Going Back to the Four Kids Killed on the Gaza Beachfront

You might remember my July 17th post on those four Gaza kids killed in a shelling incident.

My basic finding was that none of the 4-5 reports actually complemented each other but rather kept raising doubts as to the veracity of the Hamas claims of what happened.

Now we have this:

What kind of people use dead children as props to advance their totalitarian politico-religious agenda? The Palestinians.
I can’t tell you what actually happened, but the boys weren’t playing soccer, the target was legitimate, and the IDF did not deliberately kill children. Yes, the Israelis took responsibility for the deaths; however, the IDF stopped using the M825A1 smoke shell for no reason. The IDF was also unable to determine how Mustafa Tamimi and Bassem Abu Rahmeh died. From the standpoints of PR and forensic investigation, the IDF needs major reform.

And he did find a Pallywood snap:

Note the matter of shadows or lack thereof.

As to what actually caused their deaths ---  he suggests a grenade  ---- I cannot tell or even guess and I am not sure.

But the main point is that you cannot depend on Hamas.

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One Step Away From Justifying Pal./Arab Fautography

War photographs are an index of suffering rather than a true representation, but that is enough. And accepting the role of emotion in photography, even if that emotion might be an easy sentimentalism, does not have to entail an abandonment of political commitment or an aesthetic naïveté. A photograph cannot tell a four-year-old refugee’s whole story, but to proclaim that photographs always lie and then leave it at that does not represent a major step forward in moral or philosophical sophistication. The far more sensible and more ethical strategy is to use photographs, with all their incompletion and inaccuracy, as a springboard to a deeper engagement with their subjects: In this case, a brutal and unceasing war that has forced 2.5 million Syrians to flee their homes and which is degrading into a disaster on par with those in Bosnia or Rwanda. Marwan might not be an orphan, but that doesn’t mean his story isn’t real.  

From:
The Syrian Orphan in That Viral Photo Wasn't Actually an Orphan, But It Doesn't Matter

More:

He was a synecdoche, a means of coming to terms with an unfathomable humanitarian disaster and not necessarily a distraction from that disaster’s realities. That Marwan was not what he seemed to be, that he was a refugee but not an orphan, is obviously regrettable. But the force of the image did not derive from the caption; it is the larger disaster that the image evokes, with the correct caption as much as the incorrect one, that gives it power. 

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New Fautography

Story here.