Muhammad al-Durrah
Muhammad and his father, Jamal, on September 30, 2000, recorded by Talal Abu Rahma for France 2.
Born	1988
Died	September 30, 2000, aged 12 Gaza Strip
Cause of death	Shooting
Resting place	Bureij refugee camp, Gaza Strip
Nationality	Palestinian
Parent(s)	Jamal and Amal

Muhammad Jamal al-Durrah (1988–September 30, 2000) Arabic: محمد جمال الدرة) was a Palestinian boy reported to have been killed by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) gunfire during a clash between the IDF and Palestinian Security Forces in the Gaza Strip on September 30, 2000. The boy became a symbol of the Palestinian cause, and was hailed throughout the Muslim world as an icon and Islamic martyr.^[1]

The Palestinian Authority had declared the day—the first of the Jewish New Year, and the second of the Second Intifada—a general strike. As Palestinian protesters gathered to throw stones and Molotov cocktails at an IDF outpost at the Netzarim junction, filmed by cameramen from several news agencies, shots were exchanged between Palestinian gunmen and police, and Israeli soldiers.^[2] Talal Abu Rahma, a freelance Palestinian cameraman working for France 2, was the only one to film what happened to the al-Durrahs, who had arrived at the junction on their way home from a car auction.^[3] Abu Rahma's footage shows them seeking cover behind a concrete cylinder, then after a burst of gunfire, the boy slumps forward and his father appears injured.^[4] A voice-over from Charles Enderlin, the network's bureau chief in Israel, who was not present during the incident, said they had been the "target of fire from the Israeli positions," and that the boy had died.^[5] An ambulance driver, Bassem al-Bilbeisi, was also reported to have been killed as he went to help.^[6]

Israel accepted responsibility and apologized, but later official and unofficial investigations suggested either that the al-Durrahs may have been hit by Palestinian bullets, or that it remains unclear whether the boy died.^[7] France 2's news editor, Arlette Chabot, said in 2005 that no one could say for sure who fired the shots.^[8] A French media commentator, Philippe Karsenty, was sued by France 2 for defamation, after he accused Enderlin of perpetrating a hoax; a verdict in 2006 in the network's favour was set aside by the Paris Court of Appeal in 2008.^[9] France 2 has appealed to the Cour de cassation, France's highest court, a case that is ongoing.^[10]

Background

Ariel Sharon's visit to Temple Mount

On September 28, 2000, two days before the incident, the Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. The Temple Mount contains the holiest site in Judaism and the third holiest in Islam, making access to it a hotly contested issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The visit was seen as a provocation,^[11] and the following day, September 29, violent protests broke out in and around the Old City, leaving seven Palestinians dead and 300 wounded.^[12] On September 30, further protests against the previous day's deaths escalated into widespread violence across the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The uprising became known as the Second, or Al-Aqsa, Intifada, named after the Al-Aqsa Mosque on Temple Mount. It lasted 4–5 years and cost 4,000 lives, around 3,000 of them Palestinian.^[13]

Netzarim junction

The violence on September 30 included a gun battle between Palestinian police and Israeli soldiers at the Netzarim junction in the Gaza Strip.^[14] It was during this battle, in which Palestinian security forces sided with rioting Palestinian civilians against Israeli soldiers, that al-Durrah and his father were filmed as they sought shelter.^[15]

The Netzarim junction is a crossroads a few kilometers south of Gaza City (at 31°27′54″N 34°25′36″E / 31.465129°N 34.426689°E / 31.465129; 34.426689) on Saladin Road, the main route through the Gaza Strip. Many Palestinians call it the al-Shohada, or martyrs', junction, after the scores of Palestinians who have died there in clashes with Israeli soldiers over the nearby Israeli settlement of Netzarim—where 60 Israeli families lived until 2005, when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip.^[16] The junction was the site of an Israeli military outpost, Magen-3, which guarded the approach to the settlement.^[17] On the day of the shooting, the outpost was manned by 18 Israeli soldiers from the Givati Brigade Engineering Platoon and the Herev Battalion. A small post manned by Palestinian policemen stood on the diagonally opposite side of the junction.^[18]

Palestinian and Israeli security forces had mounted joint patrols in the area under interim peace arrangements, but in the days leading up to the shooting, there had been a series of violent incidents.^[19] Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, said stones and Molotov cocktails had been thrown on September 13, an Israeli soldier had been killed by a roadside bomb on September 27, and an Israeli police officer had been killed by a Palestinian police officer in a joint patrol on September 29.^[20]

Charles Enderlin

Charles Enderlin was born in Paris in 1945, and has lived in Jerusalem since 1968, becoming an Israeli national in the 1970s. He has worked in journalism since 1971, studied film and television in London from 1975 to 1977, and has worked for France 2 since 1981. He became the network's bureau chief in Israel in 1990. He is the author of several books about the Middle East, including Shamir, une biographie (1991) and The Lost Years: Radical Islam, Intifada and Wars in the Middle East 2001-2006 (2007).^[21] He was awarded France's highest decoration, the Légion d'honneur, in August 2009.^[22]

