OT:

There has been a significant development in the case of Mahmoud Masharawi, the twelve-year-old boy who was reportedly killed by an explosion on January 4, while playing on the roof of his family’s apartment building in Gaza. As many will recall, the case gained international attention after CNN and BBC’s Channel 4 broadcast video footage of Masharawi’s death, supposedly taped by his own brother Ashraf Masharawi, a Gazan filmmaker. The footage contained a scene supposedly depicting efforts to resuscitate Mahmoud Masharawi, a scene that was obviously faked for the camera’s benefit. LGF broke the story that the scene was staged, although CNN continued to maintain the legitimacy of the story, despite its obvious inauthenticity to anyone with medical experience.

Here’s the new development: The Norwegian government-funded television station, NRK, has produced a new 30+ minute documentary about the Masharawi case. The documentary was released on February 10, but I’ve refrained form posting about it until now, because it appeared for a while that NRK was preparing a version with English subtitles. Apparently they decided not to do so.

You can view the documentary in full by following this link. I’ll also submit this as an LGF spinoff link here.

If you wish, you can click the little down-arrow by the video viewer, and download the whole think for more careful analysis. Be warned, the file is 342.7 megabytes in size.

NRK in general, and their Brennpunkt show in particular, have a strongly anti-Israel agenda. Indeed, most of Brennpunkt’s website appears to be dedicated to demonizing Israel.

This documentary is no exception. It offers extensive analysis that supposedly supports the claim, stated as unsupported but self-evident fact by the BBC, that Israel deliberately targeted and murdered Masharawi and another boy, using a missile launched from a drone. I personally don’t believe that Israel has a policy of deliberately killing unarmed children, and even if they did, it would seem a tremendous waste of military resources to fly a drone around in the skies over Gaza all day long, circling and waiting for the emergence of two boys who could be killed using a very expensive guided missile.

The documentary offers new scenes of Mahmoud Masharawi’s treatment and subsequent death in Shifa Hospital in Gaza, and of the rooftop site where Masharawi was supposedly killed. I would be very interested in LGF’s military experts’ opinions about the blast site footage, and the analysis presented in the documentary by an American, English-speaking representative of the anti-Israel activist group “Human Rights Watch.” I have reviewed the new hospital scenes extensively, and I’ll present my conclusions about them in another post (to keep this one from getting too long).