They concluded that the first shots were fired from around 40m to 43m away. But towards the end of the video, gunfire came from around 12m away.
At a briefing on 5 April, an IDF official told reporters that surveillance showed the troops were at some distance when they opened fire, adding: “It’s not from close. They opened fire from afar.”
One military expert told BBC Verify that any engagements under 50m to 100m would be considered as being within close range.
Robert Maher, an audio forensics expert at Montana State University, said towards the start of the footage one firearm is discharged about 43m away from the mobile phone.
Mr Maher and another expert, Steven Beck, independently corroborated one another’s view that in the final few moments of the audio, shots are fired as close at 12m away.
Mr Beck, a former FBI consultant who now runs Beck Audio Forensics, said: “The shooter(s) at these times is much closer, with distances of 12m to 18m. There is a strange pop sound that may be a tire hit by a bullet.”
He added: “The shockwaves indicate that the bullets are passing close to the recorder microphone – meaning they are being shot at.”
Chris Cobb-Smith, a former British Army officer with over 20 years experience in conducting investigations in conflicts zones, said that at 50m the Israeli troops would have “definitively been able to identify the convoy as humanitarian” and would have been able to “determine that the personnel were unarmed and not posing a threat”.
Voices can also be heard towards the end of the recording, shouting in Hebrew: “Get up,” and: “You (plural) go back”.
Over the period of more than five minutes, at times, multiple firearms were in use simultaneously, the audio experts determined.
Mr Maher said “the sounds are often overlapping in such a way that it is clear multiple firearms are in use at the same time”.
Because of the overlap of gunshots, Mr Maher said it’s difficult to identify individual shots. But both experts determined independently that there were more than 100 shots.
Our audio analysts could not comment on which weapons were being used but Mr Beck said there are “several bursts of fully automatic gunfire”.
