2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict photographs controversies
Encyclopedia
The 2006 Lebanon War photographs controversies (also referred to as 'Hizbollywood' or 'Hezbollywood') refers to instances of photojournalism
from the 2006 Lebanon War that misrepresented scenes of death and destruction in Lebanon
caused by Israeli air attacks. As a result of the scandal, Reuters
fired freelance photographer Adnan Hajj, and the AP
disciplined several others. Reuters also fired a photo editor, and implemented stricter controls on its photo-gathering process.
The controversy began as an investigation of documents by individual bloggers, and spread to print and television media sources.
CAMERA
, a pro-Israel media watch organization, said that the alleged photographic manipulations were used by the mainstream media in an attempt to sway public opinion and paint Israel as an aggressor, and suggesting that Israel was guilty of targeting civilians.
after he admitted using Photoshop
to add and darken smoke spirals in a photograph of Beirut
, in order to make the damage appear worse. Reuters stated that Hajj had edited a second photo, and critics raised further questions about Hajj's work.
Reuters announced that they had withdrawn "all of Hajj's photos, about 920 images, from its archives".
amid a pile of rubble, also taken by Hajj, seemed suspicious to Los Angeles Times
media critic Tim Rutten
, since the building it was in had been destroyed in an Israeli airstrike hours beforehand, and everything else in the photo was already ash. A number of photographs were taken from Lebanon showing various children's toys in the foreground, each surrounded by a pile of rubble. Rutten also wrote about this set, saying that "Reuters might want to check its freelancers' expenses for unexplained Toys R Us purchases."
Similarly, CAMERA
questioned the authenticity of seemingly pristine photographs and photo albums lying on the top of the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli missiles, asking "how often does one find intact photographs sitting alone and undisturbed on top of the ruins of a building levelled by a missile? But coincidentally or not, photographers from various news organizations have been finding just that in rubble all over Lebanon" ... "with the only common denominator that all purport to depict Israel's destruction of Lebanese civilian life".
, the head of the South Lebanon civil defense organisation, was accused by bloggers and websites of being a Hezbollah member and of using the bodies of children for propaganda purposes in photographs taken at the scene of the 2006 Qana airstrike
. He denied the accusations, stating: "I am just a civil defense worker. I have done this job all my life." Daher, who responds to airstrikes in an ambulance and digs under bombed buildings to retrieve the bodies of the dead and injured, said he displays the children for cameras to show how Israeli airstrikes killed civilians. Commenting on photos of him holding a dead infant over his head, he said: "I did hold the baby up, but I was saying 'look at who the Israelis are killing. They are children. These are not fighters. They have no guns. They are children, civilians they are killing.'" He told the Associated Press that he had no regrets or apologies: "I wanted people to see who was dying. They said they were killing fighters. They killed children."
On August 8, CNN
anchor Anderson Cooper
reported about a Hezbollah press tour of a bombed-out area in southern Beirut on 23 July 2006, during which Hezbollah operatives asked a group of empty ambulances to switch on their sirens and flashing lights for the benefit of the waiting press photographers, to give the impression that they were responding to casualties. Senior Producer Charlie Moore described the same tour as a "dog-and-pony show".
The same day, Richard Landes
and The Wall Street Journal editorial writer James Taranto
challenged the validity of a photograph taken by Associated Press worker Lefteris Pitarakis. The picture in question depicted several Lebanese residents who were reportedly killed in an Israeli air strike. Upon close examination of a single still image, Taranto concluded that one man in particular was pretending to be dead.
A cursory examination of several other stills in the photographic sequence established that the man first assumed to be feigning his own death was in fact dead. Consequently both Richard Landes and James Taranto acknowledged they were "mistaken."
issued a statement saying that "two of its ambulances were struck by [Israeli] munitions, although both vehicles were clearly marked" on 23 July 2006, wounding nine people, the Associated Press
reported that "Israeli jets blasted two ambulances with rockets" according to "Ali Deebe, a Red Cross spokesman in Tyre". The story quickly spread to many other news outlets around the world. The Boston Globe quoted Kasim Shaalan as saying "A big fire came toward me, like in a dream" after a "rocket or missile had made a direct hit through the roof".
