Do explosions look like this?

One can browse wire-service photos of explosions during the first week of Cast Lead, but none of them looks like this one from AP:
(click to enlarge)

Mere Rhetoric and Snapped Shot (and others) have been looking at it, wondering if it is Photoshopped.

I don't see too much motivation for a photographer (Adel Hana, whose pictures have been reproduced on this blog a few times, including for staging photos and for selling pictures to Islamic Jihad) to enhance an explosion, which is impressive enough already.

But the flying debris makes no sense to me.

It is too high, it is too large, and appears to be way too close to the camera. It also all seems to be on the same plane relative to the camera - not in the sphere that debris should be if it was equally blown in all directions.

Snapped Shot is trying to get hold of Hana to get a larger original.