Killing of Muhammad al-Durrah

Killing of Muhammad al-Durrah

Jamal and Muhammad al-Durrah
Date	September 30, 2000 (2000-09-30)
Time	circa 15:00 hours (Israel Summer Time); noon GMT
Location	Netzarim junction, Gaza Strip
First reporter	Charles Enderlin for France 2
Filmed by	Talal Abu Rahma
Casualties
Three reported deaths by shooting: Muhammad al-Durrah; Bassam al-Bilbeisi, an ambulance driver; and an unnamed jeep driver/policeman
Jamal al-Durrah reported with multiple gunshot wounds
Suspects	Israel Defense Forces, Palestinian National Security Forces, Palestinian gunmen
Convictions	None
Footage	Original France 2 report;raw footage, al-Durrahs from 7:18 mins

The Muhammad al-Durrah incident took place at the Netzarim junction in the Gaza Strip on September 30, 2000, on the second day of the Second Intifada, amid widespread rioting throughout the Palestinian territories. Jamal al-Durrah and his 12-year-old son, Muhammad, were filmed by Talal Abu Rahma, a Palestinian cameraman freelancing for France 2, as they sought cover behind a concrete cylinder after being caught in crossfire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian security forces. The footage, which lasts just over a minute, shows the pair holding onto each other, the boy crying and the father waving, then a burst of gunfire and dust, after which the boy is seen slumped across his father's legs.

Whether the Israelis or the Palestinians shot the boy is a matter of dispute. Fifty-nine seconds of the scene were broadcast in France with a voiceover from Charles Enderlin, France 2's bureau chief in Israel, who did not witness the incident, telling viewers that the al-Durrahs had been the "target of fire from the Israeli positions", and that the boy had died. After an emotional public funeral, Muhammad was hailed throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds as a Palestinian martyr; streets and parks were named after him, and postage stamps bore his image. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) accepted responsibility within three days, saying the shots had apparently been fired by their soldiers, a position that was formally withdrawn in September 2007.

In the months and years following the incident, a number of commentators questioned the accuracy of France 2's report. A controversial IDF investigation in October 2000 concluded that the IDF had probably not shot the al-Durrahs. Three senior French journalists who reviewed the raw footage in 2004 argued that it is not clear from the footage alone that the boy died, and that France 2 cut a final few seconds in which he appears to lift his hand from his face. France 2's news editor, Arlette Chabot, said in 2005 that no one could say for sure who fired the shots. Other commentators, including the director of the Israeli government press office, said the scenes had been staged by Palestinian protesters. Philippe Karsenty, a French media commentator, was sued for libel in 2004 by France 2 for suggesting this; a ruling against him in 2006 was overturned by the Paris Court of Appeal in May 2008, a decision that France 2 has taken to the French Supreme Court.

The footage has acquired what one writer called the iconic power of a battle flag. For the Palestinians, it confirmed their view of the apparently limitless nature of Israel's brutality toward them. For the Israelis, the world's willingness to believe they had killed the boy was a modern version of the blood libel, the centuries-old antisemitic association of Jews with child sacrifice. The scene has been evoked in other deaths. It was blamed for the lynching of two Israeli army reservists in Ramallah in October 2000, and was seen in the background when Daniel Pearl, a Jewish-American journalist, was beheaded by al-Qaeda in 2002. James Fallows writes that no version of the truth about the footage will ever emerge that all sides consider believable. Charles Enderlin has called it a cultural prism, its viewers seeing what they want to see.

Political background

Second Intifada

Rioting followed Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount

On September 28, 2000, two days before the shooting, 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 its rules of access a hotly contested issue. Sharon's visit was seen as provocative—the trigger for the violence that followed, according to the Palestinians, or the pretext, according to the Israelis—and the next day violent protests broke out in and around the Old City, leaving seven Palestinians dead and 300 wounded. On the same day, an Israeli police officer was killed by a Palestinian police officer in a joint patrol. The May 2001 Mitchell Report into what caused the violence concluded that, although Sharon's visit was poorly timed and its effects foreseeable, it was not the cause of the uprising.

On September 30, the day of the shooting, 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 over four years and cost 4,000 lives, around 3,000 of them Palestinian.

The Gaza Strip, showing the Bureij refugee camp, the former Netzarim Israeli settlement, and the Netzarim junction

Source of dispute at the Netzarim junction

The Netzarim junction lies a few kilometers south of Gaza City (at 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. The source of the dispute there was the nearby Israeli settlement of Netzarim—where 60 Israeli families lived until 2005, when Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip. The junction was the site of an Israeli military outpost, Magen-3, which guarded the approach to the settlement. 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 at the junction.

People

Charles Enderlin

Charles Enderlin was born in Paris in 1945. Jewish himself, he 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).

Enderlin is highly respected within the French establishment. He is married to Danielle Kriegel, the daughter of Annie Kriegel, the anti-communist historian, and sister of philosopher Blandine Kriegel, a former aide to President Jacques Chirac. During a 2006 libel action he brought against Philippe Karsenty, who alleges the incident was staged by protesters (see below), Enderlin submitted as part of his evidence a 2004 letter from Chirac, who wrote in flattering terms of his integrity. His stature within the country was confirmed in August 2009, when he was awarded France's highest decoration, the Légion d'honneur.

Paris-based journalist Anne-Elisabeth Moutet writes that Enderlin's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is highly regarded by his peers in France but is regularly criticized in Israel. He not only produced a documentary series on the Oslo Accords and the 2000 Camp David talks, but arranged for several of the parties to the peace talks to hold discussions at the France 2 bureau as neutral ground. The criticism of him inside Israel after the al-Durrah report reached such fever pitch that, in 2008, an Israeli court was asked by the Israel Law Center to revoke his press credentials, though the court and government refused. He said in an interview that he had faced death threats, had to arrange for extra security for his home, and that his wife had been assaulted twice in the street.

Enderlin was 70 miles (110 km) away in Ramallah during the shooting, but kept in touch with the cameraman by cell phone as the story unfolded, and has said he trusts him implicitly. "The video is authentic", he told Esther Schapira. "You can say that the boy was killed by Martians, by Palestinians, or by Israelis, [but] we did not stage these scenes. It is a smear campaign against me and France 2 by people who don't like my reports, my books, and my documentaries."

Talal Abu Rahma

Talal Hassan 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' Association. He won a number of awards for his coverage of the al-Durrah story, including the Rory Peck Award in 2001. Israel military officials prevented him from traveling to London to receive the award for "security reasons." France 2 correspondent, Gérard Grizbec, wrote in 2008 that Abu Rahma had never been a member of a Palestinian political group, and had twice been arrested by Palestinian police for filming images that did not meet the approval of Yasser Arafat, then Chairman of the Palestinian Authority. He had also never been accused of security breaches by Shin Bet, Israeli's internal security service.

Daniel Seaman, director of the Israeli government press office, accused Abu Rahma on September 23, 2007—in a letter to Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, attorney for the Israel Law Center, Shurat Hadin—of the "systematic staging of action scenes," with reference to the al-Durrah footage. France 2 responded to Ra'anan Dinur, the director general of the Israeli Prime Minister's Office, that it was "astonished to read Daniel Seaman's letter, which is full of slander and half-truths." Abu Rahma has strongly denied the allegations since they first surfaced in October 2000. "I'm professional journalist," he told On the Media in 2001. "I will never do it. I will never use journalism for anything ... because journalism is my religion. Journalism—it's my nationality. Even journalism is my language!"

