Palestinian Lethal Projections
Is footage the Washington Post ran as news actually elaborately staged?
One of the key elements in the accusations of genocide leveled at Israel is footage that has been staged to tell a story in which the Israelis deliberately target children. Below is just one probable example of this kind of Pallywood. This is a long read. I don’t want to be hasty in judgment.
Israel Targets Good Samaritans
On October 18, 2024, Palestinian journalist Samaa Thaher, shot the following footage which, she claims, records how an Israeli missile hit a child, 13-year old Mohammed Salem, and when people gathered around to help, the Israelis bombed a second time to kill them. This narrative drives home the baseline Palestinian narrative: we innocent civilians have been hit by the Israelis. (There were no militants around.) Why do they do this? Why are they so cruel?
The story and its footage, filmed on the edge of Jabalya refugee camp by Palestinian journalist, was picked up as is by the legacy media:
Evan Hill,“Video shows Israeli strike on crowd of people trying to help wounded boy,” Washington Post, October 24, 2024.
In this article, which takes up the proffered narrative without a hint of doubt, the reporter cites another source:
The Palestinian Red Crescent later confirmed to the Post that Salem had died of his wounds and that a second 14-year-old boy whose feet were severed by the second strike was also pronounced dead after being taken away to an ambulance. Around 20 people were injured in the second strike, it said.
The out of focus video footage, however, when more closely examined, offers no corroborating evidence for the main narrative claim that Israel deliberately targeted a child and then deliberately shot those who came to help. And offers no hint of the claims of the PRC.
Description of the footage, noting discontinuities between narrative and video.
The video begins after the first strike which left a child allegedly injured sitting on the ground, waving his arms and calling out (01-12).
A man with a bike walks by ignoring the boy as he cries out. He walks his bike away from him, speeding up as he goes. (07-12)
The narrator asks questions: Where is the missile? Is he the only one injured? (12)
As people appear behind him, he goes vertical (“collapses backwards” Wapo; faints? lies down?).
The men standing over him gesticulate for 15 seconds before kneeling by him. (22-36).
But neither they, nor anyone else who gathers around, tend to his wounds. At the same time we are told by the narrator and the people on site: “he’s torn to pieces,” a claim with no support from the visuals, and, given his condition before lying down, incomprehensible without some intervening explosion.
The narrator asks: “Why did they bomb him?!” The identity of “they” being obviously Israel, along with the assumption is that the wounding of the child was done intentionally.
People gather around looking at, but not tending to, the wounded child. Then an explosion goes off.
Just before the explosion one man starts to run away signaling that he knows what’s about to happen.
Note the man center-right in back of scene begins to run (44).
Others, only slightly later also anticipate an explosion and run away from where it will hit. Were it an Israeli airstrike (the missile in question), he and others would have looked up.
3-4 people start to run away from where the explosion is about to take place (45).
The explosion takes one frame:
The explosion itself is localized and very brief. It is obviously not an Israeli missile fired from a plane. Perhaps it was an Israeli hollow-shell fired (or dropped in which case it would not make noise) from a drone. Or it could be a Palestinian improvised explosive device made to maximize the visuals without injuring anyone. Although some of those present run before the explosion, no one looks up either before or after the second explosion.
After the explosion, the camera goes off target, and after a brief interlude of concern, we return to the scene and are told: “they bomb[ed] them.”
A camera cut of unknown length occurs, and when we return, we are told: The boy is dead (martyred). “They bombed them with another missile” (58).
“There are injured people” the narrator says (66), but there are none in the picture nor any even at the site of the explosion. Were they all so lightly hit that they all ran away before the camera returns? There is no sign of blood anywhere in the scene, neither from the boy “torn to shreds,” nor from the alleged multiple injured, no sign of missile damage.
According to Palestinian Red Crescent spokesperson Nebal Farsakh, the Mohammed Salem “died of his wounds,” and “a 14-year-old boy, whose feet were severed by the second strike, was pronounced dead after being taken away by Red Crescent ambulances, and over 20 others were wounded.” None of this appears on tape.
Women approach and look but do not touch. One looks up. The narrator interprets their behavior to indicate that the boy must be dead: “was it possible he was martyred?” “Of course,” says the man.
“He’s taking his last breaths,” she tells us, as if she could hear his breathing from the second story across the place.
“He was screaming” the father adds (1:28). “These are the people injured by the second missile.” No sign of a missile, no sign of an injured person. People run past and away from the place where the child, now presumably dead, is lying.
