Since the photos were removed without my knowledge, the decision was made to keep the posts on the blog with a notice stating that the images had been taken down. I have no clue who was responsible for the take-down.
Here's a bit of background.
I covered the Israeli invasion of Gaza - Cast Lead campaign - extensively on this blog. Link to the archive - here. I was strongly opposed to the invasion which saw Israel using US-supplied high tech weaponry on a much smaller and defenceless neighbor... a neighbor that lacked even rudimentary air defenses. It was a shameful war without honor resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Palestinian civilians including women and children. The pretext used by Israel was wildly inaccurate home-made rockets fired by radicals. But the truth is it was a cynical "election war" - an effort to undermine HAMAS - democratically elected and created in the first instance by Israel itself, or at least with the state's connivance.
As mentioned I put up two posts that showed Palestinian children who had been wounded or killed in the air attacks. None of these images crossed the line in terms of a "blood and gore" category, certainly not compared to some of the images elsewhere online at the time that showed devastating wounds caused by Israeli high tech weaponry. The images I chose showed children being prepared for burial, wounded children in hospital or en-route - none of them so graphic they would have needed a disclaimer. The images came from mainstream media sources.
The most gut wrenching photo closest to an image that might require a caution came via Aftenbladet, a Norwegian newspaper. It shows the head of a child whose body had been buried by rubble in the course of a bombing raid. You can still link from the post to the image on Aftenbladet. The image is tough to look at but it was vital that people knew exactly what was going on at that time and the extent of the carnage visited on civilians.
Some time after putting up the two posts I discovered all the photos had been removed, including photos of grieving families that by no stretch of the imagination violated any reasonable guideline. At the time I was using a Google owned free Blogspot address. My photos were being hosted by Photobucket, also Google owned. Photobucket does occasionally take down images that violate their guidelines, but when they do this a take-down notice appears in place of the photo removed. According to other bloggers I spoke to when Blogspot itself removes material from a blog they notify via email. The images were taken down without notification from either Photobucket or Blogger.
You can check out the posts here and here.