Talal Abu Rahma

Talal Abu Rahma, who lived in Gaza, had worked as a freelance cameraman for France 2 since 1988. He ran his own press office, the National News Center in Gaza, and contributed to CNN through the Al-Wataneya Press Office. He studied Business Administration in the U.S., and was a board member of the Palestinian Journalists' Assocation. He was presented with a number of awards for his coverage of the al-Durrah story, including the Rory Peck Award in 2001.^[23]

Jamal and Muhammad al-Durrah

Jamal (born circa 1966) and his wife, Amal, lived with their five sons and two daughters in the United Nations-run Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, several kilometers south of the Netzarim junction.^[24] Jamal was a carpenter and house painter who at the time of the shooting had worked for Moshe Tamam, an Israeli contractor in north Tel Aviv, for 20 years, since he was 14. Through Tamam, Helen Schary Motro had employed Jamal twice to help build her house. She wrote in 2000 of his years of rising at 3:30 a.m. to catch the bus at 4 a.m. to the border crossing, then a second bus out of Gaza, so he could be at work by 6 a.m., able to make it only when the border was open.^[25] The border was closed on the day of the incident because of rioting the previous day in Jerusalem, which is why Jamal and Muhammad were together.

Muhammad, born in 1988, was a fifth grade student, but his school was closed that day because of a general strike.^[26] According to the boy's mother, on the evening before the shooting, he had been watching the violence on television and asked if he could join the protests in Netzarim on Saturday. He had been known to run off to the beach or to watch older boys throw stones during protests.^[27] Father and son decided instead to go to a car auction, according to an interview Jamal gave Abu Rahma in the Shifa hospital the day after the shooting.^[28]

Incident as initially reported

Arrival at Netzarim junction

Having failed to buy anything at the auction, Jamal and Muhammad decided to take a cab home, two kilometers away. They arrived at the Netzarim junction around noon, where Palestinians were throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at the Israeli outpost.^[31]

The driver stopped when he saw the demonstrators and refused to go any further. Jamal decided to cross the junction on foot to look for another cab.^[32] According to Matt Rees of Time, at around that point, Palestinian gunmen started shooting at the Israeli soldiers from a nearby orange grove, and the fire was returned. Jamal and Muhammad waited until the gunfire had stopped, then crossed the junction. The shooting started up again as they were halfway across.^[31] Jamal, Muhammad, and Shams Oudeh, a Reuters cameraman, crouched behind a wall and a three-foot tall concrete drum^[29]—on top of which sat a large paving stone, which offered further protection^[7]—situated diagonally opposite the Israeli outpost.^[31] The cameraman later moved away, and Jamal and Muhammad were left there alone.

The shooting

File:Jamal al-Durrah perspective, September 30, 2000.JPG

File:Jamal al-Durrah looking toward Abu Rahma.jpg

The violence at the junction was recorded by cameramen working for several news agencies.^[38] The only cameraman to record the al-Durrah shooting was Abu Rahma who was working alone in the area for France 2. He said he captured on tape 27 minutes of an exchange of gunfire that he said lasted 45 minutes.^[29] Around 64 seconds of the tape is focused on Jamal and Muhammad.^[39]

The tape was edited for broadcast by Enderlin, France 2's bureau chief in Israel, who was not present during the filming. The original tape was edited down to 59 seconds, with a voiceover by Enderlin. The footage shows Muhammad and his father crouching behind the cylinder, situated between the Israeli and Palestinian positions, the child screaming and the father shielding him.^[31] The father is shown waving toward the Israeli position. The camera goes out of focus at the moment of the reported shooting. When the burst of gunfire subsides, the footage shows the father sitting upright, appearing to have been injured, and the boy lying over his legs.^[39] Enderlin's report was first broadcast on France 2's nightly news at 8:00 pm on September 30. It said:

1500 hours, everything has just erupted near the settlement of Netzarim, in the Gaza Strip. The Palestinians have shot live bullets, the Israelis are responding. Emergency medical technicians, journalists, passersby are caught in the crossfire. Here, Jamal and his son Mohamed are the target of fire from the Israeli positions. Mohamed is twelve, his father is trying to protect him. He is motioning... Another burst of fire. Mohamed is dead and his father seriously wounded. A Palestinian policeman and an ambulance driver have also lost their lives in the course of this battle.^[40]

Ambulances were called to the scene but were delayed by the shooting. According to Abu Rahma, "It took about 45 minutes for the ambulance to reach the two, because of the heavy Israeli firing on everyone who dared to reach the young boy and his father."^[41] Bassam al-Bilbeisi, the driver of the first ambulance to arrive, was shot dead, leaving a widow, Hanan, and 11 children.^[6]

The boy and his father were taken by ambulance to the nearby Shifa hospital in Gaza City, where Muhammad was pronounced dead on arrival; see below for the times of the reports. In all, 15 Palestinians were killed that day in the West Bank and Gaza.^[15] Muhammad's mother, Amal, watched the violence on television and worried that her husband and son had not returned home, but failed to recognize the two figures on her screen. It was when she saw the scene again in a later broadcast that she realized who it was. Her children said she screamed, then fainted.^[32]

