Last Updated | Tuesday | 4:55 p.m. Since Israel has reportedly decided to conduct its own military and state inquiries into last week’s deadly commando raid off the coast of Gaza, rather than agree to an international investigation, it seems unlikely that the Israel Defense Forces will release all of the video of the operation recorded by the military or seized from journalists and activists on the ships.
On Sunday, however, more light was shed on the early stages of the chaotic raid, in which Israeli commandos boarded the main ship of a flotilla challenging Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza. A Turkish newspaper published photographs that appeared to show three Israeli commandos who were reportedly captured and beaten aboard the ship, the Mavi Marmara.
As the Israeli blogger Noam Sheizaf noted, the newspaper, Hurriyet, published a slide show with eight graphic images of the bloodied commandos after they were disarmed and dragged inside the Mavi Marmara. On its English-language Web site, the newspaper explained, “Photos recovered from memory cards and acquired by daily Hürriyet provide an inside look at what happened when Israeli commandos raided the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara in the early morning hours of May 31.”
Those photographs, and several more, were subsequently passed on to international wire services by Insani Yardim Vakfi, the Turkish aid organization (usually called the I.H.H.) that helped organize the flotilla. Many of the images (in the embedded slide shows at the top of this post and below) were shot by a Turkish journalist, Adem Ozkose, who also managed to smuggle out video he filmed on the ship after the raid.
Mr. Sheizaf also noted that another Israeli journalist, Alon Ben David, who is a military correspondent for Israel’s Channel 10, reported over the weekend that sources in the I.D.F. had sketched out a timeline of the raid for him. According to Mr. Ben David’s report:
The attack on the ship started at 4:30 a.m. with 15 commandos rappelling down ropes to the ship’s upper deck. The first three commandos were captured and taken to the lower deck. After one minute, the commandos opened fire and took control of the upper deck.
At 4:35 a.m. another team arrived by helicopter. At 4:50 a.m. the commandos started taking over the ship. At 5:00 a.m the military announced it had control of the ship’s bridge.
The three commandos then either escaped or were freed by their colleagues.
According to Mr. Sheizaf, the capture of the three commandos may have been what triggered the use of deadly force against the ship’s passengers. In his post on the photographs, he wrote:
Since the Gilad Shalit kidnapping, there is a standing order in Israel not to let any IDF soldier to be captured alive, even if it means risking his own life — let alone the life of the people around him.
Update: After this post was published, Ali Abunimah, a founder of the Electronic Intifada, pointed out that more photographs apparently shot during the Israeli commando raid last week were published on the Web site of HaberTurk, a Turkish newspaper. Those images were smuggled off the ship by Sefik Dinc, a HaberTurk journalist.
As Mr. Abunimah pointed out in a post on his blog, two of the images published by HaberTurk seem to show passengers treating a wounded Israeli commando, apparently after he had been captured.
Another reader pointed out that a Canadian activist, Kevin Neish, told The Canadian Press that he had taken some of the photographs published in the Turkish press. Mr. Neish said he managed to smuggle the images out and turned them over to the I.H.H.
Apologies for Two Videos
While the I.D.F. has not released any unedited video of the raid, Israel’s government did apologize over the weekend for two Web videos presenting Israeli perspectives on the clashes, which led to the deaths of nine Turkish activists. The Lede discussed both clips on Friday, after they were posted on YouTube.
The first clip is a satirical music video called “We Con the World,” made by a Jerusalem Post columnist who once advised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. The video, set to the tune of “We Are the World,” mocked the flotilla’s humanitarian mission by suggesting that the activists killed in the raid were violent provocateurs.
Rachel Shabi of The Guardian reported on Sunday:
The Israeli government press office distributed the video link to foreign journalists at the weekend, but within hours emailed them an apology, saying it had been an error. Press office director Danny Seaman said the video did not reflect official state opinion, but in his personal capacity he thought it was “fantastic.” Government spokesman Mark Regev said the video reflected how Israelis felt about the incident. “I called my kids in to watch it because I thought it was funny,” he said. “It is what Israelis feel. But the government has nothing to do with it.”
The second video is a short clip of what the I.D.F. said were audio transmissions Israel’s navy received from the Mavi Marmara before the raid. The clip suggested that a polite request from the navy to the ship was met with responses from three people who said: “Shut up — go back to Auschwitz,” “We have permission from the Gaza Port Authority to enter,” and “We’re helping Arabs going against the U.S., don’t forget 9/11, guys.”
This clip, posted on the I.D.F.’s official YouTube channel on Friday, was met with immediate skepticism by some bloggers and journalists in Israel. Max Blumenthal pointed out in a post on his blog that the I.D.F. had already released video of what seemed like the same exchange four days earlier in which the only reply from the ship was “Negative, negative. Our destination is Gaza. Our destination is Gaza.”
Mr. Blumenthal suggested that at least one of the voices making the inflammatory remarks in the clip “sounded like an impersonation of an Arab.” He also noted that Huwaida Arraf, one of the organizers of the flotilla, said that it was her voice saying “We have permission from the Gaza Port Authority to enter.” But Ms. Arraf was not on the Mavi Marmara, which suggested that the I.D.F. tape was not an unedited snippet of the exchange between the naval ship and the Mavi Marmara.
On Saturday, the I.D.F. published what it called a “Clarification/Correction” regarding the clip which said that the audio had been edited. The military’s statement insisted that the audio of the exchange was genuine, but had been condensed for clarity:
There have been questions regarding the authenticity of the recording as well as its attribution to a communication with the Mavi Marmara.
So to clarify: the audio was edited down to cut out periods of silence over the radio as well as incomprehensible comments so as to make it easier for people to listen to the exchange. We have now uploaded the entire segment of 5 minutes and 58 seconds in which the exchange took place and the comments were made.
This transmission had originally cited the Mavi Marmara ship as being the source of these remarks, however, due to an open channel, the specific ship or ships in the “Freedom Flotilla” responding to the Israeli Navy could not be identified.
The longer clip, which the I.D.F. calls the “Unedited Radio Transmission Between Gaza Flotilla and Israeli Navy,” also includes the audio of the inflammatory statements, but since they are snippets of audio over a black screen, it is impossible to verify their authenticity.