A controversy developed when 'zombie', the pseudonymous owner of the zombietime website, posted a long essay arguing (among other things) that the damage to the ambulances was far too light for a missile strike.
Zombie said that the ambulances were rusted out in the photographs, that explosive damage would not have left a rusted out shell, and that the photos showed no blast damage but instead a perfectly round hole that coincided precisely with where the roof vent would be. This was picked up by the Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer
, who said on August 28, "after closer study of the images of the damage to the ambulance, it is beyond serious dispute that this episode has all the makings of a hoax," a conclusion he later said he drew from initial reports. On August 30, the ICRC "rebuked" Foreign Minister Alexander Downer "for relying on an unverified internet blog" and said that "there was no evidence to support" the hoax claim.
Andrew Bolt
, a conservative Australian columnist who had written a column arguing that media photographs contradicted the ICRC's claims and that reporters were "passing on as fact the propaganda of terrorists",
defended Downer,
and noted that later reports claiming that the ambulances were hit by small arms fire contradicted the original reports. Bolt cited an unnamed military source as stating that "there is no weapon that would deliver terminal effects consistent with the pictures, the alleged story and the reputed damage done to ambulance and people."
In December 2006, Human Rights Watch
released a report on forensic investigations they conducted in Qana. The group concluded that there was no hoax. HRW had "originally reported that the ambulances had been struck by missiles fired from an Israeli airplane, but that conclusion was incorrect". The December 2006 report speculated that the ambulances were hit by a "smaller type of missile", possibly a "SPIKE anti-armor missile
" or "the still experimental DIME
(dense inert metal explosive) missile." Both missiles have an relatively small blast radius, with DIME being specifically designed to limit collateral damage
.
Professor Avi Bell
criticized the Human Rights Watch report, writing in the New York Sun
that "the report contains no evidence whatsoever of any [] Israeli presence in the area that could have attacked the ambulances. ... The report presents nothing more than its conjecture that Israel possesses and used unspecified new 'limited impact missiles designed to cause low collateral damage' fired from drones. ... Human Rights Watch assumes Israeli guilt without proof, viewing its mission as constructing a scenario, however implausible, in which it might be right."
showed a Lebanese woman mourning in front of destroyed buildings, said to be her home, on two different pictures taken by two photographers, published and captioned two weeks apart, which BBC editors replaced on their website after comments pointing to the inconsistency. Guardian features writer Patrick Barkham offered the following explanation for other reported time-stamp inconsistencies between different news agencies:
The New York Times
improperly captioned a photo taken in the city of Tyre in its online edition; an injured rescue worker being lifted from the rubble was implied to have been a bombing victim when in fact the worker had slipped and fallen. The newspaper subsequently issued a correction, saying that the photo had appeared in the printed edition with the correct caption.
, with the inside caption, "Hezbollah guerilla poses at the site of an Israeli attack near Beirut". Another one was published in the July 31 issue of Time
, with a caption saying the fire came from the "wreckage of a downed Israeli jet." Michelle Malkin
and anonymous blogger Allahpundit stated that the fire in the background appeared to be a large pile of burning tires.
On November 11, 2006 Stevens, on the online forum "Lightstalkers", gave his explanation for the discrepancy. He wrote that he had originally given one of the photos the following caption:
He wrote that sometime later, after having done more investigation, he had modified his caption to:
In his post, he wrote that he had had no say in the magazines' captions. He also reaffirmed the validity of his second caption, stating that the fire did not come from a garbage dump and was indeed the result of an Israeli attack; though he considered the site "a very legitimate target for the Israeli Air Force."
