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The Unedited Mavi Marmara Video
Iara Lee’s hourlong, unedited footage of Israel’s raid on the Mavi Marmara on May 31st:
From Jared’s BLOG
New video footage was released on Thursday of Israel’s deadly raid last week on the Turkish-owned ship Mavi Marmara, which was carrying aid to the Gaza Strip.
New York-based filmmaker Iara Lee was on the ship during the attack, and she managed to smuggle some of her footage out after Israel detained the 700 people who were on the Gaza-bound flotilla of six ships. Israel confiscated nearly all other video and photo equipment from the ships and has been editing it and releasing it to the public to support its own account of the raid.
Nine Turkish civilians, including one with US citizenship, were shot to death during the raid, which took place before dawn on May 31st.
Lee’s footage shows chaotic scenes of passengers scrambling to carry injured passengers below deck. Medics are shown in the video treating the wounded, including one man who appears unconscious or dead, blood soaking the front of his shirt.
Some of Lee’s footage was shown on Democracy Now. More is to be released at a news conference at the United Nations in New York on Thursday.
The footage also appears to contradict Israel’s claim’s that passengers on the ships intended to kill Israeli soldiers. In one scene, a woman’s voice comes a loudspeaker saying: “All the passengers are sitting down. We have no guns here. We are civilians taking care of injured people. Don’t use violence. We are civilians taking care of injured people. We need help for the people.”
Commenting on this, Lee told Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman: “The megaphone kept saying ‘we are civilians; don’t use violence; we have extremely injured people; we need medical help.’ … but we were ignored, and a lot of people who were injured ended up bleeding to death.”
During the interview it was noted that among those who died, several were shot at close range, including the American citizen, Furkan Dogan, who according to a report in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, was shot five times from less than 45 centimeters away.
Lee also said that in her view, the soldiers who boarded the ship intended to kill. ”They came with live ammunition, and minutes afterwards we had the megaphone in every room in the ship saying ‘stay quiet and calm, they are using live ammunition, there is no way we can resist, they are taking over the ship. … On the other boats they used rubber bullets and tear gas they didn’t kill anyone, but on our boat they came to kill.”
She also said that more could be learned about what happened during the raid if Israel returned the confiscated recordings. “We could reconstruct the events if we were given our footage back, which the IDF used in a manipulative fasion by putting it on the IDF youtube channel. This is a complete violation of respect for media.”