This was originally posted on Sunday, but I'm updating the time as I add more links at the bottom.

A building in Qana, Lebanon, collapses at 8:00 am yesterday (Saturday) morning, when OTHER nearby buildings -- nearly a half a kilometer away -- were being attacked. Current estimates are that 60 civilians were killed, including, we are told, many children.

One theory is that the building -- which had been hit at midnight the night before -- simply remained standing for eight hours before suddenly collapsing. But if so, it and was such a "rickety" structure, then why put so many civilians in it? At midnight a building is attacked: do you move people into it or out of it?

The American Thinker smells something fishy:

But why on earth were so many children and other presumed innocents inside the building 8 hours after it was attacked? Pardon my suspicions, but isn’t this possibly a case of Hezbollah intentionally killing them, in order to have an effective propagand[a] tool?

Could a group really be that reprehensible? We know Saddam did this during the first Gulf War (he positioned quite a number of civilians inside a military control tower -- and the press rewarded his cynical gambit quite handsomely) -- but Hezbollah?

But wait, there's more still. Over at Powerline they've noticed the following banner, which appeared mere hours after the deaths:

According to AFP the caption reads:

The massacre of children in Qana 2, is the gift of Rice.
The clever bombs... Stupid

Paul remarks:

What seems odd about this is that the banner was unfurled within hours after the Qana attack took place. The building where the civilians died was bombed on Sunday morning, and the demonstration took place during daylight hours, later the same day. I have no idea what kind of facility it takes to produce a 30-foot-high banner like this one. It is obviously professionally done. It would be interesting to know where this banner was produced; who designed and paid for it; and how its production was expedited so that it was ready for use, on the street, within hours after the event being protested.

The banner is indeed well done. What is very strange is that it mentions the specific building in question, and the text doesn't appear to have been added after the fact: the fonts are clearly professional-quality, and appear to be part of the image itself, not a superimposition.

Having witnessed the production of similar kinds of material (though obviously for business, not terrorists!) it has been my experience that such images, alone, would have taken hours to prepare on a computer. That's a custom artistic rendering of Condi (and whoever's smirking in the background). And even here in the US, even if you already had the whole thing prepared, I don't know of any kind of print facility which could have given you that kind of a turnaround.

And apparently, it was Hezbollah who chose the location, not the IDF.

Brigadier General Eshel explained that "since the start of fighting in Lebanon 150 rockets from a very high number of rocket launchers have been fired from the village and its surrounding areas, at a number of sites in the State of Israel. Within the village itself we have located a diverse range of activities connected to firing of rockets, beginning from forces commanding this operation – because such an operation needs ongoing command to direct it – and logistical sites that serve this end."

"From this village rockets are fired almost every day across Israel. The operation carried out overnight is an extension of operations that didn't start last night but before, and during this night we struck a number of targets in the village. All of the targets are being meticulously sifted," Eshel added.

Perhaps there's a rational explanation, other than the obvious but frightening one -- that Hezbollah was maximizing civilian casualties and had prepared the banner, and chosen the location in advance, and placed kids there. I can believe Hezbollah would do this to Israeli kids (indeed, that's the whole point of the rockets they're firing) but would they really do this even to Lebanese children, too?

But if there's an alternate explanation, what is it? A rickety building, already attacked once but strangely still filled with children -- waits eight hours to collapse? Combined with an assertion that war-torn Lebanon has graphic design, pre-press and printing facilities whose efficiency eclipses, by a magnitude, that of the West?

Update: Monday 7/31 - There seem to be even more interesting claims going around:

There are other mysteries. The roof of the building was intact. Journalist Ben Wedeman of CNN noted that there was a larger crater next to the building, but observed that the building appeared not to have collapsed as a result of the Israeli strike.

And:

Brent Sadler of CNN reports that the Israeli ordnance did not even hit the building but landed "20 or 30 meters" from the structure

And:

Their faces were ashen gray. While medical examination clearly is called for to arrive at a definitive dating and cause of their deaths, they do not appear to have died hours before. The bodies looked like they had been dead for days.

There are photos here, which hit the wires that morning (9:06am) with the corpses already showing rigor mortis. "About.com puts the timing of maximum stiffness at about 12-24 hours after death."

On the other side are arguments saying perhaps the building did collapse in the night:

Lebanese villagers in Qana who were witness to the bombing, however, say that the building's collapse occurred in the wee hours of the night.

