In the video, captured by residents of Aseera Al Qibliya village, residents from the nearby settlement of Yitzhar aim a hand gun and assault rifle at the crowd. Village youths confront the settlers with stones.  Settlers later opened fire, shooting and injuring a 24-year-old Palestinian man. Five more Palestinians were wounded by the rock throwing.

A spokesman for the settlers said the violence flared when they were pelted with stones as they tried to put out a scrub fire allegedly started by the Palestinians, Reuters reported.

B’Tselem humna rights group said it wrote urgently to the Police requesting that those involved in the violent attack are arrested and prosecuted. Additionally, B’Tselem wrote to the Military Police Investigative Unit (MPIU) requesting that a military police investigation is opened at once into the suspicion that the soldiers did not adhere to their obligation to protect Palestinians from settler violence, and that one of the attackers was a soldier on leave.

The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) Spokesperson said in response that the shooting took place during clashes between settlers of Itzhar and the Palestinian residents of Asira al-Qibliya, in which both sides threw stones, according to Haaretz. “Upon receiving the report of the incident, security forces arrived at the scene in an effort to separate the sides,” the statement said. “There was a shooting during the incident and the matter is being investigated, he said. “The video that was released does not seem to represent the whole incident.”The group aims to use social media to bring alleged violations by settlers and the military into public view, he added.

B’Tselem provided the cameras used to document the event, as part of a programme started in 2007 whereby it has distributed around 150 camcorders to “citizen journalists” throughout the West Bank, Reuters reported.

This video has attracted fierce scrutiny by the international and Israeli media on practices in territory seized in the 1967 war. Approximately 340,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank, which most refer to by the biblical names of Judea and Samaria, as many claim an ancestral right to the land and reject the fact that the United Nations deems the settlements illegal, Al Arabiya reported.

In theatres of war or civil conflict, sources play a prominent role as regards media coverage. News organisations tend regularly to seek official sources and to rely heavily on them for their output. Edward S. Herman, an old friend of Chomsky’s has argued: “The more authoritarian and credible the source the easier it is to accept statements without checking, and the less expensive is news-making”. Lots of case studies have verified the accuracy of Herman’s argument; a major one has the first Persian Gulf War, during which the US government played the role of the dominant source for mainstream media. The well-known “pool” system was later on replaced by the complicated, but highly effective embedded system in the second Iraq campaign.

All these have happened before the explosion of social networks and citizen “journalism”. Nowadays, once upon a time advanced communication technologies that allowed the global audience to watch a real-time broadcasting of events during the Persian Gulf War, are now replaced by Skype. Peter Arnett, who was risking his life in the terraces of Bagdad, was succeeded by young people who run on the streets of Homs, Cairo or Tripolis holding a smartphone that shoots footage immediately uploaded on Youtube.

Digital technology makes things possible, undermining any kind of political or military attempts to control the free flow of information. Any way we call it, “amateur” or “citizen journalism”, the power of first hand reporting makes words and images go viral in no time. When people start “liking”, “retweeting”, “sharing” or forwarding material, nothing can stop information reaching a global audience.

What is important in cases like these is to depict the truth, not propaganda, mainstream or “amateur”.

Dr. Demetris Kamaras is the Editor of AlYunaniya.com