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Thursday, August 21, 2014

Which is the forged death certificate?

There have been two photographs of the supposed death certificate of the Deif family being circulated. One of them shows Mohammed Deif being killed along with his wife and son, and the other one shows only the wife and son.

Clearly one is a forgery. But which?

Here, I placed parallel lines from each horizontal line on both of the photos. I am looking for inconsistencies in the photos.

Clearly the tops of the photos are identical. So the forgery must have occurred on the bottom half.


Assuming that the top half is legitimate, then we see that the first horizontal line is pretty much parallel with the top of the page. The dip from where the thumb is is fairly consistent with the dip on the top edge.

In the photo showing all three members of the family, the dip remains fairly consistent on all four horizontal lines. The photo showing only three is inconsistent, as each successive line ends up higher and higher.

If the photo was taken from a slight angle, it is possible that in perspective the lines would get closer together, as they do in the second photo. But one would also expect the same perspective effect between the top edge and the first horizontal line, which is not there.

If the second is the forged one, it seems unlikely it was done totally in Photoshop. It would have required someone creating a document in a word processor and then having a photo taken, and then Photoshopping that photo on top of the original. The inconsistencies are too hard to do digitally.

The monkey wrench is that the 2-person certificate was publicized first.

So I'm still on the fence. Based only on the photos alone I would tend to think Deif is dead, but given the timing I am not at all certain.