When the second Gulf War occurred, after Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait, CNN broadcast videos captured with infrared cameras of the bombings by the United States and its allies. There was great controversy, since those images, of very poor quality, actually showed practically no information.
33 years later we continue to see images of war conflicts that hardly show anything. This is what happened on social network X after the massacre of civilians in the Palestinian hospital in Gaza.
Numerous accounts, including some official ones from Israel, began showing videos a few minutes after the event occurred. Some argued that the perpetrators were the Israeli army or Palestinian militias in the Gaza Strip. For hours chaos reigned and messages were deleted and edited in X.
Scientific-looking analyzes of very poor quality images were carried out at full speed. Some of these photographs even came from the webcam of a nursery located in a settlement in Israel from which Gaza City can be seen, a long distance from where the hospital where hundreds of people have died was located.
Carrying out a good forensic analysis of images usually takes time, especially when we are trying to elucidate what has happened by analyzing low quality frames. As are often the ones that appear in night images.
Gaza is a very populated city and in conflict, so it should not surprise us that all kinds of cameras are filming what happens there 24 hours a day. The problem is that many of the images that were being analyzed had been published directly on X.
On the platform formerly known as Twitter, most of the metadata of the images is removed in order to protect the privacy of its users. These are the data that are incorporated into the images when they are captured and edited, unless they are deleted.
This is vital information: the time the image was recorded, the equipment it was captured with, how the camera was set up, and they can even show the exact position of the camera on a map.
News agencies never eliminate the metadata of the images they distribute to the media, as it is important that this data be analyzed by graphic editors if the image raises doubts.
Photographic images and videos also incorporate visual information that is not visible to the naked eye. This information can be used to see objects or shapes that cannot be seen without editing the image if its dynamic range is good.
Dynamic range is the equivalent in chemical photography to the exposure latitude of photographic or cinematographic film. The greater the dynamic range, which is measured in light exposure levels, the greater the ability of analysts to see details that cannot be seen with the naked eye. Like a plane without lights flying through a night sky.
To check the information that can be extracted from an image we use the most up-to-date version of Photoshop. We turned to some of their cutting-edge tools. For this hasty analysis we have used a recent Getty image signed by photographer Ahmad Hasaballah. In it we see a building in Gaza bombed at night by Israel on October 12.
To better see the details of the photo, we increase the dynamic range of the image to improve the level of detail, we reduce the haze caused by the atmosphere itself, we increase the luminosity of the darkest areas of the image but we reduce the light in the area of the explosion and we turn to Adobe's artificial intelligence to increase the resolution of the area we are analyzing.
As can be seen when doing these operations with the Reuters image, they are seen in much more detail in the buildings that are in the foreground. But we also get a much better look at a row of distant buildings. And these are just some of the things we can do, since it is possible to perform very sophisticated analyzes with other applications and more time. Even reconstruct the stage three-dimensionally.
If we analyze the data of this photo that we have used as a test subject, we see that it was shot with a Canon EOS 5D Mark III camera and a 300mm telephoto lens. Which shows that the image has been captured without risk for the photographer, since it is captured several hundred meters from the site of the explosion. The shutter speed is high (1/250) to avoid camera shake, which is important when using a telephoto lens, and to capture any object that moves relatively quickly.
All of this cannot be done with photos or videos with very poor quality, like those that generally circulate on size. Enough to be able to see the images in detail if whoever published them wants them to look as good as possible.
In reality, most social networks do not give much play when it comes to analyzing photos, almost all of them eliminate metadata and restrict resolution. That did not stop many from working to analyze the photos and videos that supposedly corresponded to the explosion that occurred at the hospital.
The work of the Geoconfirmed organization stands out, which has expert volunteers to analyze the locations of a certain image. Shortly after the incident they started a thoughtful Twitter thread where they carry out verifications and data with the data that is made public.
But these data are far from sufficient. The United States was quick to say that in a preliminary analysis it appears that what hit the hospital was a missile from the Islamic Jihad, the investigation continues.
Something that demonstrates the complexity of what is being tried to prove, since the country has all kinds of military images, such as satellite images, and has not yet been able to give a definitive explanation for what happened.
