A POPULAR pastime in Gaza is swapping gruesome footage of dead or dying victims of the Strip's incessant violence.Of course, it has to be Israel's fault somehow, as if centuries of intra-Arab fighting never occurred before the Zionists came on the scene.
The images used to be almost exclusive legacies of clashes with Israeli forces but last year that changed. Now being far more keenly traded are snapshots of Palestinian fratricide, gruesome images taken by "militia-cams' that record scenes for posterity.
Spend any time near the emergency ward of Gaza's Shifa Hospital and security staff or ward workers will offer a look at their mobile phones, which they'll quickly switch to video mode to show images of victims of intra-Palestinian clashes being wheeled in agony from ambulances.
Sit in a town square for more than five minutes and you'll be quickly encircled by youths clamouring to outdo each other with images of death and mayhem.
A veritable library of the "intrafada" now exists in Gaza among militias and clans. Most were added during 2007, when the numbers of intra-Palestinian deaths jumped by 800 per cent - from 55 to 439 - almost all of the deaths in Gaza.
Images of men being tossed from the towers trade particularly well, as does a sequence of a Fatah youth leaping from behind a corner to shoot a rifle at entrenched Hamas men nearby. He hadn't levelled his weapon before being shot through the chest.
...Writing last month in The Jerusalem Post, Bassam Eid from the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group said, "Because Palestinians are accustomed to seeing weapons and are also exposed to verbal and physical abuse of the military occupation, verbal disagreements easily turn into fist fights and sometimes even escalate into gang or family feuds. Growing up in a spiral of violence means that individuals find it harder to determine the limits of aggression."
The trade in gruesome photos is not limited to kids trading them like baseball cards. The mainstream Palestinian Arab newspapers and terrorist websites delight in showing dismembered bodies - here's the latest collection of victims of Hamas terror in Firas Press, and it is not close to the most gruesome.
Yet this celebration of death is, of course, the Jews' fault.
(h/t EBoZ)