Jamal and Muhammad al-Durrah

Jamal, born around 1966, and his wife, Amal, lived with their five sons and two daughters in the UNRWA-run Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip, several kilometers south of the Netzarim junction. Jamal was a carpenter and house painter who had been working for Moshe Tamam, an Israeli contractor in north Tel Aviv, for 20 years, since Jamal was 14. Through Tamam, Israeli writer Helen Schary Motro had employed Jamal to help build her house, and had come to know him. She wrote in 2000 of his years of rising at 3:30 am to catch the bus to the border crossing at four, then a second bus out of Gaza so he could be at work by six, able to make it only when the border was open. The border was closed on the day of the incident because of the 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 the general strike. According to the boy's mother, on the evening before the incident, he had been watching the violence on television and asked if he could join the protests in Netzarim. He had been known to run off to the beach or to watch older boys throw stones during protests. Father and son decided instead to go to a car auction, according to an interview Jamal gave Abu Rahma in the Al-Shifa Hospital on October 1, 2000.

The scene on the day

Netzarim junction layout

The Netzarim junction is a right-angle intersection of two roads. At the time of the shooting, in the lower right/north west quadrant (see above), there was an abandoned warehouse, two six-story office or apartment buildings known locally as the "twins," or "twin towers," and a two-story building that the IDF was using as a military outpost called Magen-3, which guarded the approach to the Nezarim Israeli settlement, where 60 Jewish families lived. On the day of the incident—Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year—this outpost was manned by 18 Israeli soldiers from the Givati Brigade Engineering Platoon and the Herev Battalion.

• 
  Talal Abu Rahma, the France 2 cameraman, included this diagram in an affidavit he swore in October 2000 in the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza.
• 
  A ballistics expert commissioned by Philippe Karsenty presented this diagram to the Paris Court of Appeal in 2008. It included a position called the "pita" (see lower left quadrant), where several sources say Palestinian police officers stood, armed with automatic rifles; see below. This position did not appear on the France 2 cameraman's diagram, which marks that area as "Fields".

Diagonally across from the IDF position, on the upper left quadrant, was a small building housing a Palestinian police post under the command of Brigadier-General Osama al-Ali, a member of the Palestine National Council. In front of it was a sidewalk along which ran a concrete wall. This was the wall that Jamal and Muhammad crouched against. The upper right and lower left of the crossroads consisted of vacant land. According to several commentators, such as James Fallows in The Atlantic in 2003, and a diagram prepared in 2008 by a French ballistics expert (above right), the lower left quadrant contained a circular dirt berm known locally as the "pita," because it was shaped like pita bread. Fallows writes that a group of uniformed Palestinian policemen stood on the pita, armed with automatic rifles. The "pita" position is not mentioned in the diagram produced by the France 2 cameraman, which marks the position only as "Fields" (see above left and below).

News organizations and protesters

A crowd of Palestinian protesters had gathered at the junction early on the morning of Saturday, September 30. Abu Rahma said that from around seven in the morning, protesters had thrown rocks and Molotov cocktails, and the IDF had returned with rubber bullets and tear gas. Several news organizations had gathered too, including camera crews from Reuters amd the Associated Press (AP). Both Reuters and the AP captured moments showing the al-Durrahs, but the crucial minute of footage was captured only by Abu Rahma.

James Fallows writes that the raw footage, or "rushes", from these news organizations shows a number of separate scenes involving several hundred protesters. Groups of young men are seen walking around, joking, sitting down, and smoking. Other scenes show protesters yelling and throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails. Some protesters run around waving the Palestinian flag and try to pull down an Israeli flag. Several had pistols and rifles, as did the Palestinian policemen, and shots occasionally ring out. In some of the scenes, protesters duck for cover, while, according to Fallows, others continue talking and smoking only feet away. One protester is seen falling and clutching his leg, as if shot; an ambulance appears immediately to pick him up. Fallows writes that one camera caught a man being loaded into an ambulance, while footage from a different camera shows the same man jumping out of the ambulance a few minutes later. There is no obvious linkage between any of the scenes, which according to Fallows gain narrative coherence only when packaged together for a news report. Several commentators agree there was at least some play acting that day for the cameras. Denis Jeambar, editor of L'Express, and Daniel Leconte, a former France 2 correspondent, who were invited by France 2 to view the rushes in 2004, said that a network official told them, "You know it's always like that." Enderlin has replied that just because scenes are played out for the camera does not mean they are not also real.

Fallows writes that several scenes show smoke coming from M16s pointed through the slits of the IDF outpost. According to Israeli spokesmen, the soldiers were under orders to fire only if they were fired at, and not in response to rocks or other objects being thrown at them.

Incident as initially reported

Jamal and Muhammad's arrival at the junction

After leaving the auction empty-handed, Jamal and Muhammad decided to take a cab home, 2 kilometres (1.2 mi) away. They arrived at the Netzarim junction around noon, according to Time magazine, though that timing has been disputed. Abu Rahma says the "intensive shooting" began around noon, and his attention was drawn at around the same time to Jamal and Muhammad by Shams Oudeh, a Reuters cameraman who briefly took shelter with them behind the concrete drum. James Fallows wrote in 2003 that Jamal and Muhammad first appear on the footage around 3 pm (GMT+3), and Charles Enderlin's report describes the shooting as taking place at 3 pm. The discrepancies have not been resolved; see below.

The cab driver reportedly stopped when he saw the demonstrators and refused to go any further, or was stopped by a policeman who said the junction had to be kept clear for ambulances. Jamal decided to cross the junction on foot to look for another cab. As they were about to cross, Palestinian gunmen started shooting at the Israeli soldiers, and the Israelis returned fire. Jamal and Muhammad waited until it had stopped, then crossed the road. The shooting started up again, and Jamal, Muhammad, and Oudeh, the Reuters cameraman, crouched against the concrete wall in the upper left/south east quadrant of the crossroads, diagonally across from the Israeli outpost. They used a three-foot tall concrete drum that was lying against the wall as cover. A large paving stone sat on top of the drum, which offered further protection. The Reuters cameraman later moved away, and Jamal and Muhammad were left there alone.

The shooting and the France 2 reports

The camera goes out of focus as a burst of gunfire is heard.

As the dust clears, Muhammad lies across his father's legs. This was the last frame of the al-Durrahs that was broadcast by France 2. In the raw footage shortly after this frame, the boy is seen to move his arm. Enderlin later said he cut that scene to spare the audience, because the boy was in his death throes ("agonie"). Critics say the boy was peeking at the camera. Three senior French journalists who viewed the rushes say they show no death throes; see below. -->

Abu Rahma was the only cameraman to record the incident. He swore in an affidavit on October 3, 2000, that he had filmed 27 minutes of an exchange of gunfire that he said had lasted 45 minutes. Around 64 seconds of his footage is focused on Jamal and Muhammad.

The tape was edited for broadcast by Charles Enderlin. Fifty-nine seconds of the scene with the al-Durrahs were shown, with a voiceover by Enderlin. The footage shows Muhammad and his father crouching behind the cylinder, the child screaming and the father shielding him. The father is seen waving toward the Israeli position, and appears to shout something in the direction of the cameraman. There is a burst of gunfire and the camera goes out of focus. When the gunfire subsides, the footage shows the father sitting upright, appearing to have been injured, and the boy lying over his legs.

