I am writing this to make a prediction based on my knowledge of the Israel Defense Forces. Below is a new New York Times headline, which I predict will be shown to be wrong. Click to read, and I’ll put a précis below. I also found the article archived here.
The claims:
An Oct. 13 strike that killed a videographer for the Reuters news agency and injured six others in southern Lebanon was carried out by the Israeli military and appeared to be a deliberate attack, Human Rights Watch said on Thursday.
The watchdog group said that evidence it had reviewed — including dozens of videos of the incident, photographs and satellite images, and interviews with witnesses and military experts — showed that the journalists were not near areas where fighting was taking place and that there was no military objective near their position.
“The attack on the journalists’ position directly targeted them,” the report said, labeling the attack a war crime.
The Israeli authorities did not immediately respond to the report.
Reuters published its own investigation on Thursday and said that an Israeli tank crew had killed its journalist and wounded the others.
. . . On Oct. 13, a week after Hamas attacks on Israel sparked an all-out war, the seven journalists from Reuters, Al Jazeera and Agence France-Presse, the French news agency, were standing on a hilltop in southern Lebanon close to the border with Israel. They were filming and broadcasting cross-border shelling between the Israeli army and Lebanese militants allied with Hamas.
The report said that the journalists were wearing antiballistic jackets marked “Press” and had a car marked “TV.” They had been at that position for more than an hour and were visible from an Israeli military location more than a mile away, the report said.
The report said that two munitions, fired within 37 seconds of each other, killed Mr. Abdallah, and injured the six others. A car belonging to Al Jazeera was destroyed. Ramzi Kaiss, a researcher for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement that it was an “apparently deliberate attack on civilians and thus a war crime.”
. . . In a separate report, which contained some of the same information, the human rights group Amnesty International said that the journalists were stationary and that their markings “should have provided sufficient information to Israeli forces that these were journalists and civilians and not a military target.”
Now this may have occurred as reported, but I’m going to stick my neck out and predict that this was by no means a deliberate targeting of journalists. Why do I say this?
a. The IDF does not deliberately target civilians, including journalists. They may be killed if they’re in the line of fire, but not as targets.
b. It would be completely inimical, and highly damaging to both the IDF and Israel, if the military was discovered to have targeted civilians and especially journalists. The IDF is especially careful not to do this, both because they value innocent life and also because the eyes of the world are on them, watching their every move. No Army in the world is as careful as Israel’s to target only military objectives. (That said, of course, this could be a mistake; see below.)
c. The reports come from two groups known to be resolutely anti-Israel: Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. I suspect they are keen to rush to judgement, as has the mainstream liberal media in all of this war. Remember when the NYT, the BBC, and other liberal sources reported that Israel had hit the al-Ahli Hospital in late October, killing 500? It turned out that it wasn’t Israel that damaged the area (it was a parking lot, not the hospital itself), but a misfired missile launched by the terrorist group Islamic Jihad, and that far fewer people were killed.
d. Israel’s lack of commenting is, I think, because the IDF is investigating the incident. It didn’t comment right away on the al-Ahli bombing, either, and some took that as an Israeli admission of guilt.
I think the most likely possibility for what happened is that the IDF was fired on from a site near where the journalists were, and returned fire, hitting the journalists who were bystanders to the action. Alternatively, it could have been a simple mistake, but I think that less likely as I don’t think the IDF would fire on a car without any good reason. What I think did not happen is that the IDF simply wanted to kill journalists and shot them.
Now I may be wrong, and if so I’ll admit it, but, more important, the IDF will admit it, as it has admitted previously when it screwed up. If IDF soldiers violate the army’s code of conduct (such as killing a wounded terrorist who poses no danger because he’s lying on the ground), they can go to jail.
The chance that the headline above is accurate is, in my view, very close to zero. Stay tuned.
Oh, and by the way, when was the last time you saw a NYT headline that Human Rights Watch or Amnesty International condemned Hamas or Islamic Jihad for committing a war crime? Palestinian terrorists do that on a daily basis, you know—most often by firing rockets willy-nilly at Israel.
Thank you for that analysis, Jerry.
Agreed. On the possibility of an error: if a U.S. Navy ship can mistake a civilian Airbus A300 for an Iranian F-14 and on that basis mistakenly shoot it down, killing everyone on board–a truly atrocious level of bungling–then surely far lesser mistakes can also occur.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_Air_Flight_655
What if signals intelligence shows that the journalists were reporting fall of shot to the Lebanese Hamas-aligned artillery men? That’s what forward artillery controllers do. Find high ground from which they can see targets not visible to the gunners.
If this turns out to be true, that the civilian journalists militarized themselves by their actions and the shooting of them was deliberate, you still win your bet.
I hasten to clarify that it’s not a bet but a prediction. I wouldn’t “bet” on human lives. But I know what you’re saying.
I apologize for misquoting you.
Also my first thought plus it is not sensible to position yourself on high ground in a conflict zone regardless of “press visible” attire.
Why would the IDF deliberately kill a journalist? It would make very little sense in a climate where Israel and the IDF are (largely) losing the PR war, while winning the war on the ground.
I don’t believe it.
