Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News: forensic evidence

Showing posts with label forensic evidence. Show all posts

Friday, July 14, 2023

UN-OCHA moving the goalposts to make Israel look bad

The UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs of the Palestinian territories comes out with a report every month about imports, exports, entrances and exits from Gaza.

In its report on June, it says:

In June, the Israeli authorities allowed 42,220 exits of people from Gaza (in most cases, travelers exited multiple times). This is 13 per cent higher than the exits in May, and 19 per cent higher than the monthly average in 2022. However, it is 92 per cent lower than the monthly average in 2000, before the imposition of category-based restrictions by the Israeli authorities.

They are comparing the number of exits with 2000 - when thousands of Israelis still lived in Gaza and traveled freely in and out every day? Before the second intifada when checkpoints needed to be enforced? Of course the number of exits will never be nearly as high as in 2000; the borders were porous then.

If they were to compare with any previous year, they should - and normally do - compare it to the time between Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, and when Israel started restrictions on Gaza after Hamas violently took over the territory in 2007. Otherwise it is comparing apples to oranges.

So let's look at previous UN charts.

Here's a UN chart from 2016 that was already deceptive: starting in 2004 when Israelis left Gaza so part of the year there were many, many more exits; and showing that in March 2006 Israel started its restrictions on Gaza workers. So if there is any year that the UN should compare against, it is 2005.

In 2005, the monthly average of exits was 31,424. Today, it is significantly higher - as mentioned, over 42,000 last month, and in fact earlier this year it surpassed 50,000 some months.

The headline should be that Israel now allows more freedom of movement for Gazans than at any time since Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005. But the UN cannot have a headline that makes Israel look good, can it? So instead of comparing to 2004 or 2005, as it always did before now, it makes up a new benchmark: 2000, a completely artificial and irrelevant date.

Here is UN-OCHA's new chart where they, for the first time, added the year 2000 with its "0.5 million" figure - just to minimize how much Israel is doing to make Gazan's lives easier.

This is lying with statistics.

(correction on years h/t Irene)

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Islamic Jihad publishes a great advertisement for Israeli armored Caterpillar D9 bulldozers

For the past week, Palestinian media has been filled with articles about how the Jenin Battalion defeated the IDF in Jenin. They don't quite explain how they come to the conclusion that 12 dead terrorists and much destroyed terror infrastructure is a "victory."

Today, the Islamic Jihad-linked Palestine Today published a video of their latest "proof" of this illusory victory.

The video shows an IDF armored D9 bulldozer clearing an area and being targeted with 3 IEDs.

The terror website claims that their explosives "disrupted" the bulldozer's work.

But the video shows that the bulldozer didn't even slow down while detonating these bombs.

Israel has created many different armored versions of the Caterpillar D9. According to this Wiki page, in testing the D9R version withstood IED belly charges of 500 kg - more than 5 times the mass of high explosives needed to destroy a main battle tank!

The IDF has been using D9s since the 1950s, and the armored versions have been recognized as saving many lives. D9s prompted top Palestinian terrorists in Jenin to surrender in 2003 as the machinery would slowly dismantle the buildings the terrorists were in - and they had no defense against it, forcing them to surrender before the building would collapse. (It takes about a half an hour for a D9 to destroy a building.)

The terrorists released this video to pretend that they effectively countered the D9s - but in the end, they created an advertisement that showed that these bulldozers are effectively indestructible.

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Palestinian terrorists shoot at journalists, Israel blamed

Haaretz reported about the clashes in Jenin yesterday, and fully accepted the idea that unseen snipers shooting towards the journalists were Israeli and not Palestinian.

Abu Ahmed, a long-time camp resident, said he had the impression that the army was planning to undertake a large-scale operation in the city and its environs. Residents say that when the presence of Israeli forces was detected, calls went out from muezzins for armed militias to come out and confront them, which ultimately led to the heavy fire that followed.

