Muhammad Jamal al-Durrah (1988–September 30, 2000) ) was a
PalestinianThe Palestinian people, also referred to as Palestinians or Palestinian Arabs , are an Arabic-speaking people with family origins in Palestine...
boy reported to have been killed by
Israel Defense ForcesThe Israel Defense Forces , commonly known in Israel by the Hebrew acronym Tzahal , are Israel's military forces, comprising the ground forces, air force and navy. It is the sole military wing of the Israeli security forces, and has no civilian jurisdiction within Israel...
(IDF) gunfire during a clash between the IDF and
Palestinian Security ForcesThe Palestinian National Security Forces are the paramilitary forces of the Palestinian National Authority . Since the signing of the Oslo Accords, these forces operate in select areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip....
in the
Gaza StripThe Gaza Strip lies on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Egypt on the south-west and Israel on the south, east and north. It is about long, and between 6 and 12 kilometers wide, with a total area of . The area is recognized internationally as part of the Palestinian territories...
on September 30, 2000, the first day of the Jewish New Year, and the second day of the Second Intifada. The boy became a symbol of the Palestinian cause, and was hailed throughout the Muslim world as an icon and Islamic martyr.
The Palestinian Authority had declared the day a general strike. Palestinian protesters had gathered to throw stones at an IDF outpost at the Netzarim junction, and cameramen from several news agencies were filming them. The violence escalated and shots were exchanged between Palestinian policemen and Israeli soldiers. Jamal al-Durrah and his son had arrived at the junction on their way back from a car auction and got caught up in the events. Talal Abu Rahma, a freelance Palestinian cameraman working for France 2, was the only one to film what happened to the al-Durrahs, though not who fired the shots. His footage shows Muhammad and Jamal seeking cover behind a concrete cylinder—after a burst of gunfire, the boy slumps forward and his father appears injured. A voice-over from
Charles EnderlinCharles Enderlin is a Franco-Israeli journalist, specialising in the Middle East and Israel.Enderlin came to international public attention in September 2000, when he provided the voice-over for a controversial France 2 report, now commonly referred to as the Muhammad al-Durrah affair, during which...
, the network's bureau chief in Israel, who was not present during the incident, said the boy and his father had been the "target of fire coming from the Israeli position." The boy's death was announced just after the shooting, and he was buried a few hours later.
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. France 2's news editor,
Arlette ChabotArlette Chabot is a prominent French journalist and political commentator. She currently is head of the editorial team of France 2....
, said in 2005 that no one could say for sure who fired the shots. A French media commentator,
Philippe KarsentyPhilippe Karsenty is a French media analyst and the founder of Media-Ratings, a media watchdog, which monitors the media in France for bias....
, 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. France 2 has appealed to the Cour de cassation, France's highest court, a case that is ongoing.
Sharon's visit to Temple Mount
On September 28, 2000, two days before the incident, the Israeli opposition leader
Ariel Sharon' is an Israeli general and statesman, former Israeli Prime Minister...
visited the
Temple MountThe Temple Mount , also known as Mount Moriah and by Muslims as the Noble Sanctuary , is a religious site in the Old City of Jerusalem. Due to its importance for Judaism and Islam it is one of the most contested religious sites in the world.The Temple Mount contains the holiest site in Judaism...
in the Old City of Jerusalem. The Temple Mount contains the holiest site in
JudaismJudaism is a set of beliefs and practices originating in the Hebrew Bible , as later further explored and explained in the Talmud and other texts...
and the third holiest in
IslamIslam Islam Islam ( al-’islām,
[There are ten pronunciations of Islam in English, differing in whether the first or second syllable has the stress, whether the s is or , and whether the a is pronounced as in father, as in cat, or (when the stress is on the i) as in the a of sofa...]
, making control of it, and access to it, a hotly contested issue in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sharon's visit was seen as a provocation, and the following day, September 29, violent protests broke out in and around the Old City, leaving seven Palestinians dead and 300 wounded. On September 30, further protests against the previous day's deaths escalated into widespread violence across the
West BankThe West Bank is a landlocked territory and is the eastern part of the Palestinian territories; on the west bank of the River Jordan in the Middle East. To the west, north, and south, the West Bank shares borders with the state of Israel, which maintains the security of this area. To the east,...
and Gaza Strip. The uprising became known as the Second or Al-Aqsa Intifada (named after the
Al-Aqsa MosqueAl-Aqsa Mosque , also known as al-Aqsa, is an Islamic holy place in the Old City of Jerusalem...
on Temple Mount). It lasted for 4-5 years, and cost 4,000 lives, around 3,000 of them Palestinian.
