Adnan Hajj

Adnan Hajj is a Lebanese freelance photographer. He became known to the general public when he passed on manipulated images of the deployment of the Israeli armed forces to the Reuters news agency during the 2006 Lebanon War .

The image used to uncover the forgeries shows the aftermath of an attack by the Israeli Air Force on Hezbollah targets in Beirut . In the original, a single thin column of smoke could be seen above the city skyline, but Hajj added thick clouds of smoke with an image editing program . After the manipulation had been proven, Reuters Hajj terminated the collaboration on August 8, 2006 after ten years and withdrew all 920 photos he had taken during the war. These included the pictures he had taken at the site of the air raid on Cana . Investigations of his other images revealed that at least one other image had been manipulated: on a photo from August 2, 2006, which shows an Israeli aircraft over a town in southern Lebanon, decoys were subsequently inserted.

Web links

• Hany Farid: Photo Tampering Throughout History. Image Science Group, Dartmouth College .
• Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , August 10, 2006, p. 38.