Jamal's and Muhammad's injuries

Muhammad was reported by the BBC to have been shot four times. Abu Rahma referred in his affidavit to one shot to the boy's right leg, while Time said he had received a fatal wound to the abdomen.^[42] According to the pathologist's report his intestines had been removed, and post-mortem photographs viewed by the French channel Canal+ showed the body with massive injuries to the abdomen.^[43] No autopsy was performed.^[44] He was buried before sundown, in accordance with Muslim tradition, in an emotional public funeral at the Bureij refugee camp, his body wrapped in a Palestinian flag.^[45]

Jamal was reported to have been struck by twelve bullets, some of which were removed from his arm and pelvis.^[46] According to Dr Ahmed Ghadeel of the Shifa hospital in Gaza City, Jamal received multiple wounds from high-velocity bullets striking his right elbow, his right thigh and several locations in the lower part of both legs; his femoral artery was also cut. The injured Jamal was filmed by France 2 at the hospital the day after the shooting; his doctors were interviewed, showing X-ray photographs of his shattered right elbow and right pelvis.^[47][48] His Israeli employer, Moshe Tamam, tried to have Jamal transferred from Gaza to an Israeli hospital and offered to cover the expenses, but the Palestinian Authority, or Jamal himself, declined the offer.^[25] He was flown instead on October 2 to the Hussein Medical Centre in Amman, Jordan, by the Royal Jordanian Air Force, where he was visited by King Abdullah of Jordan and Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi.^[49] He underwent a number of operations over the course of four months before returning to Gaza. Jordanian doctors said his right hand would be permanently paralyzed.^[50] His injuries were later questioned by an Israeli doctor; see below.^[51]

Cameraman's account

Enderlin wrote in Le Figaro that he had based his allegation that the IDF had shot the boy on the claim of the cameraman, Abu Rahma.^[52] Susan Goldenberg, writing in The Guardian, quoted Abu Rahma saying of the IDF: "They were cleaning the area. Of course they saw the father. They were aiming at the boy, and that is what surprised me, yes, because they were shooting at him, not only one time, but many times."^[27]

Abu Rahma said there was an Israeli military outpost at the northwest of the junction, and just behind it, two Palestinian apartment blocks, nicknamed "the twins." He could also see a Palestinian National Security Forces outpost (police station), located south of the junction, just behind the spot where the father and boy were crouching. He said that shooting had been coming from there too, but not, he said, during the time the boy was reportedly shot. The Israeli fire was being directed at this Palestinian outpost, he said. There was another Palestinian outpost 30 meters away. He said his attention was drawn to the child by Shams Oudeh, a Reuters photographer who for a time was crouching beside Muhammad and his father behind the concrete cylinder.^[29] Abu Rahma told National Public Radio on October 1, 2000:

I saw the young boy and his father, and I decided to film, you know. I filmed a little bit, then the shooting became really heavy and heavier. Then I saw the boy getting injured in his leg, and the father asking for help. Then I saw him getting injured in his arm, the father. The father was asking the ambulances to help him, because he could see the ambulances. I cannot see the ambulance ... I wasn't far away, maybe from them [Jamal and Muhammad] face to face about 15 meters, 17 meters. But the father didn't succeed to get the ambulance by waving to them. He looked at me and he said, "Help me." I said, "I cannot, I can't help you." The shooting till then was really heavy ... It was raining bullets. It was really raining bullets, for more than for 45 minutes. Then I find, I hear something, "boom!" Really is coming with a lot of dust. I looked at the boy, I filmed the boy lying down in the father's lap, and the father really, getting really injured, and he was really dizzy. I said, "Oh my god, the boy's got killed, the boy's got killed," I was screaming, I was losing my mind. While I was filming, the boy got killed ...

At the beginning ... the father was asking for help, but after 25 minutes exactly, he got injured, now he cannot say nothing...

[I]t was very difficult [to keep the camera rolling], I was very afraid, I was very upset, I was crying, and I was remembering my children. I was afraid to lose my life, and I was sitting on my knees, and hiding my head, carrying my camera, and I was afraid from the Israelis to see this camera. Maybe they will think this is a weapon, you know, and that I am trying to shoot them. For that, I was in the most difficult situation in my life. The boy, I cannot save his life, and I want to protect myself ... This was the most terrible thing that has happened to me as a journalist.^[34]

About an hour after the shooting, during which time the al-Durrahs were evacuated by ambulance, Abu Rahma and others with him managed to escape from the scene, he said. His footage was sent to France 2's Jerusalem office where Enderlin compiled his report and transmitted it by satellite to Paris.^[53] Abu Rahma is angry at being accused of using the incident to further the Palestinian cause. He told On the Media: "I will never use journalism for anything ... because journalism is my religion. Journalism—it's my nationality. Even journalism is my language!"^[54]

Cameraman's affidavit

In an affidavit signed on October 3, 2000, Abu Rahma said:

Shooting started first from different sources, Israeli and Palestinian. It lasted for not more than 5 minutes. Then, it was quite clear for me that shooting was towards the child Mohammed and his father from the opposite direction to them. Intensive and intermittent shooting was directed at the two and the two outposts of the Palestinian National Security Forces. The Palestinian outposts were not a source of shooting, as shooting from inside these outposts had stopped after the first five minutes, and the child and his father were not injured then. Injuring and killing took place during the following 45 minutes.