Witnesses at the scene corroborated the IDF claim that the strike on the building, which is located in the Hariva neighborhood of Qana, was carried out at 1:00 A.M. After the initial strike, some of the building's residents exited in an attempt to survey the damage, in effect saving themselves.

A few minutes later, IAF planes struck the building once again, causing the walls to collapse on the residents who did not vacate, killing them in the process.

Arab media began reporting on the incident after dawn Sunday, approximately seven hours after the strike. The reports did not note, however, that the building collapsed a short time prior to Arab journalists' arrival on the scene.

Allahpundit adds a few more conjectures:

I think there might be an innocent explanation: according to the IAF, the airstrike came at 1 a.m. and the structure fell eight hours later. Assuming the kids were killed in the attack and their bodies were removed before the building collapsed, that would account for why they weren’t crushed or covered with dust and why rigor mortis had set in by the time the media got there.

But in that case, why didn’t the airstrike do any damage to the bodies? Would the shockwave generated by the impact have caused fatal internal injuries? Any military people out there willing and able to shed light on this?

Lots of open questions here; lots of oddities.

It's important to remember the lessons of the Jenin "massacre", which turned out to be a staged-managed fiction. Perhaps this building did indeed collapse in the night, and, other than the tragedy of war, there's nothing unusual going on here. Or perhaps the terrorists also learned the lessons of Jenin, and made sure that this time there would be bodies to display. Time may tell.

Update 2: Tuesday, 8/1 - Richard over at EU Referendum has more devastating evidence of stage management here, here, and here.

The photos show the same few set of bodies being put into an ambulence, waved in front of the cameras in a variety of locations, and then being discovered and dug out of the building after already having been put in the ambulance. Also, they show the same "rescue workers" showing up in photo after photo -- apparently, even over the years.

Okay, that's enough. Although I want to keep an open mind, at this moment, I don't feel I can harbor any more reasonable doubts about what's going on here. It's pretty obvious at this point that we're looking at another Jenin, only this time with actual bodies. Thankfully, they don't look fresh, but who knows what the next escalation in realism will involve.

So my question now is when the world will apologize to Israel.

Update: Megan McArdle:

The photo conspiracy seems to be based on the ignorance of how wire services work; its author has confused the dateline, which indicates when the wire service loaded the photos into their system, with a digital timestamp. And the claims that the building couldn't have collapsed after so much time sound remarkably like the WTC Building 7 conspiracy theories, which were based on the fact that 7WTC, the farthest from the twin towers, inexplicably collapsed nine hours after the planes hit, even though it suffered no apparent structural damage.

I'd thought of that in the meantime -- and I don't deny it's a possibility. But she doesn't address why we're seeing the same bodies over and over in photos (aren't there supposed to be nearly 60 to choose from?), being held up and displayed over and over -- in a variety of locations! (It was only hours after the collapse: weren't those four 'rescue workers' concerned about survivors still trapped alive in the rubble?)

It's not just enough to say: "Oh, this is just like 9/11", and then call it a day. Qana resembles 9/11 in that it involves a building collapse. But little else. One has to address the questions at hand. Again, what's that banner doing there? And where are all the corpses? And why do the few we see already have rigor mortis? These aren't absurd, deranged questions by someone who needs this to be fake. (Innocent civilians killed during wartime? Never!) They're simply reasonable concerns about the photos we've all seen.

Update: Thursday 8/3 - The number of dead seems to have dropped:

Five days after massive Israeli airstrikes demolished a building housing dozens of villagers in the town of Qana, human rights investigators and medical authorities have confirmed only 28 deaths, well below the official death toll of 54.... Investigators for Human Rights Watch said they discovered the apparent discrepancy in the death toll after interviewing local witnesses, emergency workers and hospital officials.

That's just the number of bodies reported to be sitting in a morgue, of unproven origin. And there were supposed to have been 13 who were subtracted from the original estimate because they allegedly escaped the building alive.

Except that:

It is no longer clear whether the 13 listed as missing were in the building at the time of the collapse, say those who have looked into the incident.

Autopsies, please.

Update: Aug 8 - Some German filmmakers have a clip showing just what many have alleged: a child is carried into the ambulance, "Green Helmet" -- allegedly a rescue worker -- complains the footage isn't good enough. So they drag the dead child out again, transfer him to another stretcher, and repeat the process.