Some Pallywood from 2015

Kweansmom asked me to check out this photograph of a man bathing his kids in Gaza.

I dug a little and found this article about the photo and photographer:

In an interview with Independent Journal Review, [Emad] Nassar said he captured the shot on June 26, 2015, while he was taking pictures of the conflict in Gaza.

He was walking around the apartment complex when he suddenly saw the family and snapped the photo. It was not staged.

The only information he knows about the family in the photograph are the names of the people and how they’re related; Salem Saoody, 30, daughter Layan (left), and his niece Shaymaa (right).

OK, there are a few points right off the bat.

The photo was taken in the Shejaiya neighborhood of Gaza, which was a Hamas stronghold during the 2014 war. Hamas purposefully didn't rebuild the area for well over a year as it would show it off to clueless Europeans about how evil Israel was to bomb Hamas targets purposefully placed in a residential area. 

As we can see, photographers loved this neighborhood and continued to take staged photos over a year after the war. After all, the destruction was photogenic and served a wonderful propaganda purpose, even as tens of thousands of homes in other sections of Gaza were rebuilt.

Now, how likely is it that this photo was not staged?

Let us take at face value that a loving father would want to give his daughter and niece a bath or have them splash around in the equivalent of a kiddie pool in a clearly dangerous room.

A corner bathtub holds at least 50 gallons/200 liters. This photo was taken at least on the third floor of the building. There is obviously no running water there. This means that according to the photographer, the father carried a great deal of water up and down three flights of dangerous stairs alone, several trips, yet not bothering to clear a path to the tub he was filling up and preferring instead to step over rubble.  He then asked his daughter and niece to walk up the same path, on top of the rubble. 

Now, what if the father had help - say, the photographer Emad Nassar, helping him carry the water with the intent to stage an award winning photograph? Seems somewhat more likely, although it would still be a lot of work. 

What if there was at least a third person there - say, Emad's brother Wissam, whom he doesn't mention but who is also a photographer, and who also won awards for his versions of the same scene at the same time?

Suddenly the idea that Emad was wandering around the neighborhood and stumbled onto this scene on the third floor of a teetering building seems a lot less likely. 

The brothers seem to have found other similar scenes of ordinary Gazans just hanging out in ruins a few floors up in very photogenic ruins. 

Emad:

Wissam:

Wissam has lots of similar, "spontaneous" scenes from upper floors of destroyed buildings:

And he also finds clean toys in rubble:

And old women sitting photogenically in rubble.

Why would anyone think that these brothers are anything but honest when they say they don't stage photos?

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