Noting that the gaza convoys in general have been a mess[1]. Some might argue that about whether they were designed to create chaos[3]. And I'm not finding it difficult to believe that the leadership of Israel certainly aren't minded to be 'reasonable' in how they orchestrate operations.
What I took from the few reports of the incident that I have seen is minimal.
Tracer-fire could be seen angled upwards[4], though there was no real way to discern potentially unangled tracer-fire to assess if that was the whole or merely reprisented a fraction of the bullets let loose. The news report I saw was never going to show any more than the basic demonstration, sanitised free of identifiable deaths and injuries.
Though that moré is subverted by the IR drone footage, as released, where the heat-glow anonimity allowed "bodies on thd ground" to be seen, beyond the crush of people around the moving trucks (other than being (still) warm, we don't know why these are unmoving on the ground). In thse crushes almost certainly some glowing blobs at that moment being pressed dangerously to the front of the rolling wheels, but in part forced there by the additional glowing blobs that surround and thus obscure the 'action'. And, again, sanitised for broadcast (atop of being 'sanitised' before being released by the IDF, almost definitely, for any combination of both reasonable and malicious reasons that anyone could imagine).
There was the IR footage of the individual dragging themselves away. Unable to tell what caused the presumed lower-body injuries, could be a bullet to the spine or wheel-crushed legs... or any combination of trauma. I didn't exactly process it forensically, as it was presented as just one part of that news report (no easy ability, nor desire, to even rewind and rewatch the fleeting footage[5] and try to play amateur detective).
We do apparently have reports about the many gunshot victims brought to the hospital/wherever. Which I will agree means that there were gunshot wounds, for one reason or another, though leaves many questions open to potential interpretation[6].
Beyond those few things I could pick up from fleeting news items (that one visual one, a number of radio updates), it'd be a mistake to be overanalytical. I think we can just say that it's a mess. Some factions (both sides) may like it being a mess. I think most of the rest of the world is rightfully apalled, with one or other opinion about which circumstance is the main one to have made it apalling. And if there's an easy (and just!) solution to ending the mess, I doubt that there's many who know what it is.
[1] Twisting this situation round 180 degrees then another 180 degrees, my father (from his time as a lab chemist) had told me the analogy of how to to mix two substances (like watering down certain acids). If you have hungry prisoners in one room (intrinsically reactive substance) and bread in another (more passive substance) then throwing the bread into the prisoner's room initially means potential for a fight breaking out over the first barest sign of food. Sending the prisoners into the room with the food makes for a more peaceful mixing of resources (you have to assume that there's not a pre-emptive fight to get to the front of the queue to be sent to the bread-room[2]), sating the prisoners much more safely. Anyway, the crowd situation here is 'like' trying to tossing bits of bread into a crowded cell of hungry prisoners (even assuming you are going to send in enough bread to satisfy them). At which point, it is a switchback-analogy, resolving out as almost a shaped-like-itself re-envisioning of the scenario.
[2] Reasonable, in the analogy. Whether it's just the sight of the food that potentially sets the desperate prisoners off against each other, or that the willingness to leave a crowded and food-free cell is moderated by not exactly knowing why[/] the hypothetical prisoner warders are transfering them elsewhere. Anyway, this is not part of the basic analogy, just my acknowledgement of the more obvious nitpicks to it.
[3] Or is it just that there's no "prisoners sent to bread-room"-type solution that works, either? "Line up nicely, you hungry people (who probably don't trust us), and then we'll let you into the food stockpile area that we somehow set up in your midst..." Which is where the back-analogy fails to match how reality would pan out, in several ways.
[4] Assuming guns weren't being fired from the hip (and tracer-bullets perhaps indicates vehicle-mounted weapons more than personal weapons, anyway), that doesn't look like aiming at people. Though "what goes up must come down", so if there's enough spread of crowd then an (unaimed-for) actual hitting of more peripheral crowd-members certainly cannot be ruled out.
[5] It reminded me of the Patriot Games (film) bit where the keyhole IR satellite view is of the revenge-raid on the Libyan camp of the IRA-ish faction, one of the unknown mooks seen trying to crawl away injured from an otherwise surgical strike by special forces. Which, incidentally, is probably the "reality hits home" bit of the movie (in-universe, to combat vet Ryan in particular, as well as out, i.e. viewers like me), the silent montage of almost death-from-above (deaths seen from above) probably more hard hitting than most of the traditional cinematic gun-battles depicted. (Oh, and Sean Bean isn't even there, to be killed off. No spoilers: he does die later...)
[6] Is the doctor/department/site a specialist in gunshot trauma, wheel-crush-wounded went elsewhere (or left to limp away), giving this count more significance? Are we accounting for those who were both shot and otherwise injured, unluckily, as being 'legitimate' non-shot injuries to give the correct balance of "being in the way of a truck" vs "being in the way of a bullet". We're ruling out all possible Gazan-on-Gazan shooting, are we, with possibly desperate armed and potentially starving individuals adding to the chaos? (That's not a 'false-flag' scenario, BTW, which is a minor consideration only if we think there's a clever Hamas plot behind the tragedy, and I've seen nothing to suggest that any form of "green on green" shooting happened before warning/non-warning shots were fired by the IDF, so no need to delve into accidental or deliberate provocation.) - Ultimately, even with full sympathy for the civilian crisis, circumstances leave very obvious reporting gaps that you cannot dismiss. Disbelieving either side's 'facts' can't mean you're free to take those from the other without any critical consideration. Both ways. Fog-of-war and smokescreen-of-war obscures reality (even truly perceived realities can legitemately mismatch).
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Topic: Israel-Gaza/Palestine war thread (Read 30932 times)