Photojournalism
Photojournalism is a particular form of journalism that creates images in order to tell a news story. It is now usually understood to refer only to still images, but in some cases the term also refers to video used in broadcast journalism...
from the 2006 Lebanon War that misrepresented scenes of death and destruction in Lebanon
Lebanon
Lebanon , officially the Republic of LebanonRepublic of Lebanon is the most common term used by Lebanese government agencies. The term Lebanese Republic, a literal translation of the official Arabic and French names that is not used in today's world. Arabic is the most common language spoken among...
caused by Israeli air attacks. As a result of the scandal, Reuters
Reuters
Reuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...
fired freelance photographer Adnan Hajj, and the AP
Associated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...
disciplined several others. Reuters also fired a photo editor, and implemented stricter controls on its photo-gathering process.
The controversy began as an investigation of documents by individual bloggers, and spread to print and television media sources.
CAMERA
Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America is an American non-profit pro-Israel media watchdog group. The group says it was founded in 1982 "to respond to the Washington Post's coverage of Israel's Lebanon incursion", and to respond to what it considers the media's "general...
, a pro-Israel media watch organization, said that the alleged photographic manipulations were used by the mainstream media in an attempt to sway public opinion and paint Israel as an aggressor, and suggesting that Israel was guilty of targeting civilians.
Photo manipulation
Adnan Hajj, a freelance photographer, was fired by ReutersReuters
Reuters is a news agency headquartered in New York City. Until 2008 the Reuters news agency formed part of a British independent company, Reuters Group plc, which was also a provider of financial market data...
after he admitted using Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is a graphics editing program developed and published by Adobe Systems Incorporated.Adobe's 2003 "Creative Suite" rebranding led to Adobe Photoshop 8's renaming to Adobe Photoshop CS. Thus, Adobe Photoshop CS5 is the 12th major release of Adobe Photoshop...
to add and darken smoke spirals in a photograph of Beirut
Beirut
Beirut is the capital and largest city of Lebanon, with a population ranging from 1 million to more than 2 million . Located on a peninsula at the midpoint of Lebanon's Mediterranean coastline, it serves as the country's largest and main seaport, and also forms the Beirut Metropolitan...
, in order to make the damage appear worse. Reuters stated that Hajj had edited a second photo, and critics raised further questions about Hajj's work.
Reuters announced that they had withdrawn "all of Hajj's photos, about 920 images, from its archives".
Allegations of staging by press photographers
A photo of a burning Qur'anQur'an
The Quran , also transliterated Qur'an, Koran, Alcoran, Qur’ān, Coran, Kuran, and al-Qur’ān, is the central religious text of Islam, which Muslims consider the verbatim word of God . It is regarded widely as the finest piece of literature in the Arabic language...
amid a pile of rubble, also taken by Hajj, seemed suspicious to Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
The Los Angeles Times is a daily newspaper published in Los Angeles, California, since 1881. It was the second-largest metropolitan newspaper in circulation in the United States in 2008 and the fourth most widely distributed newspaper in the country....
media critic Tim Rutten
Tim Rutten
Tim Rutten is an American journalist who worked for the Los Angeles Times between 1971 and 2011.He started at the paper as a copy editor in the View section. Before becoming a columnist for the Calendar section in 2002, he held a number of positions, including city bureau chief and editorial writer...
, since the building it was in had been destroyed in an Israeli airstrike hours beforehand, and everything else in the photo was already ash. A number of photographs were taken from Lebanon showing various children's toys in the foreground, each surrounded by a pile of rubble. Rutten also wrote about this set, saying that "Reuters might want to check its freelancers' expenses for unexplained Toys R Us purchases."
Similarly, CAMERA
Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America is an American non-profit pro-Israel media watchdog group. The group says it was founded in 1982 "to respond to the Washington Post's coverage of Israel's Lebanon incursion", and to respond to what it considers the media's "general...
questioned the authenticity of seemingly pristine photographs and photo albums lying on the top of the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli missiles, asking "how often does one find intact photographs sitting alone and undisturbed on top of the ruins of a building levelled by a missile? But coincidentally or not, photographers from various news organizations have been finding just that in rubble all over Lebanon" ... "with the only common denominator that all purport to depict Israel's destruction of Lebanese civilian life".