“I was in Al-Awdah Square on the edge of the Jenin refugee camp,” said Hafez, a journalist who was covering the raid. “I was in my car. They shot at random while I was photographing the clashes and the Palestinian fighters.” At a certain point, he said, three bullets were fired at his car. “Two of them I heard flying past me, but the third hit the car door on the driver’s side.”

He claims that the shots were not fired at him accidentally. “Our car is a marked journalist’s car and I was wearing a vest identifying me as press.”

Hafez said he was shot at a second time even though he was wearing clothing indicating he was a journalist. “We were about a kilometer away, on Haifa Street, on the road that leads to the Salam army checkpoint. We were eight journalists from the international and Arab media and we came under direct fire from a sniper in one of the buildings,” he recalled. “We were trapped there for 20 minutes and could only leave when it was all over.”

Jasmin – another journalist who was with a colleague of hers who was shot – confirmed the account. “We’re journalists and we were wearing clothing that identified us as such, [even donning] helmets,” she said. “They started shooting at us. We hadn’t done anything, we were only taking pictures. We fled but they kept shooting at us.”

She said that in the area the raid occurred there were no armed Palestinians, “just civilians, children and journalists.” Like Hafez, she said she and her colleagues were fired on “more than once on the same day.”

The journalists are implying that the snipers were Israeli and the story is being reported that way in Arab media.

The Telegraph has video of journalists taking cover on a rooftop, although some are crouching opposite others, so there is no way to know from which direction the fire is coming.

There appears to be some play-acting in this video - some journalists taking cover behind a wall while others stand around where they'd be seen by snipers, apparently unconcerned. But the gunfire is real, and the journalists certainly are not in a position to identify the source.

While they are careful when speaking to The Telegraph not to claim they know the identity of the snipers, being that they are all Palestinian journalists, they of course will blame Israel when speaking to friendlier media.

What is certain is that trained, professional soldiers do not fire wildly and randomly. They might mistake a target but they fire at targets. The random fire described in the Haaretz article is far more likely from Jenin terrorists, whom we know will fire without even looking at their target.

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The Palestinian Waqf issued a statement yesterday:

The Minister of Awqaf and Religious Affairs, Sheikh Hatem Al-Bakri, denounced the Israeli occupation forces’ raid on Al-Assir Mosque in the Al-Jabriyat area, in the vicinity of Jenin camp, on Monday morning.

Al-Bakri said in a press statement that the occupation forces blew up the door of the mosque, broke all the windows, tampered with the mosque's assets and furniture, and destroyed the devices and speakers.

He emphasized that this violation of our sanctities and mosques is rejected by heavenly laws and earthly laws, adding that this insult to our sanctities and mosques will be confronted by insisting on our adherence to our land and our right to Palestine.

Al-Bakri called on the international community to work quickly and seriously to end these daily violations that attack our sanctities and our feelings, and to end these attacks that harm our rights as Muslims and Palestinians.

There is something missing from this statement.

Terrorists were firing weapons from the mosque they had barricaded themselves in.

The Waqf doesn't seem too bothered by Palestinians using a mosque as a military position.

Which shows that Israel has more respect for Muslim holy sites than Palestinians do.

But we already knew that.

In fact, the muezzin in Jenin used mosque loudspeakers to call for terrorists to come out and battle the Israelis - meaning that many mosques in Jenin became, according to international law, military command and control centers and therefore legitimate military targets.

Of course Israel didn't attack those other mosques, but the evidence is clear that Palestinians are the ones who treat mosques as military sites - and no one from the "human rights community" nor from the mainstream Muslim community is condemning that.

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The Washington Post documented a war crime in Nablus - but it was done by Palestinians, not Israelis

This frame appears to show a muzzle flash, but the WaPo can't see it.

The Washington Post has an article that they believe damns IDF troops - and they are so excited about it they took away the paywall so everyone can see their computer-modeled 3D analysis.

They did indeed document a war crime, but not the one they are pretending to have uncovered.

