There was gunfire before Abu Akleh was killed - including one towards reporters, seemingly from the southeast ~ EoZ

Friday, May 27, 2022

There was gunfire before Abu Akleh was killed - including one towards reporters, seemingly from the southeast

Middle East Eye released an entire seemingly unedited video of the scene in Jenin before and during Shireen Abu Akleh's death. (They mislabeled it as May 13, but it is clearly May 11.)

It provides additional evidence that the Jenin militants to the southeast shot and killed Abu Akleh, not IDF soldiers.

Here is a crucial 90 second excerpt that ends about three minutes before Shireen is shot:

It starts off with three gunshots that the reporters don't seem too concerned about (2:41 in MEE video). There are occasional gunshots audible throughout the video, so the widespread reporting that there was no gunfire in the area before she was shot is not true.

At 0:15 (2:55 in MEE) the camera looks up the street. There is the lead IDF armored car there, although a little hard to see.

At 0:21 (3:01) we hear a gunshot. The reporters duck, unlike the earlier three gunshots, so they heard the bullet shockwave.

This gunshot has a similar audio signature as the gunshots that were analyzed in the Bellingcat and CNN reports that they claim came from the from the IDF. But the sound gap between the shockwave and muzzle shot is a bit longer.

Although we have not verified that the militants to the southeast were videoed at this exact time, they were walking north. Also, they were coming down a hill - it looks like higher up the hill was a pretty good line of sight towards the reporters.

Without a real reporter going to Jenin and photographing this street and the surrounding areas, we cannot know for sure if there was a line of sight. But the next thing that happens in this video is most interesting.

Unlike the later gunshots, the reporters seem amused at this gunshot. You can hear them laughing. Then, at 0:34 (3:14) one points to the southeast, where we have seen the militants, apparently to show where the gunshot came from.

My source tells me that the journalist is saying that there are both IDF snipers and "shebab" - the "youth" militants - shooting.

My other source thinks that they are talking about Israeli snipers in a building, but the other one corrects him and says, no, those are Palestinians.

It sure looks like he is pointing to militants who are in their line of sight (otherwise, why point?) at that time. And when the reporter is pointing, he is referring to the "shabab" according to my source.

If they are referring to someone in a building, presumably on an upper floor - and there were no Israeli troops in that direction - then there was definitely line of sight from a building to the reporters.

Other gunshots are heard in the seconds after this as you can hear them again say "shebab."

Afterwards, they return to the street Shireen ended up on, and zoomed in on the IDF vehicles. I'm still not certain that the lead vehicle had a clean shot at where Shireen was, here's the best I could do from the angle of where the tree is, compared to what it looked like from the middle of the street. In the first picture from the street corner, even the taxicab was not visible, and I cannot see the IDF vehicle unlike the shot from slightly further east. It doesn't look like we can even see the corner of the block in the first shot. (There are artifacts from the camera moving.)

I'm not as certain that the IDF had no angle - we don't know how far in the street Shireen was, although we know where the tree is, and of course bullets could go through foliage but I'm still convinced that the bullet hole at the top of the tree (see my previous post, update 1) would not look like that from that angle.

There is at least one other gunshot to be heard in the MEE video, whose source seems to be more than twice as far away as these, at 5:02 of the MEE video, with 800 ms between the shot and the muzzle blast. There may be an additional gunshot at 6:38, less than 30 seconds before the shots we've all seen.

In short, this video shows that:

* There were other audible gunshots in the minutes before Abu Akleh was killed, not as wass reported.

* At least one was recognized by the reporters as being shot near them, and it came from around 220 meters away.

* There were no IDF soldiers anywhere near the reporters, which means that it is entirely possible that the militants saw figures moving, perhaps some with helmets, and took a shot directly towards them.

* The reporter referred to the "shebab" and pointed towards the southeast, seeming to point where the shots came from. (And any reporter and witnesses who know this will never, ever admit it to CNN.)

The idea that Shireen was shot by trigger-happy terrorists to the southeast is not only plausible - it is likely.

(h/t Ibn Boutros, DigFind)

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