Ambulances were called to the scene but were delayed by the shooting. Bassam al-Bilbeisi, the driver of the first ambulance to arrive, was reported to have been shot and killed, as was a Palestinian policeman or jeep driver. Abu Rahma said Muhammad lay bleeding for at least 17 minutes before an ambulance was able to pick him up, though no film was taken at that point. The boy and his father were eventually taken to the nearby Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. Talal Abu Rahma telephoned the hospital, who told him three bodies had been delivered: that of a military jeep driver, an ambulance driver, and a boy, who was initially named as Rami Al-Durrah. Some confusion remains about the sequence of events; see below. For the initial reporting of the name, see here.

The 59 seconds of footage were first broadcast on France 2's nightly news at 8:00 pm local time (GMT+2), after which France 2 distributed several minutes of raw footage around the world without charge; Enderlin said the network did not want to profit from the death of a child. The anchorwoman introduced the news with a summary of the unrest since Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount on September 28, and an "unprecedented wave of violence that has resulted in 15 dead and 500 wounded Palestinians on Saturday [September 30]". This was followed by Enderlin's report:

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.

Jamal and Muhammad's injuries; funeral

Muhammad was reported by the BBC to have been shot four times. Time magazine said he had received a fatal wound to the abdomen, which was confirmed by the pathologist in attendance, Dr Abed El-Razeq El Masry of Al-Shifa Hospital, who said the boy's injuries were such that his intestines had been expelled. The pathologist's post-mortem photographs were seen by the French channel Canal+ in 2008, and showed the body with injuries to the abdomen (but see below). During an emotional public funeral in the Bureij refugee camp that same day, the boy was wrapped in a Palestinian flag and buried before sundown, in accordance with Muslim tradition. A white marble headstone reads: "Those who die in battle do not really die, but live on".

Jamal was reported to have been struck by twelve bullets, some of which were removed from his arm and pelvis. According to Dr Ahmed Ghadeel of the Al-Shifa Hospital, 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. He was filmed by Talal Abu Rahma for France 2 at the hospital the day after the incident. Dr Ghadeel was also interviewed, showing X-ray photographs of Jamal's shattered right elbow and right pelvis.

Jamal's Israeli employer, Moshe Tamam, tried to have him transferred from Gaza to an Israeli hospital and offered to cover the expenses, but the Palestinian Authority, or Jamal himself, declined the offer. He was flown instead to the King Hussein Medical Centre in Amman, Jordan, where he was visited by King Abdullah. Jordanian doctors said his right hand would be permanently paralyzed. The nature of his injuries was later questioned by an Israeli doctor; see below.

Cameraman's account

Enderlin based his allegation that the IDF had shot the boy on the report of the cameraman, Abu Rahma. Suzanne Goldenberg, writing in The Guardian, quoted Abu Rahma saying of the IDF: "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."

Abu Rahma said that, as well as the IDF post next to the buildings called "the twins" on the northwest side of the junction, he could see a Palestinian National Security Forces outpost located south of the junction, just behind the spot where the father and boy were crouching. He said shooting was coming from there too, but not 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, the Reuters photographer who for a time crouched beside Muhammad and his father behind the concrete cylinder. Abu Rahma told National Public Radio on October 1, 2000:

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 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 ...

About an hour later, during which time the al-Durrahs were evacuated by ambulance, Abu Rahma managed to escape from the scene, he said. In 2002, he told German journalist Esther Schapira that he hid behind a white minivan for safety while he was filming the al-Durrahs, and that it was around 15 minutes after the shooting ended before he felt it was safe to drive to his studio in Gaza to send the footage by satellite to France 2's bureau in Jerusalem. Enderlin compiled his report in Jerusalem after watching the footage and asking the IDF for comment. An affidavit sworn by Abu Rahma on October 3, 2000, says that the Israeli soldiers shot the boy in cold blood: "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." The affidavit was given to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza, and signed by the cameraman in the presence of Raji Sourani, a well-known human rights lawyer. France 2's communications director, Christine Delavennat, later said Abu Rahma denied having accused the Israeli army of firing at the boy in cold blood, and that this had been falsely attributed to him.

Israeli response

Ephraim Sneh, Israel's deputy prime minister, stressed that it was an accident.

Isaac Herzog, the Israeli Cabinet Secretary, said the Palestinian police could have stopped the shooting.

The position of the Israeli government and IDF changed over time, from accepting responsibility in October 2000 to retracting that admission in September 2007.

The IDF's first response when Enderlin contacted them for comment shortly before his first broadcast was that the Palestinians "make cynical use of women and children," which he decided not to air, because it was not about the event itself. The day after the shooting, the IDF issued a statement regretting the loss of human lives, and saying it was impossible to determine the origin of the fire. On October 3, the Israeli army's chief of operations, Major-General Giora Eiland, said the shots had apparently been fired by Israeli soldiers; the soldiers had been shooting from small slits in the wall, he said, and had not had a clear field of vision. He told Israel Radio: "There was an investigation by the major-general of the southern command [Major-General Dr. Yom Tov Samia], and apparently [the boy was killed by] Israeli army fire at the Palestinians who were attacking them violently with a great many petrol bombs, rocks and very massive fire. ... This is not the first incident in which civilians were injured, but it has never been intentional. ... It is known that [Mohammed al-Durrah] participated in stone-throwing in the past."

Second Lieutenant Idan Quris, who was at the time in command of an engineering platoon at the Israeli outpost, and Lieutenant-Colonel Nizar Fares of the Herev Battalion, at the time acting commander of the outpost, said they did not know who killed the boy, and that no one had seen him from the Israeli position.

Ephraim Sneh, Israel's deputy prime minister, stressed that it was an accident. The Israeli Cabinet Secretary, Isaac Herzog, said that Palestinian security forces could have intervened. "[I]f Palestinian policemen had wanted to save the boy," he told the BBC, "they could have walked into the square, said 'Stop the fire'... and rescued the kid". He said that Palestinian police should have called their Israeli counterparts, and that the Israelis had been trying to speak to Palestinian commanders for hours.

In late October 2000, General Samia set up a controversial team of largely non-military investigators (see below), who concluded that the IDF was probably, or certainly, not responsible, depending on who was issuing the statement. The investigators' report was not published, but was presented in 2001 to the Prime Minister's foreign media adviser, Ra'anan Gissin, and Daniel Seaman, director of the Israeli government press office. Gissin and Seaman began to challenge France 2 in media interviews, to the point where the network threatened the Prime Minister's office three times with legal action. In 2005, Major-General Eiland publicly retracted the army's admission of responsibility, and in September 2007 a government press office statement to that effect was approved by the Prime Minister's office. Seaman writes that this was done, at least in part, because Israel's reluctance to support Philippe Karsenty in the libel action France 2 had brought against him (see below)—based on an unwillingness to appear to interfere in another state's legal proceedings—was being misinterpreted as a validation of the France 2 report.

Controversy

The controversy centers on two areas: the raw footage and its interpretation by Charles Enderlin, and the lack of an official investigation into the boy's death. There is confusion regarding when the incident occurred exactly, how much footage was shot, why it was blurred at the moment the shots were fired, why France 2 cut the final scene, and what time the boy arrived at the hospital. No ballistic tests were conducted. Within days of the incident, the IDF demolished the wall and concrete cylinder the al-Durrahs had sheltered against. There is no evidence that bullets were recovered, whether from the scene, from the bodies, or from Jamal. There was reportedly no full autopsy, though pathologists did examine the boy's body.

