As a former member of the Israeli artillery corps, I wanted to comment on the latest brouhaha over the recent explosion on a northern Gaza Strip beach that killed seven, capturing in the process video footage of a young girl running from the water to the body of her dead father, watching her world shatter into a thousand pieces.

The Israeli military has conducted a review and declared quite categorically that the culprit was not an errant Israeli 155 mm. artillery shell.

The Israel Defense Force has been shelling areas from which terrorists have been launching rocket attacks into Israel. These attacks follow Israel’s withdrawal last summer to the international border, that is, the 1967 lines separating it from the Gaza Strip.

Of course, firing a shell from a 155 mm howitzer is more precise an exercise than, say, “I shot an arrow in the air, it fell to earth I know not where?” Before firing, artillery units consult forward positioned scouts, wind speed and direction, humidity, topography, and trajectory, to help acquire a desired target.

Not that a mistake couldn’t happen. On April 18, 1996, Israel mistakenly shelled a U.N. peacekeeping compound in Qana, southern Lebanon, killing 102 Arab civilians. This was a terrible incident, and it had a major political impact: When combined with the stepped up pace of Hamas suicide bombings that February (four in eight days in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem), it eroded the enormous popular sentiment that had attached to Shimon Peres when he succeeded the slain Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister. Tens of thousand Jewish voters switched over to support the ultimately successful Likud candidate, Benjamin Netanyahu, while Arab voters (who would have voted against Netanyahu) sat on their hands to protest what they saw as Mr. Peres’s complicity in Qana.

For now, the forensic evidence cited by Israel to prove its lack of involvement is being refuted by a Human Rights Watch investigator who found that the injuries suffered by the Palestinians were inconsistent with a mine-blast as suggested by Israeli authorities in earlier statements. A former Pentagon senior intelligence analyst and battle damage assessment expert, Marc Garlasco, believes the evidence points to an Israeli artillery shell although he doesn’t rule out another cause. Mr. Garlasco has said that the evidence points to a 155 mm shell, but he admits his conclusions are far from conclusive and await further investigation.

Mr. Garlasco found what the HRW report calls “a large piece of unoxidized jagged shrapnel, stamped ‘155mm'” which would be consistent with an artillery shell fired by the IDF’s M-109 Self-Propelled Artillery.

Moreover, HRW reports that according to global positioning satellite readings, the crater where the victims were killed was nearby and the same shape and size as craters caused by the six other Israeli shells fired on June 9 and which are accounted for. (One was as close as 100 meters away from the beach crater.)

Finally, HRW insists that “The craters are too large to be made by bounding mines, the only type of landmines capable of producing head and torso injuries of the type suffered by the victims on June 9.”

Better send in the CSI teams. This is all about the width and tensile strength of shrapnel fragments, crater dimensions, and dispersal patterns. But to whom will crime-scene investigators report? Most likely: some institution or body at the United Nations.

U.N. Secretary-General Annan is calling for “a full investigation.” But has the judge decided on the outcome of the proceeding before setting it in motion?

On June 9 Mr. Annan was “deeply disturbed at the killing of civilians, including women and children, on a beach in Gaza earlier today,” refusing to assign blame except to say that it was “reportedly by Israeli forces.”

During a June 14 Q&A at the United Nations, Mr. Annan told reporters that that the possibility that Palestinian-planted mine was responsible for the Gaza beach fatalities struck him as “odd.”

“Mine on a beach? That’s odd,” the secretary-general said. At a June 15 press conference, he repeated his observation: “I did say it was odd.”

The June 14 London-based Al-Hayat newspaper reported that Mr. Annan reasoned that Palestinians wouldn’t plant “charges in a place where civilians often spend their time.”

In other words, responsible Palestinians (like the Hamas government) who send children with bombs strapped to their chests to blow themselves up and take some Jews with them couldn’t possibly have endangered Palestinian civilians by allowing them to picnic on a mine-sown beach.

Alternatively, there must be no words in Arabic for “snafu” or “fubar.” After all, responsible Palestinians (like the Hamas government) who send children with bombs strapped to their chests to blow themselves up and who are killing and being killed by their Fatah rivals, couldn’t possibly fail to notice whether a competitor planted mines along the beach to stop Israeli troops from using the beach as a landing zone. No way. Too strange. Only the Israeli military could make a mistake like that.

The flare-up couldn’t have come at a worse time. Divided against themselves, often violently, Palestinians were suddenly given a reminder of their common enemy. This reminder came in an almost mythic form – the suffering Palestinian child.

If the Israeli version of events has not been universally accepted, it is still better to have a disputed verdict than a lynch mob. Just look at some of the headlines that followed the initial blast: Lebanon’s Daily Star: “Israeli fire rakes Gaza beach,” while Drudge reported that “Israeli Artillery Barrage Hits Packed Gaza Beach.” Assuming the worst, that it was an Israeli shell, how does one shell “rake” or get transformed into a “barrage”?

There are those of us who have reached a point in this struggle where we have long since stopped worrying about how “unfair” our detractors are. The thing to watch is the political impact. If the verdict ultimately rendered here goes against Israel and if that judgment is backed by strong forensic evidence, it would trigger a major political problem for Israel’s untested defense minister. Amir Peretz is also leader of the second largest party, Labor, so the political fallout for Prime Minister Olmert’s government, and everything that depends on Israeli political stability, would be severe.

Mr. Twersky is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.