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| Middle East |
| Bomb victim’s family praise video |
| 2004-02-01 |
| BBC Israel was right to release a graphic video showing the results of a suicide bombing, a victim’s brother has said. The ministry of foreign affairs posted the gruesome video on its website following a suicide bombing on Thursday that killed at least 11 people. "The world has to see what we are going through," Yehuda Boneh told the BBC’s Newshour programme. Israel has never made such video available before and it is not being broadcast on television there. The video shows extremely graphic images of the kind Western broadcasters and newspapers would refuse to reproduce. and in most circumstances we’re right to do so. but maybe not in this one They include bloody body parts in the wreckage of the bus and on the street, including a hand connected to a mass of bone and mangled flesh. The five-minute, forty-second video has been edited so that victims cannot be identified. The Israeli daily Maariv said the video got more than 280,000 hits in its first 48 hours on the ministry website. Hospital officials and emergency workers said it was necessary to make the video available. "I think we clean the scenes up too fast," Barbara Sofer of the Women’s Zionist Organisation of America - which runs Jerusalem’s two main trauma hospitals - told the Baltimore Sun newspaper. She said people outside Israel thought suicide bombings merely meant "that we can’t have a coffee in peace at a trendy cafe. That’s not what this is about. It’s about our lives being blown to pieces. The world is not privy to this," she said. Mr Boneh, whose sister Rose was killed in the bombing, agreed. "It’s the truth. It’s what happens. Israel should show the truth," he told Newshour. Police used to keep journalists away from the aftermath of suicide bombings, reporters in the region say. But amid the sense that Israel is losing the propaganda war, it has begun allowing reporters almost immediate access to blast scenes and victims in hospital. Palestinian television routinely shows the aftermath of Israeli raids. Might work. Can’t hurt much, given how slanted the reporting has been. The Israeli Government has been arguing that its controversial security barrier would have prevented the attack. "The anti-terrorist fence could have prevented this massacre," the foreign ministry website said in a note accompanying the video. "All those who criticise Israel for building the fence should take a good look at this morning’s pictures from Jerusalem," the ministry said. Palestinians have said the barrier is an attempt to seize land. A number of countries have expressed opposition to its route, which does not follow the Green Line - the generally recognised |
| Posted by:rkb |
| #3 You think the BBC will show (or host) the video? Nope... You think CNN will show (or host) the video? Nope... to busy covering Israli Forces entering Jericho... (in which the IDF bulldozed a house with a terrorist inside after giving it a chance to leave. He lost his argument with the D9.) |
| Posted by: CrazyFool 2004-2-1 9:40:01 PM |
| #2 The barrier has had an effect. This bombing, not counting the one at the Gaza border checkpoint, was the first one inside the Green line in quite some time. I don't know for sure but I would guess that the Fence separting Bethlehem, where the bomber came from, has not been completed yet. |
| Posted by: Daniel King 2004-2-1 3:33:38 PM |
| #1 There are 10 entities who are stealing air in Gaza and the West Banks. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2004-2-1 1:37:40 PM |