Next to the view that Israeli gunfire killed the boy, which Enderlin still maintains, two alternative narratives have emerged, which commentators such as Adi Schwartz of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz call the "minimalist" and "maximalist" narratives. The "minimalist" narrative is that Palestinian gunfire caused his death, or that no one knows who did—this has also been called the "third way." The "maximalist" narrative, which Larry Derfner writing in The Jerusalem Post calls a conspiracy theory, is that the incident was staged by the Palestinians for propaganda purposes—without the knowledge of Enderlin or France 2—and that the boy may not be dead at all, or may have been killed as part of the staging.

IDF investigation (October 2000)

Shaul Mofaz, the IDF's Chief of Staff at the time, said the investigation had not been initiated by the IDF's General Staff.

Major General Yom Tov Samia, the IDF's southern commander, set up a team of investigators shortly after the incident, though the extent to which it was an official investigation remains unclear. IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz told the Israeli Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on November 7, 2000, that the team was put together by Samia alone, and not by the IDF's General Staff, but Daniel Seaman, the Israeli government's press spokesman, said in 2008 that the investigation was an official one by virtue of Samia's rank. James Fallows writes that Israeli commentators questioned the legitimacy of it as soon as it started—Haaretz called it "almost a pirate endeavour."

The team appears to have been led by Nahum Shahaf, a physicist, assisted by Joseph Doriel, an engineer and former director of the Israel Institute of Productivity. The team included Meir Danino, a physicist and chief scientist at Elisra Systems; Bernie Schechter, a ballistics expert who was a former police chief superintendent 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 lab. A full list of those who took part was never released, and a request by Haaretz to see the investigation's order of appointment was turned down under Israel's Military Judgment Law.

Nahum Shahaf

Shahaf is known as one of the leading developers of pilotless light aircraft and video instrumentation, and was awarded a medal in 1997 by the Israeli Ministry of Science for his work on compressing digital video transmission. He had previously worked as an inventor, and for a time was a hang-glider instructor in California. According to Anat Cygielman in Haaretz, Shahaf was involved in some of the conspiracy theories surrounding the murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. Shahaf contacted Samia shortly after the al-Durrah incident to say he had noticed an anomaly, namely that the concrete drum itself seemed undamaged, though the people sheltering behind it were alleged to have been hit from a direction that should have seen the drum punctured too. He suggested that he and Doriel—they knew each other from previous discussions about the Rabin assassination, according to Cygielman—be engaged to conduct an investigation, free of charge. Enderlin said that Shahaf wrote to him requesting a copy of the unedited footage, saying it was for "various professional audiences, including film schools," with the name of a company, Eye to Eye Communications, next to his signature. Enderlin refused, and was subsequently concerned to learn that Shahaf was associated with an IDF inquiry.

Reconstruction

Because General Samia had destroyed the wall and the concrete drum the al-Durrahs had been crouching against, Shahaf and Doriel built models of the wall, the drum, and the IDF post in a location near Beersheba in the Negev desert. Fallows writes that the concrete drum with its two-inch-thick walls, which sat between the al-Durrahs and the Israeli line of fire, can be seen in the footage with a mark from the Israeli Bureau of Standards. This allowed Shahaf and Doriel to determine its dimensions and composition. They used mannequins to represent the al-Durrahs, then reproduced the shooting using M16 rounds. Each bullet made an indentation in the drum of two-fifths to four-fifths of an inch deep. Footage taken by Abu Rahma for France 2 the day after the incident does show ten indentations on the side of the drum that faced the IDF, but photographs of the drum reportedly show no damage on the side that the al-Durrahs were huddled against. That is, no bullets went right through the drum, Shahaf and Doriel concluded.

They also concluded that the round shape of the bullet holes in the wall showed the fire did not come from the IDF. They fired into the reconstructed concrete wall from different angles, and found that, to produce a round hole, they had to fire from more or less straight on. A shot from the angle representing the position of the IDF post produced an elongated hole. They concluded that the evidence was consistent with shots coming from a position behind the France 2 cameraman, roughly in the location of "the pita," the circular dirt berm in the north-west quadrant of the junction, where Palestinian police officers are alleged to have been standing, armed with automatic rifles (see above).

Conclusions and response

Knesset member Ophir Pines-Paz said the inquiry had "foregone conclusions."

On October 23, Shahaf and Doriel invited a CBS 60 Minutes camera crew to film the renactment, Doriel telling the CBS correspondent, Bob Simon, that he believed the boy's death was real, but had been staged to besmirch Israel's reputation. Those in the know included the cameraman and the boy's father, Doriel said, though the latter had not realized the boy would be killed. The interview was aired on November 12, 2000. When General Samia saw it, he removed Doriel from the investigation.

The report was never published. It was shown to the head of Israeli military intelligence, and the key points were presented to the media in November 2000 as not ruling out that the IDF had shot the boy, though describing it as unlikely. Danny Seaman and the prime minister's foreign media adviser, Dr. Ra'anan Gissin, were shown the report in early 2001. Initially skeptical, Seaman said the investigation convinced him that the France 2 story was inaccurate.

The investigation provoked widespread criticism. 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. Knesset member Ophir Pines-Paz said it appeared the army had set up an inquiry with foregone conclusions. There was also criticism from within the IDF. An unnamed senior army officer said the investigation was a "disgrace that has piled shame on what was a terrible accident."

Later presentations and 2008 IDF statement

In February 2005, Shahaf presented his views to the American Academy of Forensic Sciences. He said that ballistic evidence indicated that Muhammad had not been in the line of fire of the Israeli outpost, and that the spread of stone particles caused by the impact of bullets on the wall behind the boy indicated a less oblique angle of fire, consistent with the Palestinian position at "the pita". He concluded that the position of the Palestinians relative to the Israeli outposts suggests the shooting may have been deliberate, that some of the bullet holes were made artificially after the shooting, and that a long cut on the body described by one of the doctors was more consistent with a knife wound than a bullet. He said that the evidence of the doctors was not consistent with photographs of the boy's body, suggesting that the dead boy in the photographs was not al-Durrah, that the body had reached the hospital before the incident was reported to have started, and that the signs of injury on the boy's body were not consistent with fresh blood. He added that several manufactured incidents, including gunfights, were visible in the television footage.

In September 2007, an Israeli government press office statement, approved by the Prime Minister's office, withdrew the IDF's October 2000 acceptance of responsibility (see above for more details), and in 2008, an IDF spokesman, Col. Shlomi Am-Shalom, said the report showed the IDF could not have shot Muhammad. Citing the report in a letter that year to France 2—which requested that the network send the IDF the unedited 27 minutes of raw footage, as well as footage the France 2 cameraman shot the day after the incident—Am-Shalom wrote:

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 the 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.

Metula News Agency

Shahaf's position was taken up in 2002 by the Metula News Agency, also known as Mena, an Israeli French-language press agency. Created in May 2001 by Stéphane Juffa, and based in Metula, Israel, near the Lebanese border, it claims around 230,000 subscribers. Mena wrote about the al-Durrah case on an almost daily basis, and in November 2002 produced a 20-minute documentary called Al Dura—The Investigation, which was based largely on Shahaf's work. Juffa concluded that the incident was a "real set up, performed by actors." In January 2003, Gérard Huber, a French psychoanalyst who was also Mena's permanent correspondent in Paris, published a book, Contre expertise d'une mise en scene ("Second opinion on a set-up") which expounds the same theory.

Questions about the footage

There is confusion regarding how much footage was taken and what it shows. Abu Rahma said in his affidavit that the gunfight lasted 45 minutes, and that he filmed about 27 minutes of it. Just over one minute shows the al-Durrahs, and 59 seconds were broadcast. No part of the footage shows the boy dead, though Enderlin did announce his death: "Another burst of fire. Mohamed is dead and his father seriously wounded."

