Jan. 7, 2008
I've spent all morning surfing the Web, looking for information that would put these surreal images into context. Aerial views using Google Earth show that the land in that area has roads and that dwellings are located along them. Then why is this house away from any road? Wikipedia says the average per capita GDP in 2001 for Gaza was about US$625. How many Gazans are going to be able to afford to build an expensive house like this? And where did the fanciful style of the architecture come from? Not from that part of the world.
Also, I'm still trying to figure out whether the last picture was snapped at the instant of the detonation of whatever explosives demolished it. We can't really tell, because our view is obscured by the smoke from the nearby trash fire. A masonry building whose ground story is blown apart would surely crumble completely into loose bricks. The upper stories wouldn't survive intact the way they have in this image.
These images strangely echo some from September 5, 2001 that I saved and analyzed here They also show an isolated building, stated to be a house in Gaza, that is of the same apparent plan: a central tower flanked by two short wings, and it supposedly was demolished by Israeli tanks. I pointed out features of those images that suggested that they might be pure computer graphics.