Yes, it is very difficult to guage what goes on inside an area where no news crews are allowed - there will be allegations by both sides which cannot be verified.
The major problem is that we have had many unsubstantiated claims and outright lies from both Gaza and Israel. We had a documentary on our local television and a Q&A answer session afterwards with a Palestinian journalist and an Israeli commentator.
We saw the Al Dura episode, the rubble that was Jenin where 1500 we were told had died, the rockets from Gaza into Sderot and many other tragic happenings.
And then the Q&A session where we found out that the Al Dura incident was a hoax and was going throught court in France, in Jenin about 55 people had actually died (according to the HRW count) and nearly half of those were Israeli soldiers and we were shown the Green Helmet ambulance man and how it had been set up and the fact that altho' Hamas had claimed they hadn't broken the cease fire, rockets were fired into Israel every month during the six months of the peacefire from off shoots of Hamas acting on their own accord. But how was anyone to know?
We also saw the Palestinians being brought into hospital during the Israeli onslaught - many of these were young men who had bad leg wounds - we found out afterwards that these young men were actually the victims of Hamas who shot them for having connections to Fatah!
So what do we believe - we know neither side are completely honest in their reporting, but there is a school of thought down here that there are some theatricals being staged to garner support - mostly on the Palestinian side.
But all these things are on the internet, they just need to be pointed out. There were some very interesting letters to the papers , articles on local blogs and radio talk backs about how naive we are in our perceptions of the I/P problem and how the population is manipulated , in particular, by left wing media. Our main TV news channel had always used the BBC overseas news clips for our local news, but now we see less and less of BBC and more from other less biased news sources.
So everything we now see or read on the media, we have to take with a pinch of salt. Sometimes propoganda is more harmful than good, because if you have been caught out once people are inclined to think they are being hoodwinked again.
And that is the greatest shame, due to the news being distorted by those with their own agendas they are harming the ones most in need in their quest to push their side of the story. Interest dies with disbelief and I think the BBC (Jon Snow, Olga Guerin, Barbara Flett particularily ) has totally lost credibilty with overseas viewers.
Videos like this are also harmful because they are made by those who are not neutral so therefore are not actually worth viewing as it is immediately obvious that it is completely one sided with no true dimension. As always, it is the women and children who suffer fom male intransigence.