Enderlin cut a final few seconds from the end, during which the boy appears to lift his hand away from his face, leading critics to say he was peeking at the camera. 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 was "unbearable". Enderlin wrote to The Atlantic in response to an article in September 2003 by James Fallows:

James Fallows writes, 'The footage of the shooting ... illustrates the way in which television transforms reality' and, notably, 'France 2 or its cameraman may have footage that it or he has chosen not to release.' We do not transform reality. But since some parts of the scene are unbearable, France 2 cut a few seconds from the scene, in accordance with our ethical charter."

The issue of how much footage exists was further confused in November 2007. France 2 sued Philippe Karsenty, a French media commentator, for libel, after 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. Enderlin then seemed to say there had never been 27 minutes of footage; according to The Jerusalem Post, he said just before the screening, "I do not know where this 27 minutes comes from. In all there were only 18 minutes of footage shot in Gaza."

Senior French journalists view the footage

In February 2004, Arlette Chabot became news director of France 2, replacing Olivier Mazerolle, who had been in the position since March 2001. On October 22, 2004, the network allowed three senior French journalists to view the footage—Denis Jeambar, the editor-in-chief of L'Express; Daniel Leconte, head of news documentaries at Arte, the state-run Franco-German television network, and a former France 2 correspondent himself; and Luc Rosenzweig, a former managing editor of Le Monde. The journalists asked to speak to the cameraman, who was in Paris at the time, but France 2 reportedly told them he did not speak French and that his English was not good enough.

Having viewed the footage, Jeambar and Leconte wrote in Le Figaro on January 25, 2005, that there was no scene in it that showed the boy had died. They wrote that, when 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." While they did not believe the scene was 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."

The first 23 minutes of the footage showed Palestinians playing at war for the cameras, they said, falling down as if wounded, then getting up and walking away. A France 2 official told them, "You know it's always like that," 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," he said, "that there was a part that was staged, that it can happen often in that region for a thousand reasons." 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." In an interview with Cybercast News, he said he believed the Palestinians had shot the boy. "The only ones who could hit the child were the Palestinians from their position," he said. "If they had been Israeli bullets, they would be very strange bullets because they would have needed to go around the corner." He dismissed France 2's explanation—that perhaps the bullets that hit the boy had ricocheted off the ground. "It could happen once, but that there should be eight or nine of them, which go around a corner? They're just saying anything."

The third journalist to view the raw footage, Luc Rosenzweig—who had previously written material about the incident for the Metula News Agency, the Israeli French-language press agency (see above)—disagreed with Jeambar and Leconte. He concluded that the shooting had been staged, calling it "an almost perfect media crime." Jeambar and Leconte say that they and Rosenzweig had agreed not to discuss what they saw on the footage until all had agreed on a response, but Rosenzweig spoke to Mena about it, and Mena published an account of the viewing, concluding that it supported the allegation of staging. Jeambar and Leconte distanced themselves from that article and that conclusion. They wrote in Le Figaro: "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."

Enderlin's response to their criticism

On January 27, also in Le Figaro, Enderlin responded to Leconte and Jeambar's article. He thanked them for not subscribing to the theory that the footage was based on a staged scene, and said that the whispering campaign against him had resulted in death threats against him that were taken seriously by the Israeli police, forcing him to move house.

He wrote that he had said the bullets were fired by the Israelis because he trusted the cameraman, who had worked for France 2 since 1988. It was the cameraman who made the initial claim during the broadcast, and later had it confirmed by other journalists and sources. Enderlin said the Israeli army did not respond to France 2's offers to cooperate in an investigation.

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." Citing Ben Kaspi in the Israeli newspaper, Maariv, he said during the first months of the Second Intifada, the IDF had fired one million rounds of ammunition—700,000 in the West Bank and 300,000 in Gaza. He said that, from 29 September to late October 2000, 118 Palestinians were killed, including 33 under the age of 18, compared to 11 adult Israelis killed during the same period.

No bullets recovered

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. This was done before ballistics tests could be carried out.

In an interview with Esther Schapira for Three Bullets and a Dead Child, a 2002 documentary for Germany's ARD channel, Abu Rahma, the cameraman, said that bullets had, in fact, been recovered. He suggested Schapira ask a named Palestinian general about them. The general told Schapira that he had no bullets, and that there had been no Palestinian investigation because there was no doubt as to who had shot the boy. 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."

Confusion about timeline

Confusion has arisen about the timeline, some reports suggesting the boy was shot before ten in the morning, others at three in the afternoon. Enderlin's report, which aired on France 2's nightly news program at 8:00 pm (GMT+2), gave the time as 3:00 pm Israeli local time (GMT+3). James Fallows concurs that Jamal and Muhammad first make an appearance in the footage at 3:00 pm (GMT+3) 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.

Brian Whitaker wrote in The Guardian on October 5, 2000, that the news first arrived in London from the Associated Press at 6:00 pm BST (GMT+1), followed minutes later by a similar report from Reuters. These both named the boy as Rami Aldura. Abu Rahma explained later that early reports said the boy's name was Rami, until a local journalist from CBS, who was married to Jamal's sister, identified the couple in the footage as Jamal and Muhammad al-Durrah. This early confusion over times and names is one of the arguments German journalist Esther Schapira advances for her hypothesis that two boys were involved in shooting incidents that day; see below.

Contradicting the 3 pm timeline, Mohammed Tawil, the doctor who admitted Muhammad to the Al-Shifa Hospital, told German journalist Esther Schapira that this occurred around 10:00 am (GMT+3). Abu Rahma, the France 2 cameraman, said the intensive shooting began at noon. According to Stéphane Juffa of the Israeli Metula News Agency, another doctor at the Shifa hospital, Dr. Joumaa Saka, said that Muhammad was admitted before 1:00 pm. 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.

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, 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 it was midday.

Esther Schapira documentaries

Drei Kugeln und ein totes Kind (2002)

In March 2002, the German network ARD broadcast Drei Kugeln und ein totes Kind ("Three Bullets and a Dead child"), a documentary by German journalist Esther Schapira.

Interviews with Jamal, his wife, Abu Rahma, and Enderlin

Schapira interviewed Muhammad's mother, who said he had breakfast at 10 am (GMT+3), then left with his father for Gaza. His mother had forbidden him from going to the Nezarim junction because it was a "protest day," and she feared for his safety. Jamal and Muhammad approached the junction on their way to Gaza around 11 am, then headed to a car auction. On the way back, they clubbed together with other passengers and hired a cab, approaching the junction for a second time around midday. Jamal told Schapira that the junction was closed to traffic to allow ambulances through, and as they approached it, a police officer stopped the cab, and they proceeded on foot across the junction. Without warning, at around midday, there was suddenly live fire. Abu Rahma told Schapira that, before that, from seven in the morning onwards, there had only been protesters throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails, and the IDF firing rubber bullets and tear gas in response. Everyone, including the camera crews, ran for cover when the real shooting started. Abu Rahma hid behind a white minibus. He told Schapira there was shooting in all directions for about five minutes, but after that only from behind him, from the direction of the IDF post. Jamal and Muhammad hid behind the concrete drum. Abu Rahma said it was clear that the shooters were focusing on Jamal and Muhammad, because there was no one else in that area; others who had briefly hidden with them behind the concrete drum had taken cover elsewhere. He said the shooting continued for 45 minutes.

