Israel Puts Graphic Suicide Bombing Video on Web

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A3342-2004Feb1

Israel Puts Graphic Suicide Bombing Video on Web
Decision Touches off Public Uproar

By Molly Moore
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, February 1, 2004; 2:06 PM

JERUSALEM, Feb. 1 – The camera jostled past the crush of rescue workers,
entered the bombed bus and paused on bloody pieces of flesh hanging from a
twisted window frame. It moved to a severed right foot flung against a curb,
then halted on an arm in the middle of the street.

For the first time in more than three years and after scores of suicide
bombings, the Israeli government has taken the horror and gore of a bus
bombing directly to the public via the Internet, bypassing what one senior
Israeli official called the "distorted" coverage of the international news media.

"We decided this was the only way for us to bring our message to the world,"
said Gideon Meir, a senior foreign ministry officer. "It took us 3½ years to
show these pictures."

The decision to put the graphic five minute and 38-second video on the Israeli
Foreign Ministry Web site just hours after Thursday's explosion, which killed
11 people and the bomber, has unleashed an emotional public debate in a nation
weary of a conflict that has turned Israeli buses, cafes and public streets
into targets and frustrated by political leadership on both sides that has not
ended the violence.

Foreign ministry official Meir said the agency's Web site had received 600,000
hits on the video as of Sunday night. On Thursday, the day of the bombing, the
site temporarily collapsed under the volume of attempts to view the footage,
which carried the understated warning – "Caution: Video contains very graphic
footage."

According to Meir, the government decided to air the footage because of a
pending case before the U.N.'s International Court of Justice in The Hague
over the legal aspects of the massive complex of walls, fences and trenches
that Israel is building around and though the West Bank. The Israeli
government describes the project as a "security fence" that is needed to
prevent suicide attacks such as Thursday's bus bombing. Palestinians and some
international human rights organizations argue that it is an attempt to
unilaterally establish a new border deep inside the West Bank and expropriate
Palestinian land.

With the decreasing frequency of Palestinian suicide bombings in recent
months, many Israeli officials have expressed the view that the government is
losing the public relations battle in the international news media. That
helped convince many officials to go public with the bloody images of
Thursday's attack, Israeli officials said.

"The decision was based on the fact that Israel is being taken to the
International Court of Justice while Palestinians are perpetrating this
barbaric terrorism," Meir said.

That rationale outraged some opponents of the barrier project.

"Showing bodies or body parts . . . lying on the ground and using it for
political ends is disgusting," said Jeff Halper, who heads the Israeli
Committee Against House Demolition, an organization that monitors Israeli
military actions against Palestinians. He accused the Israeli government of
"trying to sell a certain political program, the wall, and to recruit the dead
for this mission."

"Unfortunately this display was not introduced at an earlier stage," said
Avraham Diskin, a political scientist at Jerusalem's Hebrew University. "The
media presents these things in a sterile manner and it does not show you what
happens in reality. I believe you should show the horror, put the truth on the
table."

The video footage on the government Web site, www.mfa.gov.il, was taken by
Ilan Sztulman, 45, who heads visual productions for the ministry of foreign
affairs. He said he arrived at the scene of the Thursday attack only minutes
after the blast and the opening shots of the video show the jerky movements of
a cameraman running toward the bus amidst a crowd of rescue workers.

"I get to the zone much faster than any other photographers because I have
special permission to go in," said Sztulman. "Most of the journalists cannot
go in until the bomb officers declare the area is bomb-free."

At Thursday's bombing, most journalists were kept more than 30 yards from the
bus in the first minutes after the explosion. Many of the body parts
video-taped by Sztulman had been collected by rescue workers by the time
journalists were allowed to move closer. The 11th victim's body was so
mutlilated that the passenger, an Ethopian woman, was identifed only this
weekend using DNA tests.

"We've been documenting the terrorist attacks for a long time," said Sztulman,
adding, "We classified this stuff as almost secret." Last summer, the foreign
ministry's public affairs office showed one of its graphic videos to
international journalists for the first time, but did not publicly air the
footage.

Some of the most gruesome images from Thursday's bombing were edited out of
the version now on the foreign ministry Web site, Sztulman said.

Even so, the footage remains jarring. Sztulman also captured the intimate
details that illustrate how the explosion shattered what began as an ordinary
ride for dozens of passengers on Egged Bus Number 19. Amid the carnage and the
buckled frame of the bus, his camera recorded a black holy book still atop a
sheaf of folders on one seat, a navy blue knapsack and silver mobile telephone
tossed on the nearby pavement and a woman's leg in a black running shoe
protruding into the bus aisle as though she were preparing to get up from her
seat.

"You see this and it's sad to say you get used to it," said Sztulman, who said
he has been dispatched to the scene of most attacks in Jerusalem. "You develop
defenses. Otherwise, you'd go completely crazy. I dream for weeks after every
bomb attack."

In another development, the Israeli military conducted a rare incursion Sunday
into the West Bank city of Jericho, which has been largely immune from Israeli
military operations during the ongoing intifada and imposed a curfew on the
city, according to local residents and military officials. Israeli soldiers
killed a man whom Palestinian security officials identified as a member of the
Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, a military group linked to Palestinian leader Yasser
Arafat's Fatah movement. Israeli military officials said troops shot and
killed the man after he opened fire when soldiers tried to arrest him.

Researchers Samuel Sockol and Hillary Claussen contributed to this article.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company


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