I can assert that shooting at the child Mohammed and his father Jamal came from the above-mentioned Israeli military outpost, as it was the only place from which shooting at the child and his father was possible. So, by logic and nature, my long experience in covering hot incidents and violent clashes, and my ability to distinguish sounds of shooting, I can confirm that the child was intentionally and in cold blood shot dead and his father injured by the Israeli army.^[29]

The affidavit was given to the Palestine Centre for Human Rights in Gaza, and signed by the cameraman in front of a lawyer, Raji Sourani. France 2's communications director, Christine Delavennat, later said that Abu Rahma denied saying the Israeli army had fired at the boy in cold blood, and that this had been falsely attributed to him by the Palestine Centre for Human Rights.^[55] He is reported to have said that he gave this part of the affidavit "under pressure."^[56]

Israeli army response

Second Lieutenant Idan Quris, who was in command of an engineering platoon at the Israeli outpost, told Israel Radio that the soldiers didn't know about the death until three days later. "Believe me, all of our efforts were aimed at armed Palestinians. We don't know how he was killed." The acting commander of the Netzarim position, Lieutenant-Colonel Nizar Fares, said: "When the kid was killed, no one saw him from the position. It is difficult to command this kind of position which is under massive gunfire for such a long period of time and in the end succeed in the mission, return everyone safely and maintain the position."^[57]

Three days after the shooting, the Israeli army's chief of operations, Major-General Giora Eiland, apologized for the incident, saying that, as far as he understood, the shots were apparently fired by Israeli soldiers. He said the soldiers had been shooting from small slits in the wall and had not had a clear field of vision.^[58] His position was contradicted by Major-General Yom Tov Samia, the chief of the army's southern command, who said that he had "no doubt that the gunfire, as it appears in the television close-up, was not from Israeli soldiers."^[27]

The army's deputy chief of staff, Major-General Moshe Yaalon, accused the Palestinians of making "cynical use" of children.^[46] He told France 2 that, "The child and his father were between our position and the place from which we were shot at. It is not impossible—this is a supposition, I don't know—that a soldier, due to his angle of vision, and because one was shooting in his direction, had seen someone hidden in this line of fire and may have fired in the same direction."^[59]

Controversy

Summary

The controversy centers on two areas: the raw footage and its interpretation by Charles Enderlin, and the official investigations into his death, or lack thereof. Next to the view that Israeli gunfire killed the boy, which Enderlin stands by, two alternative narratives have emerged, the so-called "minimalist" and "maximalist" narratives. The "minimalist" narrative is that Palestinian gunfire caused his death, or that no one knows who did. The "maximalist" narrative is that the incident was a hoax staged for propaganda purposes, and that the boy may not be dead at all.^[8]

Queries about the footage

Length and content of raw footage

There is confusion regarding how much footage was taken, and what it shows. Abu Rahma said in his affidavit that the gunfight lasted for 45 minutes. He said he filmed about 27 minutes of it.^[29][62] This seemed to be confirmed in 2004, when three senior French journalists were given access to it by France 2, and said afterwards they had watched 27 minutes of footage.

On September 30, 2000, France 2 provided just over three minutes to other news organizations free of charge, saying it did not want to profit from the incident. Just over one minute of the footage showed Jamal and Muhammad, and of that only 59 seconds were broadcast by France 2 on September 30. No part of those 59 seconds shows the boy dead,^[8] though Enderlin did announce his death: "Here, Jamal and his son Mohamed are the target of fire from the Israeli positions. Mohamed is twelve, his father is trying to protect him. He is motioning... Another burst of fire. Mohamed is dead and his father seriously wounded."^[40]

Enderlin had cut a final few seconds of the footage, during which the boy appears to lift his hand, leading critics to say the boy was peeking at the camera.^[7][61] Enderlin said he cut this scene in accordance with the France 2 ethical charter, because it showed the boy in his death throes ("agonie"), which he said in October 2000, and again in a letter to The Atlantic in September 2003, was "unbearable."^[35][60]

The issue of how much footage exists was further confused in November 2007, after France 2 sued Philippe Karsenty, a French media commentator, for libel, because Karsenty accused them of having broadcast a hoax. A court ruled in France 2's favor, but Karsenty appealed; see below. The court of appeal asked to see the footage, and in November 2007, France 2 presented the court with just 18 minutes of footage. According to Agence France Press, France 2 said the rest had been destroyed because it had not been about the shooting.^[63] Charles Enderlin then seemed to deny that 27 minutes had ever existed; according to The Jerusalem Post, he said on the same day, "I do not know where this 27 minutes comes from. In all there were only 18 minutes of footage shot in Gaza."^[64]

