Thursday, April 17, 2008

Reuters Cameraman killed by tank shell

Fadal Shana, a 23-year-old TV cameraman with the Reuters news agency, was among 20 Palestinians killed in fighting Wednesday — the bloodiest day in Gaza in more than a month. Shana was struck, along with two bystanders, as he filmed Israeli tank movements off in the distance. Three Israeli soldiers had been ambushed and killed earlier that day.

Thousands of Palestinians, including journalists and members of rival political movements, marched Thursday through the streets of Gaza City at the funeral procession of a cameraman killed covering an Israeli-Palestinian battle.

Shana’s body was wrapped in a bloodied Palestinian flag as fellow journalists marched alongside carrying his broken camera and bloodstained flak jacket. The marchers waved Palestinian flags and carried small posters of Shana posing with his camera.

“Fadal Shana, goodbye, the victim of the truth,” the posters said.

Click here to see Fadal's final footage. It's sobering.

Footage released by Reuters shows Mr Shana filming a tank positioned a few hundred yards away in the distance, over the Israeli border.

The film shows a tank firing its shell, which explodes causing the picture to go blank as the camera is thrown from Mr Shana's hand.

It then cuts away to a film made by another cameraman positioned nearby, which shows the devastation left by the shell, including two youths who had been passing the scene lying dead in the road. The IDF has not confirmed that they were resonsible for the young journalist's death. The foreign press association in Jerualem is pressing for an investigation.


(cross posted on Feral Beast)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for your articles. You should know that the "click here" you reference does not exist. There is no links.

Izzy Bee said...

Thanks to you, the link has been fixed; it should click over to a YouTube. Note that my colleague Dio at Checkpoint Israel, sez that during the ongoing investigation into the killing of Shana, there are reports that the Israeli government is preparing to pay millions of dollars to the family of another cameraman shot dead by an Israeli soldier in Gaza five years back.
$3.5 million may go to the family of James Miller, a Brit killed in Gaza while working on a documentary.
Then 34, Miller was shot dead by an Israeli soldier while he and two colleagues were waving a white flag at night and trying to leave an area then under Israeli military siege.

The incident, like Shana's recent killing, was chillingly captured on film and shown in the documentary "Death in Gaza."