Allegations of photo staging by others
Salam DaherSalam Daher
Salam Daher is a Lebanese civil defense worker who was the target of accusations by bloggers in the aftermath of the Israeli airstrike on Qana on July 30, 2006, where widely-published photographs showed him removing dead children from the rubble of a house struck by an Israeli...
, the head of the South Lebanon civil defense organisation, was accused by bloggers and websites of being a Hezbollah member and of using the bodies of children for propaganda purposes in photographs taken at the scene of the 2006 Qana airstrike
2006 Qana airstrike
The 2006 Qana Massacre was an attack by the Israel Air Force on a three-story building in the small community of al-Khuraybah near the South Lebanese village of Qana on July 30, 2006, during the 2006 Lebanon War in which 28 civilians were killed, of which 16 were children...
. He denied the accusations, stating: "I am just a civil defense worker. I have done this job all my life." Daher, who responds to airstrikes in an ambulance and digs under bombed buildings to retrieve the bodies of the dead and injured, said he displays the children for cameras to show how Israeli airstrikes killed civilians. Commenting on photos of him holding a dead infant over his head, he said: "I did hold the baby up, but I was saying 'look at who the Israelis are killing. They are children. These are not fighters. They have no guns. They are children, civilians they are killing.'" He told the Associated Press that he had no regrets or apologies: "I wanted people to see who was dying. They said they were killing fighters. They killed children."
On August 8, CNN
CNN
Cable News Network is a U.S. cable news channel founded in 1980 by Ted Turner. Upon its launch, CNN was the first channel to provide 24-hour television news coverage, and the first all-news television channel in the United States...
anchor Anderson Cooper
Anderson Cooper
Anderson Hays Cooper is an American journalist, author, and television personality. He is the primary anchor of the CNN news show Anderson Cooper 360°. The program is normally broadcast live from a New York City studio; however, Cooper often broadcasts live on location for breaking news stories...
reported about a Hezbollah press tour of a bombed-out area in southern Beirut on 23 July 2006, during which Hezbollah operatives asked a group of empty ambulances to switch on their sirens and flashing lights for the benefit of the waiting press photographers, to give the impression that they were responding to casualties. Senior Producer Charlie Moore described the same tour as a "dog-and-pony show".
The same day, Richard Landes
Richard Landes
Richard Allen Landes is an American historian and author, specializing in Millennialism. He currently serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Boston University...
and The Wall Street Journal editorial writer James Taranto
James Taranto
James Taranto is an American columnist for The Wall Street Journal, editor of its online editorial page OpinionJournal.com and a member of the newspaper's editorial board. He is best known for his daily online column Best of the Web Today...
challenged the validity of a photograph taken by Associated Press worker Lefteris Pitarakis. The picture in question depicted several Lebanese residents who were reportedly killed in an Israeli air strike. Upon close examination of a single still image, Taranto concluded that one man in particular was pretending to be dead.
"Plainly this scene was staged for the benefit of the cameras, though it is important to note we know of no evidence that the photographer was complicit in the staging. It is, however, a clear example of how terrorist groups use journalists to spread their propaganda."
A cursory examination of several other stills in the photographic sequence established that the man first assumed to be feigning his own death was in fact dead. Consequently both Richard Landes and James Taranto acknowledged they were "mistaken."
Ambulance controversy
After the International Committee of the Red CrossInternational Committee of the Red Cross
The International Committee of the Red Cross is a private humanitarian institution based in Geneva, Switzerland. States parties to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 and their Additional Protocols of 1977 and 2005, have given the ICRC a mandate to protect the victims of international and...
issued a statement saying that "two of its ambulances were struck by [Israeli] munitions, although both vehicles were clearly marked" on 23 July 2006, wounding nine people, the Associated Press
Associated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...
reported that "Israeli jets blasted two ambulances with rockets" according to "Ali Deebe, a Red Cross spokesman in Tyre". The story quickly spread to many other news outlets around the world. The Boston Globe quoted Kasim Shaalan as saying "A big fire came toward me, like in a dream" after a "rocket or missile had made a direct hit through the roof".
A controversy developed when 'zombie', the pseudonymous owner of the zombietime website, posted a long essay arguing (among other things) that the damage to the ambulances was far too light for a missile strike.