Senior French journalists view the footage

In October 2004, executives at France 2 allowed three senior French journalists—Daniel Leconte, head of news documentaries at the state-run Franco-German television network, Arte,^[65] and former France 2 correspondent; Dennis Jeambar, the editor-in-chief of L'Express; and Luc Rosenzweig, a former managing editor of Le Monde—to view all 27 minutes of the raw footage. They asked to speak to the cameraman, but France 2 reportedly told them he did not speak French and that his English was not good enough.^[56]

Leconte and Jeambar wrote in Le Figaro in January 2005 that there was no scene in the France 2 footage that showed the child had died. They wrote that, at the time Enderlin said Muhammad was dead, "he had no possibility of determining that he was in fact dead, and even less so, that he had been shot by IDF soldiers."^[8] While they did not believe the scene had been staged, they said the footage did not show the boy's death throes. "This famous 'agony' that Enderlin insisted was cut from the montage," they wrote, "does not exist."^[61]

The first 23 minutes of his film, they said, showed Palestinians "playing at war" for the cameras, falling down as if wounded, then getting up and walking away. They wrote that a France 2 official had said, "You know it's always like that,"^[55] a comment that Leconte said he found disturbing. "I think that if there is a part of this event that was staged, they have to say it, that there was a part that was staged, that it can happen often in that region for a thousand reasons," he said.^[61] Leconte did not conclude that the shooting was faked. He said, "At the moment of the shooting, it's no longer acting, there's really shooting, there's no doubt about that."^[55] Both journalists emphasized that they do not believe the hoax theory: "To those who, like MENA, tried to use us to support the theory that the child's death was staged by the Palestinians, we say they are misleading us and their readers. Not only do we not share this point of view, but we attest that, given our present knowledge of the case, nothing supports that conclusion. In fact, the reverse is true."^[66] On February 15, 2005, Daniel Leconte said he believed al-Durrah had been shot from the Palestinian position, and that France 2 or Enderlin should admit their report may have been misleading.^[55]

Enderlin's response to their criticism

Enderlin responded to the criticism of Jeambar and Leconte in a January 2005 article in Le Figaro. He wrote that he had said the bullets were fired by the Israelis because he trusted the cameraman, who had worked for France 2 for 17 years. It was the cameraman who made the initial claim during the broadcast, and later had it confirmed by other journalists and sources, he said. The context also played a role. "The image corresponded to the reality of the situation," he wrote, "not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank." He said the IDF had killed 118 Palestinians, included 33 children, in the first month of the Intifada, compared to 11 Israelis who had been killed.^[52] He said of Jeambar and Leconte that they had never set foot in Gaza, certainly not during a time of conflict, and that he believed them to be mistaken in their criticism of him.^[8]

Other footage shot at Netzarim junction

Footage shot by a Reuters cameraman shows the gun battle from a different angle.^[67] According to Nidra Poller, the Reuters footage shows a jeep driving partway up the road, in sight and within range of the Israeli position, stopping near the barrel and helping to evacuate a man wounded in the right leg; this is also seen in the France 2 footage. Two ambulances are shown standing within 15 feet of the al-Durrahs, and men run down the road, passing in front of the al-Durrahs. There is no sound of gunfire nor any other evidence of combat activity near the al-Durrahs.^[56] According to Ed O'Loughlin of The Age, another video exists, consisting of spliced-up footage shot by France 2 and other unnamed Western agencies. It shows Abu Rahma behind a white van, and the al-Durrahs a few meters away behind the concrete cylinder. An ambulance driver and a Palestinian policeman are shown being killed. Soldiers in the Israeli army base and Palestinian gunmen are seen exchanging bursts of automatic gunfire from opposite ends of the wall against which the al-Durrahs are sheltering.^[38]

Autopsy, bullets, ballistics, injuries

Bullets, bullet holes

It was reported that no bullets were collected by the Palestinians, and that the IDF demolished the wall before ballistics tests could be carried out.^[68] No autopsy was performed,^[44] no bullets appear to have been recovered, either at the hospital or at the scene, and the wall and other structures the father and son had sheltered against were demolished a week after the incident by IDF Southern Commander Major General Yom Tov Samia to remove hiding places for snipers.^[69] This was done before a ballistics test could be carried out.^[70]

In an interview with Esther Schapira for Three Bullets and a Child, a 2002 documentary for Germany's ARD channel, Abu Rahma, the cameraman, said that bullets had, in fact, been recovered. He said that Schapira should ask a named Palestinian general about them. The general told Schapira that he had no bullets, and that there had been no Palestinian investigation into the shooting because there was no doubt as to who had shot the boy. "It was the Israeli side who committed this murder," he said.^[68] When told the general had no bullets, Abu Rahma said instead that France 2 had collected the bullets at the scene. When questioned about this by Schapira, he replied: "We have some secrets for ourselves ... We cannot give anything ... everything."^[68]

