Gaza Border Zone Shooting: Context Vanishes in No-Man’s Land

Simon Plosker
Honest Reporting
15 February '11

The UK’s Sunday Times featured a dramatic sounding story “Morpurgo sees child shot in Gaza border wasteland” (subscription only).

According to the article:

The children’s writer, Michael Morpurgo, has described how he witnessed the shooting of a 15-year-old boy during a visit to Gaza. …

The incident happened while Morpurgo, the former children’s laureate, was waiting to cross back into Israel with a group of sick children and elderly Palestinians in need of hospital treatment. He was told the border had been closed after two other young Palestinians had been shot.

“Either side of me I saw hundreds of kids, with carts and donkeys picking up rubble to be recycled as building blocks with which they could rebuild their shattered city,” he said.

Suddenly shots rang out. “A cry went up from all over the wilderness of the rubble; I heard lots of screaming and saw the children running towards one spot. A minute later they came pouring past me and on the last cart there was a kid bleeding from his leg, his trousers soaked through with blood, screaming.”

The boy, named Shamekh, from Jabalia in northern Gaza, had been collecting rubble with his two brothers and his father in the hope of earning some money.
The article contains criticism from Save the Children of alleged Israeli shooting of children near the Gaza border and claims that “The shootings are often carried out by remote-controlled weapon stations based in unmanned watch towers containing machineguns.“

Nowhere in the article was the IDF given the chance to respond or explain the situation surrounding the border area with Gaza. Had the journalist bothered to investigate further, perhaps she would have addressed some very relevant issues. Where The Sunday Times failed, we consulted with a senior IDF military source to find out the missing context.

(Read full "Gaza Border Zone Shooting: Context Vanishes in No-Man’s Land")

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