Israeli security forces in an armored vehicle fired repeatedly into a group of civilians sheltering between a mosque and a clinic after a Feb. 22 raid in the occupied West Bank city of Nablus, killing two people, including a teenager, and wounding three others, according to witnesses and a visual reconstruction of the event by The Washington Post.

For all the fancy 3-D modeling and hundreds of photos they claim to have used, the newspaper relies completely on one video, taken from above, showing a man with his arm extended with what appears to be a gun, and then running for cover. It is in the third part of this video:

The newspaper tries to claim that there is no evidence that the gunshot one can hear was from that gun, and even says, " The videos reviewed by The Post do not clearly show whether the man had a gun or fired, and none of the witnesses interviewed by The Post said they saw a gunman fire at the Israelis." Yet there appears to be a muzzle flash at the very beginning of the video (see photo above.) It is ignored by the Post.

They consult two experts about the two bangs heard, who say wildly different things: one says that they are not gunshots at all, and the other says they are gunshots but come from the Israelis, without saying how he could make such a distinction.

If two experts cannot even agree if a sound is gunfire or not, then what value do they add? The answer is that the WaPo can claim that they consulted audio experts when coming up with their foregone conclusion, even when they don't agree on anything!

When you look at the video of the man who appeared to be pointing a weapon then running to where the civilians are trying to avoid gunfire, it is obvious that he is holding something heavy like a gun. If his hands were empty he would not be running with his arms close together in front of him; his arms would be pumping at his sides the way normal people run.

Moreover, the civilians are running away before the IDF vehicle is shooting anything. (Look at the ones in the sunken plaza.) It appears they are running away from previous Palestinian gunshots, not Israeli.

The nature of open source forensics is that they are necessarily incomplete. We have no idea if there are any gunmen in the building behind the civilians, or on surrounding roofs, or across the street that may have shot the victims. The IDF did certainly fire in this video; we can see that some shots hit the pillar. But even if the IDF did shoot at the gunman and accidentally hit the victims, it is not a war crime. It is a split-second decision based on the information the soldiers had - they were being shot at, the gunman went for cover behind a stone pillar, and they were responding to the likelihood that the gunman would resume shooting at them as they passed the pillar. It is unclear that the soldiers even saw the civilians on the top of the stairs before the gunman ran to cover behind the pillar.

The entire life and death decision needed to be evaluated and made in fractions of a second.

Under the laws of armed conflict, while the existence of civilians is one factor to be weighed in such a decision, it is not the only factor. Troops are allowed and expected to defend themselves. A known gunman who runs for cover behind a pillar and who is about to be in line of sight is certainly a legitimate military target.

In peacetime, police are held to this higher standard of doing everything possible to avoid accidentally hitting civilians even if it means the gunman gets away. For armed conflicts, the laws are different. But the Washington Post doesn't say that - their entire article is geared towards the idea that the IDF had no right to target an armed man who was hiding among civilians. (And they know quite well that the civilians were not the intended targets.)

Isn't it interesting that the Post spent weeks and used four reporters with several experts consulted, and yet didn't even ask an international law expert whether Israel violated the laws of armed conflict?

And that brings up the other omission in the Washington Post's coverage: the armed man ran for shelter among civilians, making them into human shields. I mean this literally - he placed himself behind civilian bodies knowing that he was a target, possibly even shoving one person aside. And that really is a war crime!

Apparently, the reporters know quite well that the IDF didn't violate any laws. And that the Palestinian gunman did. And they don't want their readers to know that.

Remarkably, whenever the news media spends lots of time and money putting together elaborate 3D models of something involving Israel, it is always to say Israel is guilty. They try to replace honest investigations with razzle dazzle. And they are nearly always wrong.

When you put it all together, this article, like the others, is not meant to illuminate the truth, but to obfuscate it.

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Dashcam footage of car ramming attack on Friday

Muhammad Shehada is one of the most vocal defenders of Palestinian terror under the pretense of "human rights." He is the Chief of Communication for the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor and is a columnist for the Forward, also having written for Haaretz, Vice and Newsweek.

