets worth over USD 1 million, among them 84 multimillionaires have fortunes worth over USD 30 million, according to the Merrill Lynch/Capgemini World Wealth Report 2005.

The number of Israeli millionaires grew by 12 percent and the number of multimillionaires leapt a whopping 20 percent since last year. The total liquid assets of Israel's wealthy class grew by 25 percent to sum USD 30 billion.

The number of Israeli millionaires per capita was twice the world average. Uri Goldfarb, vice president of Merrill Lynch Israel for private banking, said that the increase in the number of multimillionaires (20 percent) was significantly higher than the world growth rate of 8.5 percent.

The wealth report reveals that in 2005, three Israelis joined the list of the top 500 richest people in the world - lifting the number of Israelis gracing the list to nine.

Nine richest Israelis in the world:

* Shari Arison (holder of controlling interest of Bank Hapoalim): USD 5 billion

* Stef Wertheimer and his familty (Iscar owners): USD 3.5 billion
* Ofer family (Israel Corporation and Bank Mizrahi): USD 3 billion
* Haim Saban (Bezeq owner, made fortune in communications and entertainment): USD 2.8 billion
* Lev Leviev (holder of controlling interest of Africa Israel): USD 2.6 billion
* Yitzhak Tshuva (holder of controlling interest of Delek group): USD 2 billion
* Benny Steinmetz (real estate and diamonds): USD 1.5 billion
* Morris Kahn (founder of Amdocs and Golden Pages): USD 1 billion
* Judith and Jacob Richter (Medinol founders): USD 1 billion

By next year, Stef and Eitan Wertheimer are expected to overtake Arison and reach first place as Israel's richest people. Their fortune after selling Iscar is estimated at over USD 7 billion. In addition businessmen defined as "oligarchs" and Arnon Milchan, who were included in Forbes' list of the world's wealthiest, were left off the current tally because they were not considered Israelis or because their wealth was not in available assets.

The report only considers millionaires whose fortune includes over USD 1 million in available assets, not considering money invested in fixed properties (such as real estate). The report also reveals that very few of Israel's wealthiest dropped off the list since last year.

In the world

According to the report, the total fortune of all the world's millionaires equaled USD 33.3 trillion in 2005 - an increase of 8.5 percent compared to 2004.

In 2005 the number of millionaires in the world grew by 6.5 percent to USD 8.7 million, and the number of multimillionaires grew by 10.2 percent to reach 85,400.

The Rafah crossing will be re-opened until further notice, the sources added.

Palestinian witnesses said that hundreds of Palestinians were unable to leave the Gaza Strip via Rafah on Wednesday morning due to the crossing's shutdown.

The Rafah crossing, sitting on the southern Gaza border with Egypt, is the only terminal for Palestinians to travel in and out of the Gaza Strip.

The European Union monitors have been inspecting the crossing since late last year in accordance with a U.S.-brokered agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.

Israel withdrew from the entire Gaza Strip last summer and the Rafah crossing is co-operated by the Palestinian and Egyptian troops.

There are two primary facts that characterize the educational system: (1) Israel provides the worst primary and lower secondary education in the western world, and (2) the system does not lack money, when compared to average educational expenditures in other countries. On the naive assumption that the first fact is by now common knowledge, I allowed myself to focus my article "Where Did the Money Go" (Haaretz, June 1, 2006) on highlighting the second fact. Big mistake.

The title of an article written in response to mine by Dr. Ami Volansky, among the educational system's leaders until a few years ago, reflects the thinking of many of those affiliated with the system: "After the budget cut, the downward slide" (Haaretz, June 7, 2006?). He is referring to the budget cuts that the system experienced after I presented a comprehensive picture of it for the first time - as part of the Ben-Shahar team - to Prime Minister Ehud Barak and his cabinet in 2000.

However, there is one small problem with Volansky's observation. It is completely disconnected from the facts. In the 1990s, Israel's education budget actually rose steadily. But during this period, the scholastic achievements of Israel's eighth graders deteriorated to 39th place among the countries that participated in the TIMSS mathematics and science exams (based on average math and science scores in 1995 and 1999).

We ranked below all the Western countries, and below additional countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and Romania, which provide us - still, though apparently not forever - with cheap textiles and labor.

As if a low level of education were not enough, educational gaps within Israel are considerably higher than in other Western countries, and in general, higher than in 49 of the 53 participating countries. These results are not due only to the "weak" segments of our population, as many people prefer to think. In fact, Israel's highest achievers, those students in the top fifth percentile, were ranked in only 35th place.

All this took place during years when budgets were relatively large compared with the budgets of countries that overtook us in achievements. And it is important to note that despite the extremely problematic implications of these rankings, the picture they depict is actually rosier than the reality, since Israel did not include in the test the many pupils studying in its ultra-Orthodox education system.

Reading comprehension among fourth graders was examined in the PIRLS tests that were given in 2001. Israel ranked 23rd out of 35 countries, while education gaps within the country were higher than in 30 other countries.

In another article written in response to mine, Abraham Yogev, Idit Livne and Yariv Feniger (Haaretz in Hebrew, June 8, 2006) focused on the PISA exam administered to 15-year-olds in 2002. In their attempt to minimize the gravity of the situation, the writers forgot to mention the bottom line - the results. Israel's average grade in all three of the subjects, mathematics, science and reading comprehension, placed it 31st out of 41 countries - once again, below all Western countries, as well as additional nations with living standards well below ours. And as if this were not enough, education gaps within Israel were the highest among all the 41 participating countries.

The quality of education, as measured by international exams, has a significant impact on living standards and their growth rates. Findings by Eric A. Hanushek and Dennis D. Kimko published in the American Economic Review, one of the leading research journals in economics, indicate that an improvement in the average level of education by one standard deviation increases economic growth by about 1.5 percentage points. Even if we assume that the growth improvement is only half of what Hanushek and Kimko find, this would mean an annual addition to gross domestic product that starts at NIS 4 billion and increases each year.

In addition, the researchers found that an increase in education spending does not significantly affect growth.
In short, the time has come for those who demand higher education budgets to distinguish between facts and opinions and to provide a detailed explanation of what exactly causes the lethal combination of low achievements and large budgets in the country of the People of the Book. In light of the speed with which the surrounding global environment is changing, it should be clear that this is an existential need.

Dr. Ben-David teaches economics in the Department of Public Policy at Tel Aviv University.