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The Foreign Ministry posted a video showing the January 29 suicide bombing. "We decided this was the only way to bring our message to the world."
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| By Ellis Shuman February 8, 2004 |
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More than one million "hits" have been registered in ten days on the website of Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which posted a graphic five-minute, 38-second video showing the devastation of the suicide bombing on a Jerusalem bus on January 29. "We decided this was the only way for us to bring our message to the world," said Gideon Meir, a senior Foreign Ministry official. "It took us 3 1/2 years to show these pictures."
"After we have seen the way the media continues to cover the stories... we decided enough is enough," Meir told Israel Radio. "We have to show to the world what the Israelis have been going through in the past three-and-a-half years, being exposed to such barbaric Palestinian terrorism..."
Meir said the decision to put the footage on the Internet "was based on the fact that Israel is being taken to the International Court of Justice (on the security fence) while Palestinians are perpetrating this barbaric terrorism."
"Caution: Video contains very graphic footage" states a warning on the Foreign Ministry website. According to the Washington Post report of the video, "The camera jostled past the crush of rescue workers, entered the bombed bus and paused on bloody pieces of flesh and a withered gray lung hanging from a twisted window frame. It moved to a severed right foot flung against a curb, then halted on an arm lying in the middle of the street."
The video footage was taken by Ilan Sztulman, 45, who heads visual productions for the Foreign Ministry, the Post reported. "I get to the zone much faster than any other photographers because I have special permission to go in," Sztulman said. "Most of the journalists cannot go in until the bomb officers declare the area is bomb-free."
Some of the most gruesome images from the suicide bombing, in which eleven people were killed and more than fifty people were injured, were edited out of the version posted to the Foreign Ministry website, Sztulman said.
"All those who criticize Israel for building the fence should take a good look at [the] pictures from Jerusalem," the Foreign Ministry said on its website. "Israelis started their morning having to face shocking pictures of dead commuters - victims of a yet another suicide bomber. The anti-terrorist fence could have prevented this massacre."
But opponents of the fence said the Foreign Ministry had gone too far with the video. "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 Demolitions, an organization that monitors Israeli military actions against Palestinians. Halper accused the Israeli government of "trying to sell a certain political program, the wall, and to recruit the dead for this mission."
Israeli newspapers regularly obscure the faces of the wounded and dead "out of respect for their families." The graphic images on the Foreign Ministry site are only seen by those who click on the appropriate link, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Jonathan Peled.
"The time had come for us to be slightly more proactive in front of a cynical world opinion," Peled said. Israel often feels that the world criticizes it unfairly for defending itself, he said. "The victim of terror has been put on the bench of the accused."
In a related story, the skeletal remains of the green No. 19 Egged bus will be flown to The Hague by Zaka, the disaster victims' identification organization, and displayed in a central public square during the controversial court hearing on the security fence, the Jerusalem Post reported.
"We want to emphasize the plain results of terrorism which indiscriminately kills people... and not simply another bland statistic," said Zaka spokesman David Dvir.
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