Playlist For Understanding Israel Deception

[Raze]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/09/the-gaza-family-torn-apart-by-idf-snipers-from-chicago-and-munich
 

Quote

Daniel Raab shows no hesitation as he watches footage of 19-year-old Salem Doghmosh crumpling to the ground beside his brother in a street in northern Gaza.

“That was my first elimination,” he says. The video, shot by a drone, lasts just a few seconds. The Palestinian teenager appears to be unarmed when he is shot in the head.

Raab, a former varsity basketball player from a Chicago suburb who became an Israeli sniper, concedes he knew that. He says he shot Salem simply because he tried to retrieve the body of his beloved older brother Mohammed.

“It’s hard for me to understand why he [did that] and it also doesn’t really interest me,” Raab says in a video interview posted on X. “I mean, what was so important about that corpse?”

A five-month investigation by the Guardian, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism (ARIJ) and Paper Trail Media, Der Spiegel and ZDF has identified six people shot by Israeli snipers on 22 November 2023. And through interviews with survivors, witnesses and relatives, reviews of death certificates, medical records and geolocated images we revealed how a family from Gaza City’s Tal al-Hawa neighbourhood was torn apart in a few hours by men who grew up in Naperville, Illinois and Munich, Germany.

Israeli snipers killed four members of the Doghmosh family that day, and injured two others. Their story illuminates patterns of killing by Israeli troops, who have repeatedly treated unarmed men between 18 and 40 in Gaza as targets.

 

Quote

“They’re thinking: ‘Oh I don’t think [I’ll get shot] because I’m wearing civilian clothes and I am not carrying a weapon and all that, but they were wrong,” said Raab, who majored in biology at the University of Illinois before joining the Israel Defense Forces. “That’s what you have snipers for.”

After Salem was shot, his father, Montasser, 51, rushed to the site, and tried to collect his sons’ bodies for burial, but was also fatally injured by a sniper.

The need for a dignified funeral for loved ones is a core human instinct, protected in law and explored in art for millennia. It is at the emotional heart of Homer’s Iliad, one of the earliest surviving works of literature.

But on that day, Raab treated love and grief as cause to kill. “They just kept on coming to try and take these bodies,” he said.

The video of Salem’s killing, and footage of other attacks on unarmed Palestinians, was posted online five months after his death, part of a montage made by a soldier called Shalom Gilbert to celebrate a deployment in Gaza.

Raab later said he and another sniper carried out three of those killings, in an interview carried out under deceptive circumstances by a team led by the Palestinian journalist and activist Younis Tirawi.

Raab was approached by a Hebrew speaker who claimed he wanted to write about the squad’s experiences and to commemorate fallen soldiers, Tirawi said. Raab was promised anonymity, but Tirawi posted extracts of the interview online, justifying the decision by saying it was in the public interest, given the scale of civilian killings.

Raab did not name his partner, who was later identified from photos as Daniel Graetz.

 

Quote

The next victim was Salem and Mohammed’s father, Montasser. “My boys,” was all he could say when he saw them lying dead in the street. He tried to approach them and was shot.

Then, snipers targeted a cousin, Khalil*, who raced to help Montasser. “I had taken about eight to 10 steps carrying him when I was shot and it felt like my arm was blown off,” said Khalil, who managed to stagger out of range before losing consciousness.

The two men were taken to hospital, but Montasser died the next day. The family decided they could not risk more loss, and the brothers’ bodies were left in the street until a ceasefire began on 24 November.