Jamal told Schapira, "I raised my right hand to signal to stop shooting at my son and me. They were shooting at us with fully automatic weapons." Abu Rahma told her, "The boy got hit in the stomach, while I hear that boom and the dust came. After the dust was clear, I saw the boy ... in his father's lap and he was bleeding." At that point, Schapira said, a hand covered the lens of the France 2 camera, and the film was cut, returning only when the dust had settled. Jamal and Muhammad were taken to hospital, and 15 minutes later, Abu Rahma was able to leave his position behind the white minibus. He reached his studio in Gaza at 4:15 pm (GMT+3), with 60 minutes of footage according to Schapira, where he was scheduled at 4:30 pm to feed his pictures to the France 2 Jerusalem office by satellite. He said he fed six minutes back to Jerusalem, which he described as "from the shooting to the end." Schapira said the footage arrived at the France 2 studio at around 6 pm. Enderlin asked the army for a statement. Without having seen the images or having interviewed the soldiers, the IDF spokesman spoke of a "cynical misuse of children." Enderlin then compiled his report.

Interviews with Israeli soldiers

Schapira interviewed three anonymous Israeli soldiers who were among the 25 on duty at the IDF post that day. One of them told her, "We know that when cameramen turn up, that's when something is going to happen. That day we knew immediately that something big was going down, as there were a lot of TV crews." She said that at least ten photographers and camera crews had gathered, Palestinians working for Western news agencies. Around midday, the situation began to escalate, as protesters climbed on top of the IDF base.

One of the soldiers told Schapira that the live fire had started from the high-rise Palestinian blocks known as "the twins"—see this image by Abu Rahma, where "the twins" are marked on the lower right quadrant as "Two Palestinian Housing Buildings". Someone was shooting from there down at the IDF post, the soldier said. He said he had not seen the al-Durrahs. The Israelis returned fire on a Palestinian station thirty meters to the left of the al-Durrahs, but the soldier told Schapira that their weapons were equipped with special optics that allowed them to fire very accurately, and that none of them had switched to automatic fire. In the view of the soldier, the shooting was no accident, because the range was too close and the visibility too good, but the fire did not come from the Israeli position, he said.

Response

Enderlin described the documentary as comprising "innuendo [but] no convincing demonstration," and rejected Schapira's claim that France 2 had withheld images of the scene. Israeli historian Tom Segev wrote that the documentary said nothing new about the incident, but did convey something about the power of propaganda and myth, and the failures of the IDF spokesman's office. He said that Schapira had not succeeded in ruling out that the IDF had killed the boy, but had merely shown that it was impossible to say with certainty that they had.

On October 2, 2002, Pierre Lurçat of the French Jewish Defense League was involved in organizing a demonstration of 1,000 protesters outside the France 2 offices in Paris. Schapira's film was projected onto a giant screen, and France 2 and Enderlin were awarded what the demonstrators called a "prize for disinformation," or "Goebbels Award". Enderlin described it as a "deliberate incitement to hatred [and] violence."

Das Kind, der Tod und die Wahrheit (2009)

In a second ARD film broadcast in March 2009, Das Kind, der Tod und die Wahrheit ("The Child, the Death, and the Truth"), Esther Schapira and reporter Geogre M. Hafner suggest that two Palestinian boys may have been injured that day, and that the boy who died and was buried may not have been Muhammad. The film was shortlisted for an Association of International Broadcasting Award in September 2009.

Interviews with doctors; time of funeral

Schapira interviewed Dr Mohammed Tawil of the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza. He said that, at 10 am (GMT+3), two people were delivered within a minute of one another, both dead. One was a small boy, the other an ambulance driver who had been shot through the heart. Tawil said he learned later that the boy was Muhammad Jamal al-Durrah. He said the boy had a serious injury to his abdomen, and that his bowels were lying outside his body. Schapira notes that, according to all other reports, Jamal and Muhammad had not yet reached the junction by 10 am (GTM+3), and that the shooting is reported to have started between midday and 2 pm (GMT+3). She also says that Jamal and Muhammad were reportedly transported away from the scene together, yet did not arrive at the hospital together, according to Dr. Tawil. She argues that the discrepancies suggest there was a mix-up of some kind.

Hospital records show that, at midday, a young boy was examined in the pathology department. Schapira argues that it was the same boy that Tawil had admitted, because the pathologist noted the same kind of injury. The pathologist, Dr Abed El-Razeq El Masry, examined the boy for about half and hour, and told Schapira that the boy's abdominal organs had been expelled and were lying outside his body. He showed Schapira images that he had taken of the body, with cards identifying it as Muhammad's. Schapira's camera zooms in to show a watch on the wrist of one of the pathologists, which appears to say 3:50 (GMT+3). That evening, before dusk, the funeral took place in the al-Bureij refugee camp, which Schapira says is about one hour away by car. Her camera again zooms in to show a watch on the wrist of a mourner, which appears to say 5:30 (GMT+3). Schapira argues that this cannot be Muhammad, because the time that had elapsed between the incident—reported by Enderlin as taking place at 3 pm (GMT+3)—and the funeral was too short (but see above regarding confusion over the timeline).

Name confusion; facial imaging expert; blood

Schapira suggests that the dead boy may have been called Rami al-Durrah. When the news first spread that a young boy had been killed and was lying in the hospital morgue, Rami was the name that was reported by several news agencies, including Reuters and the Associated Press. Brian Whitaker wrote in The Guardian on October 5, 2000:

The first report of Mohammed's killing came from the American agency, Associated Press, just before 6pm last Saturday [GMT+1]. Unedited, the relevant part said: 'Among those killed was a 12-year-old boy who was caught in the crossfire. The boy, Rami Aldura, and his father, were crouched behind a metal barrel, trying to seek cover and pleading for a ceasefire. The father held his hand protectively over the boy, who was screaming with fear, only to see his son fatally shot in the stomach.'

A few minutes later, Reuters circulated a report which said: 'In Netzarim, 12-year-old Rami Aldura and his father Jamal were caught in the crossfire.' Both reports got the boy's name partly wrong ...

The name was changed to Muhammad al-Durrah by Abu Rahma, the France 2 cameraman, after another journalist, Sami—who was married to Jamal al-Durrah's sister—saw the footage and identified the pair as Jamal and Muhammad. Abu Rahma explained to Schapira that, when he heard Sami say the boy in the film was Muhammad, he changed the name on the France 2 report:

He [Sami] shouted, "That is Muhammad al-Durrah, that is Jamal al-Durrah. I'm married to his sister." In that moment, they were reporting the name of the boy as Rami al-Durrah. As I then played back my material, I changed the news reports from Rami to Muhammad Jamal al-Durrah.

The assumption that the boy in the footage was also the boy in the hospital morgue may not have been correct, Schapira suggests. She arranged for Kurt Kinderman, a facial imaging expert, to examine images known to be of Muhammad, alongside images from the pathologist's examination and the funeral. Kinderman said that, in his view, the faces in the pathology and funeral images belong to the same boy, but they are not the same as the boy in photographs identified as Muhammad. He identified what he saw as significant differences in the shape of the eyebrows and the mouth. Schapira does not conclude from this that Muhammad is alive, or that the incident was staged. She obtained other images of an injured boy being taken to hospital, either on that day or some other, which appear to be images of Muhammad, but their authenticity has not been established, and the original source is unknown.

