Every movie buff knows that when a gang of criminals is apprehended by the forces of law and order, the first thing they need to do is get their story straight. Under police questioning a case is then constructed around holes and inconsistencies in the criminals’ individual stories.
Picking apart the stories of so-called Palestinian “eyewitnesses” is not a luxury that the IDF has. It’s also not something that many journalists can be bothered to deal with before writing up an article.
So just how reliable (or unreliable) are Palestinian eyewitnesses?
The story surrounding the deaths of three Palestinians during a pre-dawn Israeli arrest raid in the Qalandia refugee camp near Ramallah is illustrative of the problem.
Threat to IDF life
The threat posed by Palestinians engaged in stone throwing or worse is often downplayed by a media keen to promote a simplistic David versus Goliath framing of the story, with the Palestinians playing the David role. Once again, in this story, most media avoided any graphic descriptions of the Palestinian rioting, leaving the impression that the IDF had resorted to a disproportionate and indiscriminate response.
Only a short quote from IDF spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner was included in most media stories: “Live fire was used only after soldiers felt their self defence required it,” he said. “With the great numbers of people and the way the situation developed forces felt there was no choice but to use live fire.”
Credit then to the Daily Telegraph and the New York Times for including descriptions of the scene that paint a much more detailed and alarming picture.
The Daily Telegraph:
The noise and disturbance brought large numbers of inhabitants from their homes, many of whom climbed to the roofs of low rise buildings and began hurling missiles, witnesses told The Telegraph.
Outnumbered, the police requested help from the Israeli army, which deployed soldiers in armoured vehicles and jeeps.
“It was like a battlefield,” said Ahmed Lafi, 25, a journalism student at Ramallah’s Bir Zeit University “Nobody was on the roof simply watching.
People were throwing rocks, Molotov cocktails, iron bars, even satellite dishes.
“The Israeli forces panicked and some of them were screaming like women.
One of their jeeps broke down and another was almost burned. One group of soldiers got trapped. At one point, they thought they had lost a soldier and started breaking into houses looking for him.”
The New York Times:
Mr. Lafi described people attacking the soldiers with firebombs, stones, bricks, satellite dishes — anything they could get their hands on. “If the army meets resistance each time it tries to arrest activists in the West Bank,” he said, “then the army won’t dare to go on raiding and arresting.”
Is it any wonder that IDF soldiers felt sufficiently threatened to resort to live fire?
What time is it?
Most media, including the BBC, relied on an Associated Press report:
Hatim Khatib, whose brother Youssef was arrested in the raid, told The Associated Press that undercover troops dressed in civilian clothes arrived at their home at 4:30 a.m. looking for the brother.
“After half an hour we started hearing shooting from the soldiers inside our house, and then people started throwing stones at them,” he said.
According to the LA Times, however:
Palestinian witnesses said the raid began at 3 a.m. as an undercover operation to re-arrest a Fatah militant who had recently been released from an Israeli prison.
In stark contrast, the Washington Post said:
At the funeral for the three dead, senior Palestinian leaders and angry residents said Israel provoked the attack by arriving in the refugee camp in the morning, when people were heading to work, school and mosque.
Just how many people go to work or school at 4.30 in the morning? It’s entirely unlikely that the IDF would contemplate an undercover arrest operation at a time when ordinary Palestinians would be moving around on the streets. This is precisely in order to avoid both detection and the risk of a confrontation. Indeed, for the record, the IDF stated that the operation began around 5am.
The arrest
The aforementioned AP report, relied upon by numerous media outlets describes how Youssef Khatib was arrested based on his brother Hatim’s testimony:
