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Trying to find out what happened in the Middle East is often difficult.

Israelly Cool! shows us again. Snapped Shot likens it to a game of Clue.

The other day I noticed that a Palestinian woman had been killed. The AP reported:

Palestinian relatives of Khaldiyeh Hamdan react at the family house during her funeral in Maghazi refugee camp, central Gaza Strip, Monday, Dec. 31, 2007. Hamdan, 45, was shot and killed on Sunday on the Gaza-Israel border while waiting for relatives to return from a religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, Palestinian officials reported. She was waiting on the Palestinian side of the Erez passenger terminal when Israeli soldiers in a nearby watchtower opened fire, killing her and wounding four others, witnesses said. The Israeli military said it was looking into the report.

A picture accompanied this report:

Reuters reported:

A Palestinian relative of Kaldiya Al Tilbani mourns during her funeral in the Gaza Strip December 31, 2007. At least one Palestinian was killed and four others were wounded by gunfire while crossing from Israel into the Gaza Strip on Sunday after completing the annual haj pilgrimage to Mecca, Palestinian medics said.

Note that the family name of the woman is different and that Reuters makes no mention that she was shot by an Israeli soldier.

Finally there was a short AFP photo and caption that accompanied a longer AFP article published in the Middle East Times:

Relatives of Palestinian woman Halbia Altibani, 30, mourn during her funeral in the central Gaza Strip refugee camp of Maghazi. Altibani was killed when Israeli soldiers opened fire later yesterday on a group of Palestinians awaiting returning Hajj pilgrims at the Erez Crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip. (AFP Mohammed Abed)

This also had a photograph accompanying it.

It is quite similar to the first photograph, though not identical. (The two photographs are credited to two different photographers too.) Still it’s pretty clear that it was taken in the same place. And yet the details about the woman killed are entirely different. This leads me to conclude that the photographs were staged. (I’m not saying that no one was killed, but read on.)

Another oddity with this report is that when you search for images in Yahoo! using the name “Halbia Altibani”, you get a cached version of the picture because the news item has been removed with no explanation. (The AFP story on Yahoo! News – along with the photo – is still there and other older photos have not expired yet.)

And while the Israeli army admits that it’s soldiers fired during the rioting, it doesn’t – as a number of news organizations claim – admit to killing the woman. Ynet, though, unfortunately draws that conclusion, though it presents no (conclusive) testimony that the woman was killed by Israeli gunfire.

But the preliminary findings of the probe indicate that the soldiers manning the crossing felt threatened by the volume of the crowd amassed at the scene and fired warning shots that had not been intended to cause injury. Some 700 Palestinians attempted to cross through Erez that evening.Palestinian reports claimed that several more pilgrims were wounded in the incident, the IDF report maintains they were hit by ricochets.

High ranking military officials stressed that it is clear that it was not the troops’ intent to target innocent civilians and said investigators would continue to pursue the case until the circumstances surrounding the incident are brought to light.

From all this two red flags emerge:
1) The radically different details of the incident. That includes two reports from apparently the same location that agree only that the woman was killed by Israel.
2) A report that disappeared with no explanation.

There are three possibilities as to what really happened.
1) The woman, whoever she was, was killed by Israeli gunfire.
2) The whole incident was staged and no one died.
3) Something in the middle, whereby a woman died but from other causes.

I believe that the third is most likely. When someone dies there’s a body and that’s hard to hide.

My initial speculation was that perhaps she had been trampled as the crowd moved. But buried in a Jerusalem Post story there’s this:

Ayman Taha’s threat came a day after some of the pilgrims housed in temporary shelters in northern Sinai burned mattresses and broke windows in protest of Egypt’s refusal to let them enter Gaza through the Rafah crossing. A Palestinian woman died of a heart attack during the protests.

It seems odd for a 45 or 30 year old woman to die from a heart attack. And I’m not saying that this report is conclusive either. Still it supports my speculation that while a woman died the cause of death was not Israeli gunfire.

Again this demonstrates the difficulty of getting news straight when your sources are accuracy challenged.

Thanks to Elder of Ziyon for his help in trying to decipher these conflicting stories.

UPDATE: It looks like I was correct.

But Hamas members among the pilgrims feared arrest if they tried to return to Gaza through Israel. Pilgrims staged angry protests, setting fires in makeshift camps, to demand passage through Egypt. Three Palestinian women died of natural causes while waiting, Palestinians said.

(Washington Post)

Many of the returning Palestinians complained of harsh conditions and the bitter cold in Sinai. The Egyptian authorities put them up in a stadium and provided food and medicine, the returnees said. But two of the pilgrims died of heart attacks during the wait in the desert town.

(NYT)(Emphases mine.)

While the numbers of the dead differ in each account, both accounts attribute the deaths to natural causes. The charge that Israeli soldiers killed a woman appears to be discredited.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.