Please less Israel
And more science and evolution
Signing
Off
Sorry, I write what interests me at the moment, and this war has many aspects that are worth exploring. You are free to go; I don’t want readers who don’t like the content, nor readers who say that publicly, which is rude. Bye, Mr. Rude Ron.
I’m afraid I don’t agree with Ron. This is the sort of story whose truth needs to be nailed down before the alternative explanations get too much credibility. I’m not quite sure that I trust the IDF’s openness as much as our host does, but I would certainly wait for their account before passing judgement.
Other options:
a) It was an accident
b) There WAS military activity in the vicinity
c) The militants did it
Slightly unrelated, but the BBC just reported that one of the men in a photo of alleged Hamas fighters captured today has been identified as a prominent Palestinian reporter. I can’t find the report on the BBC’s website yet.
In other news, the BBC is also reporting:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67654848
While I very, very much discount the idea that the IDF would have a deliberate policy of targeting journalists or civilians there is still the chance this was either a rogue action or much more likely a mistake.
I reserve judgement until an investigation.
I agree that the IDF would never deliberately fire on journalists.
However, wars are dangerous.
The investigations I found go to great pains to identify the type of shell and the firing location, then jump right into the assumption that the attack was “apparently deliberate”.
I would put no credence in the sources currently reporting on this strike. They have a history of misrepresenting or omitting facts to serve their political ends. I will wait for the IDF conclusions.
Human Rights Watch is in the pocket of wealthy Arab donors. See:
https://quillette.com/2023/12/06/bias-and-betrayal/
It seems highly unlikely that the IDF has a policy of deliberately targeting journalists. It would do them far more harm than good.
On the other hand, we had reports of at least some Hamas terrorists wearing IDF uniforms during the attack so it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine them wearing Press vests or driving vehicles marked Press when gathering intelligence or spotting for artillery and the IDF is probably well aware of it
I wonder if the newshounds have any reports of Hamas pretending to be journalists and would they say if they had?
I doubt the validity of the report as well. There is no benefit to Israel in killing journalists and many deficits. We cannot rule out a killing by mistake or by a soldier violating IDF standards, which is why we need to wait for a more complete investigation.
Il the IDF had deliberately aimed at this target, there would have been no survivors. Or was the plan to keep a few alive so they could testify? Some people say that the Israeli military are perverse, but no one claims that they are that stupid.
Not necessarily.
I’ll let Max explain it better if he wishes, but the rounds fired by most modern tanks, including the Israeli Merkava, work as kinetic penetrators of armour — very fast, solid tungsten-steel darts — not by blast and fragmentation like conventional artillery. Reuters video claims to depict a remnant of the tail fins characteristic of these projectiles (assuming that what we are shown actually came from the site, and were not just random battlefield junk picked up opportunistically.)
So it’s plausible that only the guy closest to the struck car would be killed, the rest injured by pieces of the car (and its fuel) as it disintegrated from the sheer kinetic energy of the dart. Had the tank fired a conventional high-explosive round, likely they all would be dead. But the smooth-bore guns now used in all modern tanks except the British Challenger can fire only these fin-stabilized penetrators (and special guided anti-tank missiles resembling Javelins.) So if it was a deliberate shot, “for effect”, from the tank, the tank crew couldn’t be sure of killing them all with a dart aimed at their vehicle. They are still lucky to be alive, though.
The video mentions that the TV film crew had just turned to shoot toward the Israeli position. It’s possible that the watchful tank crew interpreted this as an attempt to “dial in” the tanks for the benefit of Hezbollah gunners and fired on them in a better-to-be judged-by-12-than-carried-by-six response. Who’s to say that Hezbollah wasn’t tuned into the live TV station? The Israelis were under fire from the enemy with only seconds to make decisions. That makes the battlefield a dangerous place for journalists who want to ply their trade independently of the military.
As a related phenomenon, all the conventional media report on the repeated artillery shelling of Israel by Hizballah—a part of the Lebanese government—as if it were a mere natural phenomenon, like a snowstorm blowing south. We can be sure that if
militias in Canada were suddenly to start firing shells and missiles south into the US, this would be reported as unprovoked aggression and acts of war.
The “journalists” could have also been calling in targets and were an observation post.
Is there any evidence that the journalists were anything other than that?
These situations are complicated and clearly difficult to resolve. I think members of the IDF, like any military in combat situations, probably do sometimes make bad judgements. There has been at least one recent case of an IDF soldier apparently shooting a journalist who happened to be Palestinian, Shireen Abu Akleh. In this case the evidence strongly suggests that she was deliberately targeted, but there is no way to determine why she was targeted (she might have appeared to be a combatant, for example). Israel’s initial investigation blaming the death on Palestinians was flawed and came to false conclusions, as shown by subsequent investigations. After public push-back, the IDF investigated further and found that she was probably shot by the IDF. Additional investigations were blocked by all parties involved.
In this case the IDF further muddied the waters by violently attacking her funeral, according to both Israeli and Palestinian sources:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/video-shows-cops-storming-hospital-before-reporters-funeral-firing-shots/
So while the IDF is more careful than most armies, they do misbehave sometimes.
Human Rights Watch Arab donors are the same as those who paid off EU delegates to burnish the “human rights” policy of one of the most repressive Arab states, if not the worst. Avoiding one’s gaze from Qatar is becoming the default position….anything to prevent the public from looking too closely.