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Thursday, December 27, 2012

New Video of Fatal Shooting at West Bank Checkpoint Shows Officer\'s Final Shot

Security-camera footage of a shooting at a checkpoint in the West Bank city of Hebron this month, provided to Israel's Channel 10 by the Israel Defense Forces.

Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for the Israeli human rights group B'Tselem, wrote to The Lede on Thursday to draw our attention to the fact that more video of a fatal shooting at a checkpoint in Hebron this month has been posted online.

As The Lede reported last week, when the Israel Defense Forces relea sed security-camera footage of an Israeli officer killing a 17-year-old Palestinian at the checkpoint in the occupied West Bank on Dec. 12, activists and bloggers in the region asked why the video had been edited before release.

On Wednesday, a correspondent for Israel's Channel 10 uploaded what appears to be unedited video of the encounter at the checkpoint to his personal YouTube channel. According to the correspondent, Roy Sharon, the security-camera footage, which includes 19 seconds omitted from the edit posted on an Israeli military channel last week, was “raw material provided by the I.D.F. Spokesperson's unit.”

The longer version of the footage displays a time stamp indicating that it was recorded on Dec. 12, from 8:09 p.m. to 8:10 p.m. The unedited recording includes about 14 seconds that was cut from the middle of the version released by the military last week and another five seconds that was trimmed from the end of the encounter.

The newly released video of the end of the incident appears to show that the Israeli officer fired at least three shots at the Palestinian boy, Muhammad al-Salameh, after he had already retreated away from the officer he had been fighting with when the first shot was fired. The officer's final shot, which was omitted entirely from the military's edited version, looks to have been fired from some distance, after the boy had doubled over, perhaps from the impact of the earlier shots, and was not close to any of the Israeli officers visible in the footage.

One day after the incident, B'Tselem released video recorded at the checkpoint minutes after the shooting. That footage showed the boy's body on the ground near the guard post and a series of tense encounters between Israeli officers and Palestinian civilians.

Video recorded shortly after the fatal shooting of a 17-year-old Palestinian boy by an Israeli officer at a checkpoint in the West Bank city of Hebron.



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