KLEPAS.ORG

Israeli rocket hits Reuters car

An Israeli air strike on a car in Gaza City during a secu­rity oper­a­tion has injured a Reuters news agency cam­era­man and a local jour­nal­ist.

[…]

Israeli ground forces backed by heli­copters were con­duct­ing an oper­a­tion inside the Gaza Strip on Sat­ur­day evening, near the Karni cross­ing.

“During the oper­a­tion, there was an aerial attack on a sus­pi­cious vehicle that drove in a sus­pi­cious manner right by the forces and in between the Pales­tin­ian mil­i­tant posts,” Israeli armyspokes­woman Capt Noa Meir said.

“This car was not iden­ti­fied by the army as a press vehicle. If jour­nal­ists were hurt, we regret it.”

The Reuters armoured car was clearly labelled as a media vehicle, with signs on all sides, includ­ing the roof.

Accord­ing to the Asso­ci­ated Press, the white sports utility vehicle was embla­zoned with the Reuters logo and had “TV” and “Press” written on it in English, Arabic and Hebrew.

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Israeli rocket hits Reuters car

That this behav­iour of a vehicle in the Pales­tin­ian ter­ri­to­ries war­rants mil­i­tary action is com­pletely absurd. This sort of mil­i­tary guess-​work is ridicu­lous; leading to easily a hundred civil­ian deaths each year which could and should be avoided.

Edit: Steve wrote a response to the above, point­ing out that the jour­nal­ists within the car were point­ing skyward and this can be easily mis­taken for someone armed with an RPG and thus an inci­dent like this easily hap­pened. I think the theory is quite believ­able, however there are still a few things that stand out.

Firstly, this inci­dent occurred during the night. I doubt NVGs do a good job at allow­ing an observer in a heli­copter flying across above at “500km/h” to dif­fer­en­ti­ate someone leaning out of a car with or without a camera, rifle or RPG from a streak of dirt or some­thing entirely dif­fer­ent yet again.

I guess since I wasn’t there when this occurred and the details we’re getting are pretty sketchy that we won’t ever really know under what cir­cum­stances this all hap­pened but one things is sure - the IDF doesn’t have any legit­i­mate reason to be there nor should it have the right to be trigger happy on any vehicle unless that vehicle somehow possess perhaps a threat to people within Israeli borders.

tech­no­rati tags: Israel, car, air-​strike, Pales­tine, Gaza, Reuters, media