Zombie said that the ambulances were rusted out in the photographs, that explosive damage would not have left a rusted out shell, and that the photos showed no blast damage but instead a perfectly round hole that coincided precisely with where the roof vent would be. This was picked up by the Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer
Alexander Downer
Alexander John Gosse Downer is a former Australian Liberal Party politician who was Foreign Minister of Australia from March 1996 to December 2007, the longest-serving in Australian history...
, who said on August 28, "after closer study of the images of the damage to the ambulance, it is beyond serious dispute that this episode has all the makings of a hoax," a conclusion he later said he drew from initial reports. On August 30, the ICRC "rebuked" Foreign Minister Alexander Downer "for relying on an unverified internet blog" and said that "there was no evidence to support" the hoax claim.
Andrew Bolt
Andrew Bolt
Andrew Bolt is an Australian newspaper columnist, radio commentator, blogger and television host. Bolt is a columnist and associate editor of the Melbourne-based Herald Sun. He has appeared on the Nine Network, Melbourne Talk Radio, ABC Television, Network Ten and local radio...
, a conservative Australian columnist who had written a column arguing that media photographs contradicted the ICRC's claims and that reporters were "passing on as fact the propaganda of terrorists",
defended Downer,
and noted that later reports claiming that the ambulances were hit by small arms fire contradicted the original reports. Bolt cited an unnamed military source as stating that "there is no weapon that would deliver terminal effects consistent with the pictures, the alleged story and the reputed damage done to ambulance and people."
In December 2006, Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch
Human Rights Watch is an international non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. Its headquarters are in New York City and it has offices in Berlin, Beirut, Brussels, Chicago, Geneva, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Moscow, Paris, San Francisco, Tokyo,...
released a report on forensic investigations they conducted in Qana. The group concluded that there was no hoax. HRW had "originally reported that the ambulances had been struck by missiles fired from an Israeli airplane, but that conclusion was incorrect". The December 2006 report speculated that the ambulances were hit by a "smaller type of missile", possibly a "SPIKE anti-armor missile
Spike (missile)
Spike is a fourth generation man-portable fire-and-forget anti-tank guided missile with tandem-charged HEAT warhead, developed and designed by the Israeli company Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and in service with a number of nations....
" or "the still experimental DIME
Dense Inert Metal Explosive
Dense Inert Metal Explosive is an experimental type of explosive that has a relatively small but effective blast radius. It is manufactured by producing a homogeneous mixture of an explosive material and small particles of a chemically inert material such as tungsten...
(dense inert metal explosive) missile." Both missiles have an relatively small blast radius, with DIME being specifically designed to limit collateral damage
Collateral damage
Collateral damage is damage to people or property that is unintended or incidental to the intended outcome. The phrase is prevalently used as an euphemism for civilian casualties of a military action.-Etymology:...
.
Professor Avi Bell
Avi Bell
Abraham Bell is a Professor of Law at the University of San Diego School of Law and at Bar-Ilan University Faculty of Law. Bell received his B.A. and J.D. from the University of Chicago, and his S.J.D...
criticized the Human Rights Watch report, writing in the New York Sun
New York Sun
The New York Sun was a weekday daily newspaper published in New York City from 2002 to 2008. When it debuted on April 16, 2002, adopting the name, motto, and masthead of an otherwise unrelated earlier New York paper, The Sun , it became the first general-interest broadsheet newspaper to be started...
that "the report contains no evidence whatsoever of any [] Israeli presence in the area that could have attacked the ambulances. ... The report presents nothing more than its conjecture that Israel possesses and used unspecified new 'limited impact missiles designed to cause low collateral damage' fired from drones. ... Human Rights Watch assumes Israeli guilt without proof, viewing its mission as constructing a scenario, however implausible, in which it might be right."
