e9ea0def-904b-4b3d-870f-52e2c2536738.jpgYesterday, a video started circulating with claims that it showed the immediate aftermath of the bombing of a market in Gaza. Many of you by now may have seen it – it is horrifying. Even though I’ve seen an awful lot of rough video from Iraq and Afghanistan and now Gaza, this one … this one was like a punch to the gut … this one made me cry.

This afternoon, markfromireland, who, as many of you know, is a very experienced bomb disposal officer, and I watched it again and again – and did more digging. Several things have led us to think this is not a video from yesterday. It may be from a horrific explosion a few years ago – markfromireland discovered that both Liveleaks and Toxicjunction (warning:video starts automatically) have the same video, the first posted on January 1 of this year making a very dubious claim to show events from September 2005, the latter uploaded in March 2008.

markfromireland had a feeling that something was just not right and other things seen in the video raised our suspicions: there is a focus on a truck at the end yet no truck mentioned in the Times article on yesterday’s market strike, there are men in uniforms seen, yet we doubt Hamas or other Gazan fighters are circulating in public in uniform at the moment, and the number of dead and wounded seems greater than the casualties of yesterday’s market strike.

Since we do our best to check our sources and both the Guides team and I believe in tracking down dodginess when we can — and revealing it even if it weakens the case we might be making, we wanted to be very clear about our agreement that this video is not a legitimate report of events yesterday in Gaza.

What is being done in Gaza is horrific enough, the truth disturbing enough without embellishment. There is confirmation now of the use of clusterbombs, and evidence of the use of white phosphorous.

And there was a market in Gaza hit yesterday by the Israelis. The Times of London reports – and it is no less horrific for not being the subject of this video:

Nobody even knows what kind of shell it was that hit Gaza City’s main vegetable market this morning – the explosives are falling so thick and fast it could have come from an Israeli naval vessel, an F-16 fighter-bomber, an Apache helicopter gunship, an unmanned drone, an artillery cannon or a tank.

But the results were unmistakable. With Gaza’s ambulance service stretched far beyond its normal capacity, the first mangled bodies arrived in private cars as locals scrambled to save the lives of the shoppers.

The first to be carried in was a boy, his face masked in blood from a head wound as medics whisked him into the overcrowded emergency rooms. The next car disgorged a girl, perhaps 12 or 13 years old, her entrails blown out through a hole in her back by shrapnel.

Medics said five people were killed in the market bombing, and 40 wounded. Israel said it had no knowledge of a market being hit.

Let’s leave aside the authenticity of the video as a genuine report on what happened in Gaza yesterday. I still think it is important.

This video is very disturbing and folks should know that before viewing. It is very graphic and should not be viewed

by children.

I thought a lot last night about the video – and why it hit harder than all those others that have become almost commonplace on youtube, all that footage that is shown on the news, less here than in other countries, but more often now shown with the usual warnings about “may find disturbing” and such.

Here’s what makes this, at least to my mind, so different.

When we see the pictures, the blood and body parts, the children broken and crying, the medics rushing the wounded to an overflowing, understaffed, undersupplied hospital, we see one moment of the actual, real cost of our wars.

But what we never see, what we never hear – are the moments before the medics arrive, before the aid team gets there, before the reporters and cameras arrive. The moments when people, regular everyday people like you and I, like our parents and our children, are thrown into the chaos and frenzy and horror of having their homes, their neighborhood, their everyday lives blown into bloody bits.

So much of what we’ve talked about here these past few years has been about bombings, US air strikes on Iraq, on Afghanistan and now the US bought and sold Iraeli air strikes and shelling of Gaza.

And what we see in this video is the moment, the moment when the world explodes for people just like us.

Almost two years ago, Mohammed Ibn Laith wrote about that moment which he has lived so many times in What Shall We Talk About Today You and I? I went back this morning to read it once again, I hope you will too.

Everywhere inside there are pieces of flesh and blood and rubble. Pulling the living flesh from the rubble. Separating the living from the dead. Climbing over rubble to reach bloodied living flesh. She is so small she cannot be older than 5. The cars and the trucks and the vans begin to arrive. A man takes my bloodied burden from me and others run in to help. I run to the next shop.

Where is my brother?

There is nothing to be done here. Where is my brother?

The others of my team are here. Doing as our trainers have shown us. Doing the things that must be done in the first few minutes. All 5 of us are here now. We do as our trainers have shown us. Doing the things that must be done in the first few minutes.

Where is my brother?

What will we talk about today you and I? I do not want to talk about last Saturday. Shall we talk about peace? I would like to talk about peace. I love the word. No, perhaps we are not ready to talk of peace yet you and I, we are not at peace, we are not even at truce.

Moving round the market with my team. Taking wounded people to the waiting cars. Where are the ambulances? Where are the police? Will the Americans stop the cars and buses and vans carrying the wounded and the dieing to the hospitals as they have done so often before?

…

Showing the helpers how to pick up the pieces of human flesh. Put your hand inside one plastic bag pick it up. Drop it into the plastic sack. Move on to the next piece. One of them has not done this before his hand is shaking so much that he drops a piece of dead human flesh to the ground. But before I can get to him another whose face I recognise from before moves to him and shows him how to do it properly. They stay together the experienced helping the new. The first time is hardest. The new one’s shoulders are moving up and done as he works. He stands up and runs to a stall his helper running after him. He stands his shoulders moving up and down. His helper’s hand upon his shoulder. My brother calls out:

O God! Pardon our living and our dead, the present and the absent, the young and the old, the males and the females.

They go back to work.

O God! Pardon our living and our dead, the present and the absent, the young and the old, the males and the females.

Lips moving with each piece that they pick up and put into their plastic sacks.

O God! Pardon our living and our dead, the present and the absent, the young and the old, the males and the females.

What will we talk about today you and I? I do not want to talk about last Saturday. Shall we talk about peace? I would like to talk about peace. I love the word. No, perhaps we are not ready to talk of peace yet you and I, we are not at peace, we are not even at truce.

Today, in this video, no matter when it was shot or the bombing it records, we see that moment, we hear that moment and perhaps we begin to understand a bit more.

Each day, as we hear the news of another bomb in Iraq, another destroyed wedding party in Afghanistan, another day of the Israeli war on Gaza, each day, let us remember that this is what it looks like, this is what it sounds like and it is our weapons, our funding, our government’s support which so often makes this possible.

Thank you to markfromireland for his help in analysing this video and for his understanding, to Mohammed Ibn Laith for his words. Special thanks as well to Michael Braymen for his map which reminds us how very small Gaza is, how very small the area where 1.5 million Gazans are living under a rain of bombs.


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