Filmmaker releases smuggled footage from Israeli assault

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Filmmaker releases smuggled footage from Israeli assault
By Patrick O’Connor
15 June 2010

More than 60 minutes of video footage taken aboard the MV Mavi Marmara during
the May 31 Israeli commando raid has been publicly released by Iara Lee, an
American filmmaker and activist. While her video cameras and other footage were
seized by Israeli troops in the raid, Lee managed to conceal the one hour-long
video during her detention by Israeli authorities. The graphic footage shows
some of the Turkish activists after they had been shot, with their colleagues
desperately trying to offer assistance and first aid.

Lee’s video also provides definitive proof of an earlier report published in the
British Independent that Israeli troops who raided the aid flotilla in
international waters carried with them a booklet with the names and photographs
of many of the individuals on board. Before the camera, one person in the video
flicks through the pages of the booklet, which was found on one of the Israeli
soldiers who was hurt during the raid. The list indicates that Israeli
intelligence and military operatives had identified people aboard the aid vessel
whom they wanted to either kill or detain.

The video footage also provides some indication of how shocked people were on
board the ferry when they realised that the troops were using live ammunition.
At one point an unidentified woman tries to communicate with the commandos using
a loudspeaker, saying: “All the passengers are sitting down! We are civilians
taking care of injured people! Don’t use violence! We need help for the people!
Don’t use violence against the civilians!”

Iara Lee told Democracy Now! that minutes after the shooting had began: “We had
the megaphone in our rooms, in every room on the ship, saying, ‘Stay quiet and
calm. They’re using live ammunition. There is no way we can resist. They are
taking over the ship. Just stay calm and don’t resist at all.’ You know? The
other boats, they used rubber bullets and tear gas; they didn’t kill people. But
in our ship, they came to kill.”

She added: “I just know that when they call us like a hate boat, this is insane,
because obviously we were there to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza, and they were
the ones using live ammunition, to the point when they did the autopsy, the
people who are found dead, they had like thirty bullets. So, can we say the
Israeli navy and the commandos, they came to play ball with us? No, they came to
kill.”

In a press conference held at the UN headquarters in New York last week, the
filmmaker explained that her ability to smuggle the footage out of Israeli
detention was partly due to the fact that the Israeli soldiers who were ordered
to search everyone with the aid flotilla were “young people who didn’t seem to
want to be there”. Lee said she hoped that an expert analysis could be made of
the audio on the footage to try to establish exactly when live ammunition was
first fired.

The footage underscores the criminal character of the US and Israeli attempt to
block any international investigation into what happened on May 31 in the
Mediterranean Sea. (See: “US backs Israeli inquiry into aid flotilla massacre”)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwsMJmvS0AY&feature=player_embedded

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jun2010/isr2-j15.shtml

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