A Fauxtography Story (updated)

This morning, in a reprehensible attack, an Arab home near Ramallah was burned down:

A Palestinian home was set on fire Wednesday night in the village of Sinjil, northeast of Ramallah in the West Bank, in a suspected "price tag" attack. Five Palestinians residing there suffered from smoke inhalation.

“Regards from Eden, Revenge” was sprayed on one of the walls of the house, indicating that the act may have been carried out to avenge the murder of Private Eden Attias, a 19-year-old Israeli soldier who was stabbed to death by a Palestinian teen on a bus earlier Wednesday.

Here is one photo of the burned out home from photojournalist Mahmoud Illean on the public news service Demotix:

The focus of the photo is, obviously, the basketball.

The only problem is that the basketball was placed there by a photographer!

Haaretz reporter Chaim Levinson took his own photo of the ball and wrote on his Facebook page, "See the ball in the burnt room? It wasn't really there. A Palestinian photographer brought it in from the outside to improve the photo."

Roy Sharon of Israel's Channel 10 tweeted the same thing. He wrote that if you see any photos of an orange ball in today's news coverage, you should know that it was placed there by the MBC (Saudi) channel photographer.

Now that we know that this photo was staged, we can look with a more critical eye at some of the other photos taken at the time.

Here is the grief-stricken grandfather probably being told where to walk with his cute daughter, the basketball in the background:

The ball is there, but it seems to have moved.

But this photo wasn't quite good enough, so the photographer needed a better one, possibly with the father but keeping the same cute girl:

They are looking at what appears to be a stuffed penguin, that is helpfully standing up in the damage. But the penguin wasn't there in the previous photo, and is not visible (at least not standing) in the other photos of the same room.

Here are the same two people, waiting around while photographers do their thing:

We've suspected the purposeful placement of toys in photos in the past, but we have never had witnesses before.

And if the photographers that took the photos were not the same ones as those who placed the objects, that doesn't make them any less deceptive if they know that the props they are photographing are staged.

(h/t Gidon Shaviv)


UPDATE: Ian forwards an almost unbelievable clip from 1990 British comedy "Drop the Dead Donkey":