A man runs to the doorway to the left where someone comes out with a large cloth, which he carries to the boy’s location and, with another man, hastily throws it over the boy. The one who came with the cloth flees from the boy, while the other stays to arrange the covering and gesticulates for someone to come. A man starts running towards him. The camera (or the editor) cuts off.
Analysis
There are three ways to interpret this footage.
1. It illustrates the narrative (as did Hill in the WaPo, taken up almost verbatim by the Times of Israel)
A Palestinian journalist in Gaza has captured international attention when she published footage of an apparent Israeli airstrike hitting a boy in a street in the northern Gaza Strip, then another strike hitting a group of men as they attempted to help him.
In the footage captured last weekend by 21-year-old journalist Wafaa Thaher on October 18, a wounded boy can be seen lying in the street waving his hands in distress, after an apparent strike caused a small scorched crater nearby, on the edge of the Jabaliya refugee camp, where the IDF has been carrying out a renewed offensive it says is aimed at preventing a Hamas resurgence in the area.
Thaher, who is herself from Jabaliya, later provided a copy of the video to The Washington Post, which in recent days verified its authenticity and added English subtitles.
She told the Post that she began filming after she heard nearby explosions amid an Israeli strike and noticed the child, later identified as 13-year-old Mohammed Salem, pleading for assistance from the ground.
“He’s a child,” she could be heard saying as she filmed. “In pieces. Why did they strike him?”
A group of around a dozen men then rounded the corner, and, grabbing their heads in disbelief as Salem collapsed backward, began running toward him while calling for additional help.
Moments later, as two men tried to lift Salem from the ground, a second strike slammed into the ground, sending the group of men flying back.
2. It’s an Israeli strike aiming at another target (Hamas operatives) and missed, not an intentional strike on the boy.
3. It’s a Palestinian bomb that is part of a staged and elaborately scripted scene.
1. Nothing confirms the first narrative which presents a number of anomalies:
Why do the people gathering around the boy gesticulate for 12 seconds before tending to his wounds?
Why are we told he’s been torn to pieces when he’s been waving his hands seconds before and nothing has happened to make his situation worse?
Why does a bomb that does not even seriously wound the dozen men standing around, wipe out a boy lying down who was only seconds before gesticulating, and is now pronounced dead?
Why, if another boy was killed in the second blast - “his feet severed” - do we have no footage of that? Why is there no sign of blood anywhere?
Why are we told that there are many wounded but see none? Why, if according to Nebal Farsakh, 20 were wounded in the second blast replete with ambulance evacuations, do we have no footage of that? Surely such footage would have been more valuable than what we do have.
If these are Israeli “missiles,” why does no one look up?
Why do the two men in the last scene with the shroud act so differently?
2. Nothing disconfirms the second narrative about intention: in other words there is no proof (or even circumstantial evidence that the Israelis deliberately targeted people coming to help the boy).
If Hamas is present (and the target), we do not see them behind or beyond the video’s frame.
All the problems with the first hypothesis concerning evidence of the two strikes applies to this hypothesis.
3. The staged scenario explains the anomalies of the footage best.
Before analyzing the possibility that this was staged, it is important to address the issue of what drama critics call “the willing suspension of disbelief.” When we go to a play, in order to follow a story that is acted out, viewers must suspend their disbelief: if you spend the whole play asking, “why is are these people acting as if something real were happening when they’re on stage,” you miss the drama. In other words, the viewer must drop the obvious questions in order to follow the story: with this willing credulity, the question of “staging” is literally out of the question.
Here we are dealing, as so often from Gaza, with footage that depicts a story (to be precise, a lethal narrative). People – even those who know better – naturally tend to suspend disbelief. After all, these people are suffering. It would be cruel not to believe them.
Thus, when you see the boy in the opening scene, you assume along with Evan Hill, as you are told, that he’s wounded and “waving his arms in distress”; when he lies down, you see him “collapse.” If you don’t suspend disbelief, however, you see a boy who waves his arms energetically, with no signs of his being wounded, no blood, and certainly not “torn to pieces.” The possibility that he is acting seems considerably more likely than that he is fatally wounded.