Netzarim junction
The violence on September 30, 2000, included a gun battle between Palestinian police and Israeli soldiers at the Netzarim junction in the Gaza Strip. 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 from the gunfire.
The Netzarim junction is a crossroads situated a few kilometers south of Gaza City (at ) 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 settlementIsraeli settlements are Israeli civilian communities in the Israeli-occupied territories . Such settlements currently exist in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights...
of
NetzarimNetzarim was formerly an Israeli settlement established in Gaza in 1972. It began as a secular Nahal outpost of the Hashomer Hatzair movement; in 1984 it became an orthodox kibbutz. A few years later, the residents decided to change from a kibbutz to a village...
—where 60 Israeli families lived until 2005, when Israel
withdrewIsrael's unilateral disengagement plan , also known as the "Disengagement plan", "Gaza expulsion plan", and "Hitnatkut") was a proposal by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, adopted by the government on June 6, 2004 and enacted in August 2005, to evict...
from the Gaza Strip. The junction was the site of a heavily fortified Israeli military outpost, codenamed Magen-3, which guarded the approach to the settlement. On the day of the shooting, the outpost was manned by 18 Israeli soldiers from the
Givati BrigadeThe Givati Brigade functions as the amphibious force and is one of the infantry brigades in the Israel Defense Forces. Givati soldiers are designated by purple berets...
Engineering Platoon and the Herev Battalion. A small post manned by Palestinian policemen stood on the diagonally opposite side of the junction.
The presence of Israeli settlers at Netzarim was vehemently opposed by local Palestinians, as a result of which the settlers were under orders to travel only with military escorts, which were regularly attacked with firebombs and rocks. Palestinian and Israeli security forces had mounted joint patrols in the area under
interim peace arrangementsInterim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip or Israeli-Palestinian Interim Agreement, or simply the Interim Agreement, also known as Oslo 2 , and alternately known as Taba, was a key and complex agreement about the future of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank...
, but in the days leading up to the shooting, there had been a series of violent incidents. Israel's ambassador to the United Nations, Yehuda Lancry, said stones and
Molotov cocktailThe Molotov cocktail, also known as the petrol bomb, gasoline bomb, or Molotov bomb, or simply Molotov, is a generic name used for a variety of improvised incendiary weapons...
s 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.
Charles Enderlin
Charles EnderlinCharles Enderlin is a Franco-Israeli journalist, specialising in the Middle East and Israel.Enderlin came to international public attention in September 2000, when he provided the voice-over for a controversial France 2 report, now commonly referred to as the Muhammad al-Durrah affair, during which...
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).
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 also contributed to CNN through the Al-Wetaneya Press Office. He had studied Business Administration in the U.S., and was a board member of the Palestinian Journalists' Assocation.
Jamal and Muhammad al-Durrah
Muhammad al-Durrah lived with his mother, Amal, his father, Jamal, and his four brothers and two sisters in the
United NationsUnited Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East is a relief and human development agency, providing education, health care, social services and emergency aid to over four hundred thousand Palestine refugees living in Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, as well as in the West...
-run
BureijBureij is a Palestinian refugee camp located in the central Gaza Strip east of the Salah ad-Din road in the Deir al-Balah Governorate. The camp's total land area is 529 dunums and in 2005, it had a population of 34,951 with 28,770 registered refugees....
refugee camp in the
Gaza StripThe Gaza Strip lies on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea. It borders Egypt on the south-west and Israel on the south, east and north. It is about long, and between 6 and 12 kilometers wide, with a total area of . The area is recognized internationally as part of the Palestinian territories...
, several kilometers south of the Netzarim junction. His father was a carpenter and house painter who 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.
Muhammad was a fifth grade student, but his school was closed on the day of the incident because of a general strike. His father was unable to go to work because Israel had closed the border after the rioting in Jerusalem the previous day. 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. 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.
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.