Time of shooting

Confusion has arisen regarding the time of the incident, some reports suggesting the boy was shot in the morning, others in the afternoon. Enderlin's report, which aired on France 2's nightly news program at 8:00 pm on September 30, gave the time of the shooting as 3:00 pm local: "1500 hours, everything has just erupted near the settlement of Netzarim, in the Gaza Strip."^[40] Israel Standard Time is two hours ahead of GMT, while Israel Summer Time is three hours ahead; according to a law enacted by the Knesset in July 2000, Israel Summer Time ended that year on October 6, meaning that on September 30, the day of the shooting, Israel was three hours ahead of GMT.^[71]

James Fallows, writing in June 2003, concurs that Jamal and Muhammad first make an appearance in the footage at 3:00 pm, arguing that the time can be judged by later comments from Jamal and some journalists on the scene, and by the length of the shadows.^[7] Brian Whitaker writes in The Guardian that the news first arrived in London from the Associated Press at 6:00 pm BST (5:00 pm GMT), followed minutes later by a similar report from Reuters, both mistakenly naming the boy as Rami Aldura.^[72] Abu Rahma explained later that early reports named the boy as Rami, until a local journalist from CBS,^[53] who was married to Jamal's sister, identified the couple in the footage as Jamal and Muhammad al-Durrah.^[73]

Against this, Mohammed Tawil, the local doctor who admitted Muhammad to the Shifa hospital, told German journalist Esther Schapira that the admission time was around 10:00 am local.^[74] Abu Rahma, the France 2 camerman, said the intensive shooting that Jamal and Muhammad were caught up in began at noon.^[29] According to Stéphane Juffa of the Metula News Agency in Israel, another doctor at the Shifa hospital, Dr. Joumaa Saka, said that Muhammad was admitted before 1:00 pm.^[75] James Fallows writes that he saw a hospital report saying a dead boy with an eight-inch cut down his belly was admitted at 1:00 pm.^[7]

Fallows also writes that there is a discrepancy regarding the time of the funeral. A boy wrapped in a Palestinian flag, with his face exposed, and who Fallows says looked like Muhammad, was carried through the streets of the refugee camp, with thousands of mourners watching. Several news organizations reported that this occurred on the evening of September 30. Fallows writes that the procession appears to take place in full sunlight, with shadows that, in his view, suggest that it was midday.^[7] These discrepancies have fueled speculation in a number of directions, including that more than one boy of roughly that age was shot in that area on the same day; see below.^[76]

IDF investigation

Major General Yom Tov Samia, the IDF's southern commander, set up a team of investigators shortly after the shooting, though whether this was an official investigation remains unclear. The team included Nahum Shahaf, a physicist; Yosef Duriel, an engineer; Meir Danino, a physicist and chief scientist at Elisra Systems; Bernie Schechter, a former police chief superintendent, a ballistics expert, and former head of the weapons laboratory at the Israel Police's criminal identification laboratory; and Chief Superintendent Elliot Springer, also from the criminal identification laboratory.^[8]

The investigation appears to have been headed by Shahaf and Duriel, who had no forensic or ballistic qualifications. They had met through an earlier campaign to show that Yigal Amir, the settler arrested for the 1995 assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, had not committed the crime; they had blamed instead a conspiracy headed by Shimon Peres, Israel's president.^[38][77]

The investigation was hampered by Samia's decision to destroy the structures around the junction a week after the shooting.^[69] Shahaf and Duriel carried out engineering and ballistic tests to replicate the shooting, building a replica of the wall and cylinder in the Negev Desert.^[69] On October 23, 2000, Shahaf and Duriel arranged a re-enactment on an IDF shooting range in front of a CBS 60 Minutes camera crew. Duriel told 60 Minutes that he believed the boy's death was staged to produce an image that would besmirch Israel's reputation—when he saw the interview, Samia removed Duriel from the investigation.^[77]

The report was never published, and a full list of those who took part in the investigation was never released. The findings were shown to the head of Israeli military intelligence, and the key points presented to the media. A request by Haaretz to see the investigation's order of appointment or the names of its members was turned down under Israel's Military Judgment Law.^[8] Releasing a summary of the report, Col. Shlomi Am-Shalom of the IDF said:

The general [Samia] has made clear that from an analysis of all the data from the scene, including the location of the IDF position, the trajectory of the bullets, the location of the father and son behind an obstacle, the cadence of the bullet fire, the angle at which the bullets penetrated the wall behind th father and his son, and the hours of the events, we can rule out with the greatest certainty the possibility that the gunfire that apparently harmed the boy and his father was fired by IDF soldiers, who were at the time located only inside their fixed position.^[78]

The investigation provoked immediate criticism. IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz insisted that it was a private enterprise of Samia's.^[79] A Haaretz editorial said, "it is hard to describe in mild terms the stupidity of this bizarre investigation," concluding that it was so shaky that the Israeli public would never accept its findings. "The fact that an organized body like the IDF, with its vast resources, undertook such an amateurish investigation—almost a pirate endeavor—on such a sensitive issue, is shocking and worrying."^[80]