Schapira also argues that there is no sign of blood in the France 2 footage, except for one red mark that she suggests is a red piece of cloth; no blood stains by the concrete drum in some of the footage taken the next day; and in the images that do show blood stains by the drum—also taken the day after the incident—she argues that the color of the blood is too bright considering the time that had elapsed. She concludes that Muhammad may well have died, but not the way his death has been presented, and that there is no firm evidence to show whether he is alive or dead.

France 2 responded angrily to the documentary, threatening to end cooperation with ARD. Charles Enderlin called Schapira a "militant journalist" who had been taken in by the Israeli right. Schapira replied that Enderlin had "a strange understanding of press freedom."

Questions raised about father's injuries; Jamal al-Durrah litigation

On December 13, 2007, 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. 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 incident were actually scars from a tendon repair operation that David performed in 1994.

David made the same assertions in an interview with a "Daniel Vavinsky," published in Actualité Juive (Jewish News) on September 4, 2008. Charles Enderlin sent a "right of reply" to Actualité Juive, along with medical documents and photographs of Jamal's injuries. In late 2008, Jamal filed a defamation complaint against Actualité Juive with the Tribunal de grande instance (superior court) of Paris. The court subsequently established that "Daniel Vavinsky" was a pseudonym for Clément Weill-Raynal, a deputy editor at France 3, and a former adviser on antisemitism and misinformation with the Council of Jewish Organizations. In October 2009, the Paris magistrate issued defamation charges against Weill-Raynal and Serge Benattar, the managing editor of Actualité Juive.

Philippe Karsenty litigation

Enderlin-France 2 v. Karsenty (2006)

Philippe Karsenty of Media-Ratings was sued by France 2 when he called the al-Durrah footage a hoax.

In response to the claims that it had broadcast a staged scene, Enderlin and France 2 filed three defamation suits. It sought symbolic damages of €1 from each of the defendants, suing for a "press offence" under the Press Law of 1881. The most notable of the lawsuits was against Philippe Karsenty, a deputy mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine and financial consultant who runs a media watchdog, Media-Ratings. He wrote on November 26, 2004, in a press release and article entitled "France 2: Arlette Chabot and Charles Enderlin should be removed from their positions immediately," on the Media-Ratings website, that the scenes with the al-Durrahs had been faked by the cameraman, that Muhammad had not been killed, and that Enderlin and Chabot (France 2's news editor) should be sacked. On December 9, 2004, Enderlin issued a writ for libel, followed by France 2 on December 3, 2005.

The case began on September 14, 2006 at the Palais de Justice in Paris. Witnesses who offered statements on Karsenty's behalf included the French journalist, Luc Rosenzweig; Francis Balle, a media professor and former member of the Conseil supérieur de l'audiovisuel, a media regulatory institution; Richard Landes, an American academic who studied the footage; Gérard Huber, author of Contre expertise d'une mise en scene; and Daniel Dayan, research director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Dayan wrote: "I am ready to affirm, not that it was necessarily a set up, but that you are correct in noting the absence of verifying elements that would allow one to determine the veracity of the images ... The images broadcast did not justify the commentary that accompanied their broadcast ..."

Enderlin did not attend the hearing, but submitted as part of his evidence a letter from two years earlier, February 2004, from Jacques Chirac, then president of France. The letter did not mention the al-Durrah incident, but testified in general terms to Enderlin's integrity. The court was not persuaded by Karsenty's evidence, and upheld France 2's complaint on October 19, 2006, fining Karsenty €1,000 and ordering him to pay €3,000 in costs. Karsenty lodged an appeal that same day.

Karsenty v. Enderlin-France 2 (2007)

Public screening of the raw footage

The appeal began on September 19, 2007, heard by the 11th Chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal, the three-judge panel presided over by Judge Laurence Trébucq. The court asked France 2 to turn over, no later than October 31, the 27 minutes of raw footage the cameraman had said he had shot, to be shown during a public hearing on November 14. France 2 produced only 18 minutes. Karsenty refers to this discrepancy as "the first tampering of the evidence," though Enderlin told The Jerusalem Post on the day of the hearing that France 2 had produced all the raw footage it had, based on "an original tape that was kept in a safe until now. We presented a DVD that was made in front of a bailiff from the original tape... not from the various copies you can find here and there." He said, "I do not know where this 27 minutes comes from. In all there were only 18 minutes of footage shot in Gaza."

Enderlin was present during the screening, the first time he had attended any of the hearings, along with around 60 people in the audience. The screening lasted from 2:15 to 4 pm, interrupted several times so that Enderlin could describe what was happening.

The footage showed demonstrators throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at an IDF outpost, apparently being injured and carried into ambulances, an interview that the cameraman conducted with a Fatah official, and the incident with the al-Durrahs in the last minute. The court heard that the boy put his hand to his forehad and moved his leg, after the cameraman had said he was dead, and that there was no blood on the boy's shirt. Enderlin argued that the cameraman had not said the boy was dead, but that he was dying, 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.

Schlinger report

Karsenty commissioned Jean-Claude Schlinger, a ballistics expert, to write a report for the court. Schlinger recreated the incident, examining the angle of the shots, the weapons, and the reported injuries. A diagram he produced—see the image on the right above—included a position behind the France 2 cameraman and in front of the al-Durrahs, a circular dirt berm known locally as "the pita." James Fallows writes that Palestinian policemen were standing there armed with automatic rifles. This position did not appear in the cameraman's eyewitness report; see the image on the left above. Schlinger's 90-page report concluded 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.

Appeal upheld

On February 27, 2008, the last day of hearings, Maître François Szpiner, former counsel to Jacques Chirac, referred to Karsenty as, "the Jew who pays a second Jew to pay a third Jew to fight to the last drop of Israeli blood", comparing him to 9/11 conspiracy theorist Thierry Meyssan and Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson. Karsenty had it in for Enderlin, Szpiner argued, because of Enderlin's even-handed coverage of the Middle East.

Despite the network's arguments, on May 21, 2008, in a 13-page decision, the court overturned Karsenty's conviction, ruling that he had presented a "coherent mass of evidence," and had "exercised in good faith his right to free criticism." The court said that his claims fell within the boundaries of permitted expression, and that statements provided by the cameraman were "not perfectly credible either in form or content". In a move reportedly unprecedented in French media litigation, France 2 appealed to the Cour de cassation, France's highest judicial court, a case that continues.

Petition in support of Enderlin

After the appeal, a petition in support of Enderlin was started by Le Nouvel Observateur, a left-leaning news magazine, and signed by 300 French writers and journalists, including Théo Klein, president of the Council of Jewish Organisations in France in the 1980s, though Klein acknowledged that he had added his name without having read it. It accused Karsenty of a "seven-year hate-filled smear campaign" to destroy Enderlin's "professional dignity," and objected to the appeal decision as "granting equal credibility to a journalist renowned for his rigorous work, and to willful deniers ignorant of the local realities and with no journalistic experience." Journalist Anne-Elisabeth Moutet writes that the petition was an example of the French journalists' guild closing ranks. "To understand the al-Dura affair," she wrote, "it helps to keep one thing in mind: In France, you can't own up to a mistake."

Independent group of inquiry established

The historian, Élie Barnavi, a former Israeli ambassador to France, called for an independent inquiry into the affair in an editorial in Marianne in June 2008, followed by Richard Prasquier, president of the Council of Jewish Organisations in France, who issued a public appeal for an inquiry on July 2, 2008.

