Smartphones Lend New Dynamic to Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Surrounded by Israeli police, Israa Abed holds a knife in one hand and a
cellphone in the other before shots ring out and she falls to the
ground.

The incident, filmed by passersby on their smartphones, has
been viewed thousands of times since it was posted online last Friday,
one of dozens of such videos encapsulating a new dynamic in what looks
like a third Palestinian uprising, or intifada.

Four Israelis and
25 Palestinians have died in 12 days of bloodshed partly fuelled by
Muslim agitation over high-profile Jewish visits to a contested holy
site in Jerusalem.

Video clips exhorting attacks on Israelis – and
often spiced up with animation, catchy tunes and the Twitter hashtags
“Jerusalem Intifada” or “Intifada of the Knives” – are popular on
Palestinian social media, as is whatever footage emerges of the violence
when it happens.

That, in turn, can inflame resentment further,
especially if Palestinians see in Israel’s response a demonstration of
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s vow to crack down on unrest that has
simmered since peace talks collapsed a year ago.

“Today we’re in a
different era, in which a great, great many people are incited by
publications on their personal smartphones and end up making individual
decisions to go out and stab, to go out and blow themselves up with gas
balloons,” Security Minister Gilad Erdan told Israeli Army Radio on
Monday.

Police said Abed, an Arab Israeli, was being treated in
hospital having been shot four times in the legs after she tried to stab
a security guard at a bus station in the northern Israeli town of
Afula, and ignored orders to disarm.

Many Israelis saw the police action depicted in the video as appropriate.

Some
Palestinians circulated rumours she was dead rather than in hospital.
According to a report by the news website Al Wattan Voice which was
shared 3,500 times over Facebook, Abed, 30, was making a distress call
when she was shot. “Dad, I don’t want to die!” it quoted her as saying –
suggesting she might have surrendered.

Individual words are drowned by the hubbub of shouts on the video’s soundtrack.

Reached
by Reuters, the woman’s father, Zeidan Abed, said he received no call
from her, declining to discuss the incident any further.

Online surveillance
Another
video, showing police shooting dead a Palestinian suspected in an Oct 4
stabbing in Jerusalem, has been cited by the minority rights group
Adalah in its demand for a Justice Ministry probe.

It argues the Palestinian posed no danger and police may have been egged on by pedestrians seen chasing him.

There
was a similar outcry after a Palestinian woman was accused by Israel of
attempting to detonate a makeshift car bomb – potentially a major
escalation – when police pulled her over on a West Bank road into
Jerusalem on Sunday.

Unconscious in hospital with burns, the woman
could not immediately be interrogated, police said. Her family denied
the Israeli account, saying a malfunction had set off a fire in the car.
Images showing minimal external damage to the vehicle circulated among
Palestinians, who said it showed Israel was exaggerating the threat.

Having long relied on its advanced
eavesdropping apparatus and Palestinian informants to thwart militant
organisations, Israel is scrambling for a response to the latest
violence, which has been made up predominantly of “lone-wolf” attacks.

Palestinian
activists and the Hamas militant group complain of having Facebook and
YouTube accounts being shut down as a result of requests filed with the
firms by Israel’s government.

Israeli security sources said they
were working to expand keyword-search and other surveillance
technologies in hope of being able to spot, in good time, suicide notes
on social media by Palestinians who are about to carry out violence.

Their
surveillance efforts may have been helped, inadvertently, by those
Palestinians who take selfies at rock-throwing protests and post them
online.

© Thomson Reuters 2015

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