The BBC has done an important story on Israel's use of youtube to propagandize its surgical war. The other day it posted dramatic footage of a missile hitting a truck with a lot of men around it.
The YouTube video has a large caption on it saying "Grad missiles
being loaded onto the Hamas vehicle." As of Saturday morning UK time,
more than 260,000 people had watched it.
It turned out, however, that a 55-year-old Gaza resident named
Ahmed Sanur, or Samur, claimed that the truck was his and that he and
members of his family and his workers were moving oxygen cylinders from
his workshop.
This workshop had been damaged when a building next door was bombed by the Israelis and he was afraid of looters, he said.
The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem put Mr Sanur's account
on its website, together with a photograph of burned out oxygen
cylinders.
Mr Sanur said that eight people, one of them his son, had been
killed. He subsequently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz: "These were
not Hamas, they were our children… They were not Grad missiles."
Friends of mine had pointed me to this story a couple days ago. Apologies. But it will soon be picked up in the American press. Not!