He angrily denounced anyone who claimed that the car ramming attack on Friday that killed three, including two children, and critically injured others (including their father), saying that there was no evidence that the attack was deliberate.

Somehow, it is a sheer coincidence that Palestinians happen to lose control of cars near crowds of Jews. And equally strange that they celebrate those accidents and canonize the poor people who all have faulty brakes due to the "occupation."

Dashcam footage has been released showing the attack. The blue car speeding to the left of the dashcam veers over two lanes to hit the bus stop.

There will always be apologists for terror. But why does the mainstream media keep giving them a platform for their vile hate?

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New documentary questions the narrative of the IDF killing Shireen Abu Akleh (video)

Renowned documentary filmmaker Pierre Rehov has released a film on the death of Shireen Abu Akleh that casts doubt on whether it was an IDF soldier that killed her.

It is called "Lies and Tears."

Using some of the evidence I had uncovered, and with some additional expert testimony, Rehov looks at the events in Jenin that day with a critical eye. He interviews Palestinians who themselves think that the Palestinian Authority had the incentive and means to murder Abu Akleh.

The summary of the film:

UNPRECEDENTED CAMPAIGN: Since 1990, 2658 journalists have been killed in the line of duty. None of them has had the media coverage of Shireen Abu Akleh. The well-organized campaign launched by the Palestinian Authority around her death has almost no precedent.

UNFOUNDED ACCUSATION: Assuming that an Israeli soldier was really responsible for the death of the Al Jazeera journalist, the accusation that it was a deliberate shooting is unfounded. The film shows that at such a distance no one could see the “press” sign on Shireen’s bulletproof vest. Palestinian gunmen were firing at Israeli soldiers from all directions.

FALSE WITNESSES: The “witnesses” who were at the scene and first to accuse Israel of murder are claiming to be impartial journalists. They are, in fact, propagandists of the Palestinian Authority, as the film clearly shows.

DISTORTION OF FINDINGS: CNN, The Washington Post and Bellingcat, called on Professor Maher, a forensic specialist and sound analyst, to define the distance between the journalist and the shooter from videos shot at the time of the tragedy, but they distorted his report to accuse the Israeli army. Professor Maher’s analysis, which Rehov also obtained, describes a distance between the sound recorders and the shooter, not between the journalist and the shooter. This “detail” leads to a difference of more than 20 meters which places the shooter further north of the army’s most extreme position. Yet, this critical detail has been glossed over in all the official versions, concluding that Israel is responsible.

Professor Maher’s calculation was made for an M4, a weapon frequently used by Israeli soldiers. But if the bullet was fired from any other weapon with a longer barrel, the distance shortens again and places the shooter more than 40 meters north of the Israeli position.

OMMISSIONS: Witnesses, including one of the “journalists” who was near Shireen Abu Akleh at the time of the tragedy, mention the presence of gunmen in a house not far from them. These testimonies have never been taken up by the media. They describe “snipers,” but the film formally demonstrates that it was impossible for Israeli “snipers” to have been in these positions. There were men shooting at the journalists from the buildings. They could not be Israelis. So, who were they?

EXPERT TESTIMONY: The film gives the floor to high-level international experts, including a French GIGN officer, court-appointed forensic expert Alain Artuso, and physicist Nahum Shahaf. Each of them, according to their expertise, points out several mistakes made by those who accuse the Israeli army.

At this point the IDF has all but admitted that it was their own soldier who shot Abu Akleh, and Rehov doesn't include in his distance analysis the additional factor of the extra time from the shockwave to the microphone which could indeed potentially include the place the IDF was known to be. Nevertheless, the idea that the IDF would deliberately kill a journalist is shown here to be as absurd as possible. And the "experts" from Bellingcat, AP, the NYT and Washington Post based their distance estimations on wrong data.

Rehov is also the first one to include my findings that there were Palestinian snipers in houses and on roofs.

It is worthwhile to watch.

(h/t Ian)

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