Patrick de Carolis, CEO of France Télévisions which runs France 2, agreed in September 2008, at Prasquier's request, to form an independent group of experts to examine the issues, to be led by Patrick Gaubert, a member of the European Parliament and president of the International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism. The parties agreed to bring Jamal al-Durrah to Paris for medical tests to establish the nature of his injuries. In November 2009, Luc Rosenzweig wrote that Carolis has said Jamal is stuck in Gaza, unable to renew his passport. The Israeli authorities have reportedly said that no passport application has been made. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has told Prasquier that they do not intend to hinder Jamal's movements.

Personal and political impact

Place Mohammed al-Dura, Bamako, Mali, 2006

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". Helen Schary Motro argues that the footage took its place alongside other iconic images of children under attack: the boy with raised hands in the Warsaw ghetto (1943), the nine-year-old Vietnamese girl doused with napalm (1972), the firefighter carrying the dying baby away from the Oklahoma City bombing (1995).

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. Palestinian children started acting out the incident in their playgrounds, afraid of being killed in the same way. The images were blamed for the lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah on October 12, 2000, and for the burning of synagogues and a general rise in antisemitism in France. Al Qaeda spokesmen mentioned Muhammad several times, including Osama bin Laden shortly after 9/11 in a "warning" to President George Bush. An image of Jamal and Muhammad was seen in the background as journalist Daniel Pearl, an American Jew, was beheaded in February 2002. A would-be suicide bomber, 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.

French journalist Catherine Nay wrote that Muhammad's death "cancels, erases that of the Jewish child, his hands in the air before the SS in the Warsaw Ghetto."

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. 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. 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 prompted by antisemitism. French philosopher Pierre-Andre Taguieff has 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 in Dreyfus's place. French journalist Catherine Nay said that the death of Muhammad "cancels, erases that of the Jewish child, his hands in the air before the SS in the Warsaw Ghetto," suggesting, in effect, that anti-Arabism and Islamophobia are the new antisemitism.

Echoing Luc Rosenzweig's view that the images are an "almost perfect media crime," 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?" On the other side, the French news programm, Jeudi Investigation, attributes the controversy to radical pro-Israeli commentators, for whom al-Durrah is an unbearable symbol, and their determined use of the Web to undermine Enderlin and his report. Mid-East expert Jonathan Randal told the Weekly Standard that the people attacking Enderlin are paranoid: "Americans have been under the gun of such people for some time, but France used to be free of this kind of thing. [These groups] are paranoid, they're persistent, they never give up, they sap the energy of good reporters. I can't imagine how much money France 2 has spent defending this case. Charles Enderlin is an excellent journalist! I don't care if it's the Virgin Birth affair, I would tend to believe him." Other 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 said. "But you can't own up one, two years after the fact."

Enderlin, himself a Jew and an Israeli, has expressed astonishment at the idea the shooting was faked. "You really believe that a father and his child would be playing ... right in front of an Israeli position, in front of a dozen Israeli soldiers. Live bullets are being fired, and they're acting?" he asked Esther Schapira. "You believe that?" He and Abu Rahma have offered to take polygraph tests if a suitably independent inquiry is established, and if the soldiers at the IDF outpost take one too. Jamal has said he is willing to have his son's body disinterred.

At the center of the controversy, the al-Durrah family was reported in 2000 to be profoundly affected, in part because of the repeated broadcasting of the footage. A therapist who treated the remaining children said they were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—wetting their beds, becoming withdrawn and isolated, suffering recurrent nightmares, and denying that their brother was dead. Muhammad's 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. Jamal is similarly haunted, unable to escape the images himself, and dismayed by some of the commercialization—he has even seen a picture of himself and his son on a toilet roll. "I can't get over that moment," he told the Los Angeles Times in 2003. "He sticks to me."

See also

• Décryptage
• Pierre Rehov

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Further reading

• Google translator, accessed January 13, 2010.
• Template:Fr icon Enderlin, France 2 v. Karsenty October 19, 2006; English translation by Richard Landes (2006). Decision du 19 octobre 2006 par la 17ème Chambre du Tribunal correctionnel de Paris, no. 0433823049, accessed January 3, 2010.
• Template:Fr icon Karsenty v. Enderlin-France2, May 21, 2008; rough English translation, accessed January 3, 2010.
• Template:Fr icon Website of Phillipe Karsenty, accessed January 7, 2009; in English.
• Template:Fr icon Charles Enderlin's blog at France 2, accessed January 9, 2010.
• Amnesty International (2001). Broken Lives: A Year of Intifada, pp. 15–16, accessed January 2, 2010.
• Durand-Souffland, Stéphane (2007). "France 2 blanchie pour l'image choc de l'intifada", Le Figaro, October 20, 2006, accessed January 24, 2010.
• Derfner, Larry (2008). "Rattling the Cage: Al-Dura and the conspiracy freaks", The Jerusalem Post, May 28, 2008, accessed January 24, 2010.
• Le Meilleur des mondes debate:

• Template:Fr icon Taguieff, Pierre-André (2008). "L'affaire al-Dura ou le renforcement des stéréotypes antijuifs...", Le Meilleur des mondes, September 2008; Google translation, accessed January 12, 2010.
• Template:Fr icon Response to Taguieff: Grizbec, Gérard (2008). "Affaire al-Dura: Gérard Grizbec réagit à la contribution de Pierre-André Taguieef", Le Meilleur des mondes, October 2008; Google translation, accessed January 12, 2010.
• Template:Fr icon Response to Grizbec: Rosenzweig, Luc (2008). "Affaire al-Dura: Luc Rosenzweig réagit à la contribution de Gérard Grizbec", Le Meilleur des mondes, October 2008; Google translation, accessed January 12, 2010.
• Template:Fr icon Reichstadt, Rudy. "L'affaire al-Dura: des mythes concurrents sur fond d'intifada", Le Meilleur des mondes, October 2008; Google translation, accessed January 14, 2010.

• Schapira, Esther (2008). Propaganda against Israel: The Mohammed Al Durah Case and Staging Reality in the Media, European Forum on Antisemitism, June 18, 2008, accessed January 3, 2010.
• Template:Fr icon Schlinger, Jean-Claude (2008). Ballistics report prepared for Philippe Karsenty, Media-Ratings, February 19, 2008, accessed October 19, 2009.
• Sharansky, Natan (2007). "Palestinian Propaganda Coup", The Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2007, accessed January 24, 2010.
• Taguieff, Pierre-Andre (2008). La Judéophobie des Modernes. Des Lumières au Jihad mondial. Paris, Éditions Odile Jacob.
• Template:Fr icon Vidal, Dominique (2008). "Acharnement contre Charles Enderlin", Le Monde, May 29, 2008; Google translation, accessed January 14, 2010.

Video

• Original France 2 report, September 30, 2000, Charles Enderlin's blog, France 2, accessed January 12, 2010.
• France 2 raw footage, YouTube, the al-Durrahs are first seen at 7:18 minutes, accessed January 3, 2010. Also see the same material, Seconddraft.com, begins around 02:10 mins, accessed January 3, 2010.
• Final ten seconds of the footage, not shown by France 2, YouTube, accessed January 6, 2010.
• 180 seconds of the same scene, filmed by a Reuters cameraman crouching behind the al-Durrahs, Seconddraft.com, accessed January 3, 2010.
• Eight seconds of the same scene, filmed by an Associated Press cameraman, Seconddraft.com, accessed January 3, 2010.
• Debate between Arlette Chabot of France 2 and Philippe Karsenty (French), part 1/21, filmed September 18, 2008, courtesy of YouTube, accessed January 12, 2010.