This photo was posted on The Australian's website with the caption:
1st prize General News Singles
Picture: Kent Klich, Sweden
Light enters through a hole in the roof of a house hit by a tank shell, in Tuffah, northern Gaza. The family that lived in the house had fled during Operation Cast
Lead, the Israeli attack on Gaza that began at the end of December 2008.
Mohammed Shuhada Ali Ahmed, 39, had gone back to fetch clothes for his children,
and was killed when the shell struck.
Now, it seems quite obvious that something has gone through the roof, but that something did not explode. There are no shrapnel holes in the walls and the TV and the furniture are still intact. The other glaringly obvious detail is that whatever came through the roof came straight down. Tanks are not howitzers. At a pinch, tanks can be used in an indirect role; that is, that the main armament is used in a similar manner to an artillery piece. Unfortunately for the claim made by this photographer, they are not capable of firing their main armament at a high enough trajectory to drop a round straight through the roof of a building leaving an impact crater directly under the entry hole. Now, it may well be that the place has been cleaned up since the incident happened, in which case they have done a bang up job of cleaning the place up and filling the holes in the wall with spak-filla. Of course, why they put a new TV in a room with no roof remains a mystery, unless whatever it was that came through the roof didn't contain any High Explosive and didn't kill anybody at all.
Update: Below is a picture from the same photographer's website, the same album that contains the photo above. It shows what a wall looks like when it has been hit by shrapnel. Notice a difference?