Esther Schapira documentaries

In 2002, the German broadcaster ARD broadcast Drei Kugeln und ein totes Kind ("Three bullets and a dead child"), a documentary by German journalist Esther Schapira. Her film did not conclude that Muhammad had been killed by Palestinian fire, but cast doubt on reports that he was shot by the Israelis.^[81] She argued that the lack of an autopsy and the destruction by the IDF of all the structures around the intersection where the shooting occurred, carried out to remove places where snipers could hide, according to the IDF, meant the investigation was seriously compromised. She presented testimony from Israeli soldiers who had been present, and who said they had never used automatic weapons. She also presented conclusions from Nahum Shahaf's investigation for the IDF that said the al-Durrahs were protected by the concrete cylinder from shots fired from the Israeli position. On October 2, 2000, 1,000 demonstrators gathered outside the offices of France 2, where Schapira's film was shown on a giant screen. The crowd awarded France 2 and Enderlin a "prize for disinformation."^[66]

In a second film in 2009, Das Kind, der Tod und die Wahrheit ("The Child, the Death, and the Truth"), Schapira suggests two Palestinian boys may have been injured that day, and that the boy who died and was buried may not have been Muhammad al-Durrah.^[82] France 2 responded angrily to the claims made in the film, threatening to end cooperation with ARD.^[83] Enderlin criticized Schapira as a "militant journalist" with "a strange understanding of press freedom" who had been "taken in by right-wing circles in Israel."^[84]

Questions about father's injuries

Questions were raised in 2007 regarding Jamal al-Durrah's injuries. On December 13 that year, Israel’s Channel 10 aired an interview with Maj. (Res.) Dr. Yehuda David, a doctor at Tel Hashomer hospital who served during the 2006 Lebanon War in the IDF's Granite Infantry Battalion.^[85] David told Channel 10 that he had treated Jamal in 1994 for knife and axe wounds to his arms and legs sustained during a Palestinian gang attack. David said the scars that Jamal presented as bullet wounds from the 2000 shooting were actually scars from a tendon repair operation that David had performed in 1994.^[86]

France 2 v. Philippe Karsenty

France 2 filed three defamation suits in October 2004. It sought symbolic damages of €1 from each of the defendants, suing for a "press offence" under the Press Law of 1881.^[87] The first and most notable of the lawsuits was against Philippe Karsenty, a French financial consultant who runs a media watchdog website, Media-Ratings. He wrote in November 2004 that the events filmed by the cameraman had been faked, that al-Dura had not been killed in front of the camera, and that the boy was still alive.^[59][88] Two witnesses testified on his behalf, Luc Rosensweig, formerly of Le Monde, and Daniel Dayan, research director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Dayan said the images that France 2 broadcast did not justify the commentary that accompanied them.^[89]

In October 19, 2006, the court convicted Karsenty of libel, ordering him to pay €1,000 in costs and €1 in damages. The judge said that Karsenty's argument was "primarily based on extrapolations and amalgams, depend[ent] on peremptory assertions of authority which no Israeli official—nor the army, however concerned in the highest degree, nor justice—has granted the least credit."^[90]

Karsenty appeal

Karsenty appealed, and the court was shown the 18 minutes of raw footage that France 2 said it still had in its possession.^[91] The footage showed people throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at an IDF outpost, an interview with a Fatah official, and the incident involving the al-Durrahs in the last minute. The court heard that the boy moved after the cameraman had said he was dead, and that there was no blood on the boy's shirt. Enderlin responded that the cameraman had not said the boy was dead, but that he was dying,^[92] though the cameraman himself told National Public Radio on October 1, 2000 that he had said out loud, "the boy got killed," when he saw Muhammad lying in his father's lap.^[34]

Karsenty commissioned Jean-Claude Schlinger, an adviser on ballistic and forensic evidence for the French courts for 20 years, to write a report for the court on the ballistic evidence.^[93] Schlinger recreated the incident, examining the angle of the shots, the weapons, and the reported injuries. He wrote in his report that, "If Jamal and Mohammed al-Dura were indeed struck by shots, then they could not have come from the Israeli position, from a technical point of view, but only from the direction of the Palestinian position." He said there was no evidence that the boy was wounded in his right leg or abdomen, as reported, and that if the injuries were genuine, they did not occur at the time of the televised events. Had the shots come from the Israeli position, he wrote, only the lower limbs could have been hit. He also said, "In view of the general context, and in light of many instances of staged incidents, there is no objective evidence that the child was killed and his father injured. It is very possible, therefore, that it is a case [in which the incident was] staged."^[62]

On May 21, 2008, the court overturned Karsenty's conviction, ruling that his claims fell within the boundaries of permitted expression,^[94] and that statements provided by the cameraman were "not perfectly credible either in form or content."^[95] France 2 appealed to the Cour de cassation, France's highest judicial court, a case that continues.^[10]

