Israel was behind downing of MH17: Professor Fetzer

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In a phone interview with Press TV on Sunday, Professor James Henry Fetzer said, "While the United States is claiming that the newly released photographs by Russia -- claiming that the Ukrainian military jets targeted the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 -- are preposterous, [but] that does not mean they are not authentic, or that the plane having been shot down by Ukrainian jets is not true."

On Friday, Russian state media released satellite images purportedly showing a Mikoyan MiG-29 fighter jet firing a missile at the MH17.

On July 17, the Boeing 777-200 passenger plane crashed in Ukraine's conflict zone, killing all 298 people aboard. According to US intelligence and military officials, the plane was hit by a Russian SA-series missile launched from eastern Ukraine.

"Indeed, in the past I have seen the pieces of fuselage of MH17 showing bullet holes, both going in and going out of the same piece of fuselage, which implies that the plane was actually being shot down by jets from two different locations," Fetzer said.

"Not only there's nothing preposterous about this, but it's the only account that makes any sense of what was taking place. Neither of the Russians nor supporters of Russia in the eastern Ukraine appeared to have had anything to do with it," he added.

He went on to say that "this appears to have been part and parcel of a propaganda campaign to create a diversion to Israel's invasion of Gaza, where indeed Vladimir Putin's own aircraft passed through that area about 30 minutes previously."

At least 2,139 Palestinians, mostly civilians, including women, children and the elderly, were killed in 50 days of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza in July and August.

"The fact that first responders on the scene described bodies in an advanced state of decomposition suggests that they were not fresh, and that the passengers aboard the plane, who were discovered there, had probably died some time previously, where a number of us have been led to speculate that the flight Malaysian airliner 17 was actually the same plane as the Malaysian airliner 370, which disappeared in southeast Asia months before," Fetzer noted.

"There was a report from Christopher Bollyn that an identical aircraft was observed in a hanger in Israel, which would not surprise me," he revealed.

"The bottom line here being that Israel, in particular, will go to any length to try to mislead and deceive the public, and in this instance had a keen motive to distract the attention of the world from its vicious onslaught in Gaza," he stated.

The Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777-200ER, carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members, vanished from radar screens early on March 8, less than an hour after taking off from Kuala Lumpur on a scheduled flight to Beijing.

After a vast search in 4.64 million square kilometers (1.79 million square miles) of the southern Indian Ocean, the hunt was scaled backed as nothing was spotted.