The shocking, discordant, sensation here comes from questioning the good will, the sincerity of the people we see. The very act of doing so, seems like a betrayal. At every step of viewing the footage, we are drawn by a “compassionate imperative” to suspend disbelief. It is unconscionably heartless to claim these people are deliberately lying. And among those most compelled by this compassionate imperative, Palestinians, Arabs, Muslims, stand in the first place if only for tribal reasons: ‘these are my people being butchered.’ But Westerners, indeed even jews, although this willing credulity does not benefit their cause, nevertheless feel compelled by their trans-tribal, ecumenical compassion for all humans to yield to the compassionate imperative.
But, should journalists? Especially those who specialize in “open-source and visual forensic techniques”?
The following analysis accepts the possibility that this is staged and examines the evidence. In the end, nothing proves it is staged, just as nothing proves that the lethal narrative is an accurate description. It’s up to us, the viewers, to form our own opinion. Below I share mine, and I welcome yours.
To entertain the possibility that it was staged, one must imagine the following: The scene has been set up: a Palestinian-made explosive device has been set to go off near the boy (but far enough not to harm anyone around him). The filmer-journalist-narrator is there to tell us what to see as she lays out her plaint: the Israelis are killing us deliberately, why would they do that?
The scenario runs:
Scene I: a boy badly injured in a first Israeli strike waving desperately for help;
Scene II: men come around to tend his wounds;
Scene III: those who have come to help are targeted by a second explosion;
Scene IV: many wounded by blast;
Scene V: women come and affirm boy is dead
Scene VI: two men come and put a shroud over martyred boy.
The script for the narrator and her father tells us how to interpret what we see.
The narrative: people come to help the wounded and get targeted themselves - is communicated indirectly by the narrators - Wafaa and her father.
Transcription of their remarks.
Thaher: Oh mom, he’s injured. Where is the missile? Is he the only one injured? It seems like a child. Oh Allah. He is torn to pieces.
Citizens [one woman’s voice]: He’s torn to pieces.
Thaher: How did they bomb him? Why? (29)... Get away from the window (48). They bombed them (54). There are wounded people and also injured ones (56). The one on the ground has been martyred (59).
Father: They bombed him with another missile (61).
Thaher: God is sufficient for us and He is the best Disposer of affairs (63). There are injured people (67). They struck twice. Oh my is it possible he was martyred? (79).
Father: of course.
Thaher: He’s moving. Taking his last breaths (82).
Father: He was screaming. They [the women] came and started screaming (84).
Thaher: Are all these injured? (87).
Father: These are the people injured by the second missile (88). This is the second missile (91). Anyone who gets close to him gets attacked (98).
Thaher: He is targeted (1:42).
Father: Yes (1:43). He got martyred. He got martyred (1:46).
Thaher: May Allah have mercy on him (1:48).
What does he say? (1:54).
What follows is an interpretation of the footage and script as an effort to enact the narrative.
1) The boy’s role is “an injured child calling out in distress”: but he gesticulates energetically without showing any sign of pain or injury.
The man walking his bike, who shows no concern for the boy, seems to have accidentally wandered into the scene and, when he realizes he’s on stage, hurries off.
2) At the approach of the men for scene 2, the boy lies down. Nothing explains how we went from sitting up and gesticulating, and now goes down. Rather than fainting or collapsing, he lies down for the next scene. The narrative clashes notably: “He is torn to pieces!” Somehow, between when he sat up waving, and after he lay down, he was somehow torn to pieces?
Note that someone from below also repeats this claim at the same time - another index that it is part of a (badly-timed) script. (It is one of the failures of the script to account for the passage from wounded and crying for help, and down and torn to pieces.)
The men gathering round take up the gesticulations, expressing dismay at the sight of the wounded child (23-39). If you step back from the narrative, it resembles scenes from the early days of silent movies: they are supposed to be looking at a boy torn to shreds.
3) Then, just before the explosion, people below the boy start to run. First one man running in the back who changes direction quickly, then a few more, just before the explosion. Were this because they saw an incoming missile, they would have looked up, but it is those looking in the direction of the camera who run away first.
The script was written around this explosion. Everyone in the scene knew it was coming and, in some cases, jumped the gun. That is why subsequently, even as people treat the place around the boy as explosive (the script: the Israelis are targeting anyone who helps him), and run away from it, but no one at any point, looks up to see if there’s another flying object (plane or drone) that threatens.
