Snapped Shot

Oof!

Thanks to a couple of links (thanks, Muqata and Aussie Dave!), the server is overwhelmed at the moment. As per our usual routine, we've disabled all dynamic functionality of the website, which means that this is the only article you're going to be seeing for now. My apologies for the outage—will hopefully have everything back up and running as soon as things slow down a bit.

In the meantime, if you have any comments to add to the story below, please send me an e-mail, and I'll append your commentary to the text here. (Or at least, I'll try.) Be sure to include an alias and website if you want your comment to appear on this site permanently, or just say "Anonymous" if you prefer not to be identified.

Thanks for your understanding, as always!

Regards,
Brian

A couple of you have sent in the photo above (thanks to Larry_from_PHX and The Elder), and pointed to a Mere Rhetoric article related. (Also: Are We Lumberjacks?)

Is it Photoshopped? I'm on the fence. There are a number of inconsistencies in the photo, the most questionable of which is the crown of the smoke cloud. There's a little indentation at the top (circled in white) that looks like it could have been retouched with the clone tool. On top of that, the debris looks impossibly big—Unless the Israeli military was exploding a barn, one would think that it would be much smaller.

The Elder points out that the original photograph was taken by AP's Adel Hana, seen on Daylife here and here. Bob Owens also thinks that the debris looks impossibly large, that it should've been broken up into smaller pieces. Not being a demolition expert, I can't really say one way or another whether that'd be the case, but there are certainly some spots in the photo that might have been inserted after the fact (circled in red). I've enhanced the color and contrast on the local copy of the image to hopefully illustrate more clearly the areas in question—And again, I can't stress enough that I'm not convinced that this is a fraud.

I'm trying to get in touch with Adel Hana right now to see if a higher-resolution version of the photograph would be more conclusive. Watch for updates to this article if and when I hear back from him!

Update: Thoughts from The Elder. Also, the kind folks at rotter.net temporarily overwhelmed our server. My apologies for the outage, and hope it's working better now.

There's a Yiddish Report? That's awesome—Thanks for linking, guys!

Also: I've made this article sticky, since it seems to be what's hot for today.

Update: Hooray! Static mode!

Update: Is this a picture of the same explosion, from the opposite side? It sure looks like it might be to me, which would suggest that the photo above is legitimate—Though the date listed is different than Adel Hana's (3 January versus 5 Jan.)

(Thanks to InMontreal down in the comments!)

Update: My blogfather, Charles Johnson of littlegreenfootballs fame, has responded to this controversy via e-mail thusly:

You mean like this? (Adel Hana, AP)

I don't know enough about the terrain to judge. The buildings in the foreground do look Palestinian. I think it must have been a radical telephoto zoom, which could have shortened the background a lot. The debris in the air looks striking, but it could be large pieces of cheap metal roofing material, possibly even blown into air by secondary explosions.

I'm leaning toward not fake. At most, there's a small possibility it was mislabeled - from somewhere else. Adel Hana is in the Gaza area, though, and he's been filing a lot of pictures.

CJ

He adds:

also note that one of the captions says "in Beit Lahia, as seen from Gaza City." So it would have been taken looking north.

Which pretty much sums up my initial thoughts on the matter. For what it's worth, I'm still waiting to hear back from Adel Hana, who apparently doesn't check his e-mail very often. C'est la vie.