After Karsenty won his appeal, a petition in support of France 2 was started by Le Nouvel Observateur^[65] and signed by 300 French writers and journalists.^[96] Elie Barnavi, a former Israeli ambassador to France, called for an independent inquiry into the affair, as did Richard Prasquier of the Council of Jewish Organisations in France.^[97]

Personal and political impact

Doreen Carvajal writes in The New York Times that the images of Jamal's futile efforts to shield his son have the "iconic power of a battle flag." The footage became what Charles Enderlin called a "cultural prism," through which viewers see what they want to see.^[61]

The Arab street felt confirmed in its view that Israel's brutality toward the Palestinians knew no bounds. Several Arab countries issued postage stamps bearing the images. Parks and streets were named in Muhammad's honor, including the street in Cairo on which the Israeli embassy is located.^[61] Palestinian children started acting out the shooting in their playgrounds, afraid of being killed in the same way.^[98] The images were blamed for the lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah on October 12, 2000, and the burning of synagogues in France.^[56] Al Quaeda spokesmen mentioned Muhammad several times, including Osama bin Laden shortly after 9/11 in a "warning" to President George Bush.^[7] An image of Jamal and Muhammad was seen in the background as journalist Daniel Pearl, an American Jew, was beheaded in February 2002.^[55] Suicide bombers invoked Muhammad's name in their videos. Wafa Samir al-Bis, 21, was caught in June 2005 on her way to a hospital in Be'er Sheva, where she had been receiving treatment for burns, to blow up Israeli children in his memory, she said.^[56]

Like other battle images—Carvajal gives as an example the 1945 Associated Press image of U.S. Marines raising the U.S. flag on Iwo Jima twice, because the first flag they used was too small for the photographs—the authenticity of the al-Durrah footage has been questioned precisely because it was such a potent weapon.^[61] The French news program Jeudi Investigation describes al-Durrah as "an unbearable symbol in the eyes of certain radical pro-Israelis. Thanks to the [World Wide] Web, they will get to question the authenticity of the France journalist [Enderlin]. Muhammad al-Durrah was not dead, his father was not injured, Muhammad was alive. In their eyes, Charles Enderlin would be a falsifier of actuality." Enderlin has reported facing death threats and a hate campaign that required him to engage a security company to protect his family's home. Canal+ puts this in the context of a campaign by "radical activists" to target journalists who do not conform with their viewpoint of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Europe 1 journalist François Clémenceau comments: "We realized that it was not just aimed at Enderlin, it is all those who, directly or indirectly, [are] following the affairs of the Middle East."^[43]

Both sides have invoked the idea of the "blood libel"—the ancient allegation against the Jewish people that they are willing to sacrifice other people's children.^[99] From the Arab perspective, the footage proves it; from the Israeli perspective, the willingness of the world to accept the footage at face value is an example of antisemitism. David Gelernter writes that, if it can ever be shown that the footage was not authentic, "Where does Israel go to get its reputation back? What will it all matter to grief-stricken Israelis whose children, husbands, mothers and fathers have died in acts sparked by the Dura story?"^[100] Luc Rosenzweig, a retired managing editor of Le Monde, has called the images an "almost perfect media crime."^[100]

A few writers have compared the situation to the Dreyfus affair in 1894, when a French-Jewish army captain in Paris, Alfred Dreyfus, was found guilty of treason based on a forgery, but this time with Philippe Karsenty, Israel, or the Jewish people standing in Dreyfus's place.^[101] Enderlin, himself a Jew and an Israeli, has expressed astonishment at this position. "You really believe that a father and his child would be playing ... in front of an Israeli position, under shooting, real shooting, in front of a dozen Israeli soldiers, and they would be staging?" he asked Esther Schapira, one of his critics. "You believe that?"^[102] He and Abu Rahma have offered to take polygraph tests if a suitably independent inquiry is established, and Jamal has said he's willing to have his son's body disinterred.^[8] Some journalists in France say Enderlin made a mistake but can't admit it. "Guy sends him pictures from Gaza, tells him the Israelis shot the kid, he believes him—I mean, even the Israeli Defense Forces spokesman believed it!" Jean-Ives Camus told the Weekly Standard. "But you can't own up one, two years after the fact. It's too late ..."^[65]

At the center of the controversy, yet for the most part silent, the al-Durrah family is reported as profoundly affected, in part because of the repeated broadcasting of the footage. Muhammad Mukhamier, a psychologist who treated the six remaining children, said they were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—wetting their beds, having recurring nightmares, becoming withdrawn and isolated, and denying that Muhammad was dead. His sister, Nora, aged six at the time, was afraid to go to sleep because she was being followed everywhere by a ghost who was waiting to kill her.^[98] Jamal is similarly haunted, unable to escape the images himself, and dismayed by some of the commercialization—he has even seen himself and his son on a toilet roll.^[54] "I can't get over that moment," he told the Los Angeles Times in 2003. "He sticks to me."^[16]

Notes

References

Further reading