4) The camera cut after the explosion is important. By the time we return to the scene, it has been cleared to focus on the boy alone, and the narrator has a distinctly different tome. There are no signs of the impact of the explosion. If any of the dozen men present at the explosion were wounded, they all seem to have left the scene without needing help, certainly not ambulances. (Had there been wounded and ambulances, we would surely have scenes both of the evacuations, and of the blood caused by two severed legs.) On the contrary, we are told we see the wounded (script) when the camera shows people milling around. Instead, the boy is alone on the scene, and we are ready for the final acts.
5) The women approach. We are told: “they came and started screaming.” So the boy we saw waving his arms is now so clearly dead that they need not even get close to check before sending the message: He’s dead! Somehow the blast that did not badly injure people who were closer has so devastated the boy that checking to see if he’s still alive is not necessary. (This is probably where “he has been cut to pieces” should have been said.)
6) We are ready for the final scene, the placing of a shroud over the boy. A man in the doorway holds the shroud at the ready. One of the actors takes it and runs to cover the boy. He is joined by another. But they have not been coached well, and play by different scripts. The one holding the cloth throws it on the boy and starts to flee from the scene as if it were a danger to be close to the boy. The other arranges the sheet and calls for others to come and finish the scene, as if showing respect for the martyr was the point.
Little to nothing in the visuals corroborates this script, which seems more focused on informing the audience on what they are seeing than on responding spontaneously to the tragedy playing out before them. At no point, for example, does Samaa, shout out from the window: “help the poor boy!”
The best way to understand both the dialogue and the behavior of the people in the place, is that these actors have already internalized the storyline (script) and are acting it out, rather than genuinely reacting to events. In the storyline, the injured boy dies, targeted by “them” (Israel). Like al Durah declared dead by bystanders while he’s still moving, these people treat the boy as the overall script has him (dead), even when he was still supposed to be just wounded.
Also, notably, nobody at the scene (ie the actors) is taking pictures of the wounded and dead boy. (In the Al Durah case, this was especially notable because although both the AP and Reuters cameramen were there just before the shooting, they curiously caught nothing of 20 minutes of “bullets like rain” and an alleged ambulance evacuation.) 25 years later, hand-held cameras are all over the Gaza Strip.
Most of the gesticulations of those on (in) the scene are for a dead person throughout. Hence the lack of any real attention to him, and the prepared, but hastily laid funeral shroud. Many follow the script - the Israelis were “targeting anyone who gets close” - and run away from the boy (most notably the one with the shroud). And yet no one approaching or running from the boy looks up to see if there are Israeli planes or drones in the area. They act as if the danger were present on the ground.
In this photo from 2000, the Israelis are on the other side of the building top right, out of line of fire. These people are all pretending to run from non-existent fire. The people behind them, who presumably should be worried about fire coming from where the runners are looking, stand around because they think they are “off set.”
Conclusions:
The lethal narrative – Israel’s deliberate, murderous cruelty – is not confirmed by footage: there are no elements of the visuals that are probative of the narrative claim of targeting the boy and anyone who helps him. Only the verbal overlay makes that claim, and given how often that script does not describe what the camera shows (torn to pieces… these are the injured), one can hardly consider that testimony decisive.
There is, on the other hand, nothing decisively probative that this is staged, like the boy getting up after the filming. And yet, as with Al Durah, the staged hypothesis does explain all the multiple anomalies. Odds that this is staged, 80-95%; odds it depicts the lethal narrative, under 1%.
From a journalist’s point of view, while this story does not offer sufficient evidence to denounce it as a deliberate fake, it certainly does not offer sufficient evidence to run it as a news story. No serious professional journalist, committed to not running war propaganda as news whether his side’s or the enemy’s, would consider this story viable. Apparently Evan Hill, did. And the Times of Israel sought fit to reproduce his piece without comment.
Finally, the storyline is noteworthy since it is not only a lethal narrative – Israelis excel in killing innocent children – but also a projected one. During the second intifada, Palestinian Jihadis developed precisely this technique of setting off an initial bomb and then, when Israelis gathered to help, setting off a second one to kill them as well. So here, people who know that doing so is evil and yet somehow feel authorized to so behave, accuse their enemies of that evil, and appeal to outsiders to take their side out of compassion.
Somehow, in the strange logic of the compassionate imperative, we are forbidden from saying that they deliberately lie to us, but must accept their claim that the Israelis are deliberately targeting their children.
“Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I will tell you what you are guilty of.”
Vasily Grossman
Brilliant, detailed analysis, almost certainly accurate.