Allegations of improper captioning
Photographs submitted to Reuters and Associated PressAssociated Press
The Associated Press is an American news agency. The AP is a cooperative owned by its contributing newspapers, radio and television stations in the United States, which both contribute stories to the AP and use material written by its staff journalists...
showed a Lebanese woman mourning in front of destroyed buildings, said to be her home, on two different pictures taken by two photographers, published and captioned two weeks apart, which BBC editors replaced on their website after comments pointing to the inconsistency. Guardian features writer Patrick Barkham offered the following explanation for other reported time-stamp inconsistencies between different news agencies:
[B]loggers in Britain and the US want to prove that the mainstream media are swallowing Hizbullah propaganda. [...] At first, they suggested victims of the Israeli bombings were being carried around and posed for pictures because of different time-stamps on photographs reproduced on news websites. An AP photo was time-stamped 7.21am, showing a dead girl in an ambulance. Another AP picture by a different photographer, stamped 10.25am, showed the same girl being loaded on to the ambulance. A third, with the time 10.44am, showed a rescue worker carrying the girl with no ambulance nearby. Three agencies – AP, AFP and Reuters – denied staging pictures at Qana. And the explanation for the different times was simple. Different news websites, such as Yahoo, put their own time-stamps on photos they receive from feeds; and AP does not distribute photos sequentially but on their news value and how quickly they are sent in.
The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
improperly captioned a photo taken in the city of Tyre in its online edition; an injured rescue worker being lifted from the rubble was implied to have been a bombing victim when in fact the worker had slipped and fallen. The newspaper subsequently issued a correction, saying that the photo had appeared in the printed edition with the correct caption.
Bruno Stevens photos
A set of photos taken by press photographer Bruno Stevens show a Lebanese gunman with a raging fire in the background. One such photo appeared on the cover of the July 31 issue of U.S. News & World ReportU.S. News & World Report
U.S. News & World Report is an American news magazine published from Washington, D.C. Along with Time and Newsweek it was for many years a leading news weekly, focusing more than its counterparts on political, economic, health and education stories...
, with the inside caption, "Hezbollah guerilla poses at the site of an Israeli attack near Beirut". Another one was published in the July 31 issue of Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
, with a caption saying the fire came from the "wreckage of a downed Israeli jet." Michelle Malkin
Michelle Malkin
Michelle Malkin is an American conservative blogger, political commentator, and author. Her weekly syndicated column appears in a number of newspapers and websites. She is a Fox News Channel contributor and has been a guest on MSNBC, C-SPAN, and national radio programs...
and anonymous blogger Allahpundit stated that the fire in the background appeared to be a large pile of burning tires.
On November 11, 2006 Stevens, on the online forum "Lightstalkers", gave his explanation for the discrepancy. He wrote that he had originally given one of the photos the following caption:
- "Kfar Chima, near Beirut, July 17, 2006 An Israeli Air Force F16 has allegedly been shot down while bombing a group of Hezbollah owned trucks, at least one of these trucks contained a medium range ground to ground missile launcher."
He wrote that sometime later, after having done more investigation, he had modified his caption to:
- "Kfar Chima, near Beirut, July 17, 2006 The Israeli Air Force bombed a group of Hezbollah chartered trucks parked on the back of large Lebanese Army barracks, at least one of these trucks contained a medium range ground to ground missile launcher, at least one missile was hit, misfiring high into the sky before falling down and starting a huge fire in the barracks' parking lot."
In his post, he wrote that he had had no say in the magazines' captions. He also reaffirmed the validity of his second caption, stating that the fire did not come from a garbage dump and was indeed the result of an Israeli attack; though he considered the site "a very legitimate target for the Israeli Air Force."
See also
- Adnan Hajj photographs controversyAdnan Hajj photographs controversyThe Adnan Hajj photographs controversy involves digitally manipulated photographs taken by Adnan Hajj, a Lebanese freelance photographer based in the Middle East, who had worked for Reuters over a period of more than ten years...
- Journalistic fraud
- Media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict
- PallywoodPallywoodPallywood, a portmanteau of "Palestinian" and "Hollywood", is a coinage that has been used by some pro-Israeli media watchdog advocates, among others, to describe alleged "media manipulation, distortion and outright fraud by the Palestinians and other Arabs .....