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. 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. Jamal, Muhammad, and Shams Oudeh, a Reuters cameraman, crouched behind a wall and a three-foot tall concrete drum—on top of which sat a large paving stone, which offered further protection—situated diagonally opposite the Israeli outpost. The cameraman later moved away, and Jamal and Muhammad were left there alone.
The shooting
The violence at the junction was recorded by cameramen working for several news agencies. 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. Around 64 seconds of the tape is focused on Jamal and Muhammad.
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. 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. 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.
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." Bassam al-Bilbeisi, the driver of the first ambulance to arrive, was shot dead as the fighting continued.
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. 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.
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. No autopsy was performed. 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 flagThe Palestinian flag is based on the Flag of the Arab Revolt, currently used to represent the Palestinian people and the State of Palestine, and adopted by the Palestinian Authority.The origins of the flag are the subject of dispute and mythology...
.
Jamal's 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. He was flown instead on October 2 to the Hussein Medical Centre in
AmmanAmman , sometimes spelled Ammann , is the capital city of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, a city of 2,525,000 inhabitants , and the administrative capital and commercial center of Jordan. It is also the largest city in Jordan. It is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world...
, Jordan, by the
Royal Jordanian Air ForceThe Royal Jordanian Air Force is the Aviation branch of the Jordanian Armed Forces.-History:...
, where he was visited by
King Abdullah of JordanAbdullah II bin al-Hussein is the current King of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. He ascended the throne on 7 February 1999 after the death of his father King Hussein. King Abdullah is a member of the Hashemite family and is reportedly a 43rd-generation direct descendant of Muhammad...
and Libyan leader
Muammar al-GaddafiMuammar Abu Minyar al-Gaddafi
1 has been the de facto leader of Libya since a coup in 1969....
. He was reported to have been struck by twelve bullets, some of which were removed from his arm and pelvis. He was also treated for wounds to both legs and his midsection, undergoing a number of operations over the course of four months before returning to Gaza. Jordanian doctors said his right hand would be permanently paralyzed. His injuries were later questioned by an Israeli doctor; see below.
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. 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."
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. 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.
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.
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.
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. Abu Rahma won several awards for the footage, including the "Year's Best Cameraman" from
Sonyis a multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan, and one of the world's largest media conglomerates with revenue exceeding ¥ 7.730.0 trillion, or $78.88 billion U.S. . Sony is one of the leading manufacturers of electronics, video, communications, video game...
. He 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!"
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."
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. 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."
The army's deputy chief of staff, Major-General Moshe Yaalon, accused the Palestinians of making "cynical use" of children. 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."
Summary
The controversy over al-Durrah's death centers on two areas: the raw footage and the investigation into the death, or lack thereof. There is first of all criticism of the way France 2 shot, edited, broadcast, and described the material. Abu Rahma said that he shot 27 minutes, but only 18 minutes were presented to a Paris court that asked to see the footage after France 2 sued a media commentator for libel. Of that 27 or 18 minutes, just over one minute was footage of Jamal and Muhammad. The material France 2 broadcast on September 30, 2000 was cut by Enderlin just before a scene in which Muhammad appears to move his hand. When challenged on this, Enderlin responded that he had cut out the boy's "death throes." It was later found that the footage showed no death throes.
Independently of those issues, questions have arisen because neither Palestinian nor Israeli officials conducted a full investigation. There is confusion regarding the time the shooting occurred, no bullets were formally recovered, there was no autopsy, no ballistics tests were conducted at the scene to determine the angle of the shots, and the Israeli army demolished a number of the structures around the junction, including the wall the al-Durrahs were leaning against, thereby destroying forensic evidence.
James FallowsJames Fallows is an American print and radio journalist who has been associated with The Atlantic Monthly for many years and has written nine books. His work has appeared in Slate, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The American Prospect, and other magazines...
writes in
The Atlantic that, as a result, "The truth about this case will probably never be determined. Or, to put it more precisely, no version of truth that is considered believable by all sides will ever emerge."
Next to the view that Israeli gunfire killed the boy, two alternative narratives have emerged, the so-called "minimalist" and "maximalist" narratives. The "minimalist" narrative is that Palestinian gunfire caused his death. The "maximalist" narrative is that the incident was a hoax staged for propaganda purposes. In 2007,
Daniel SeamanDaniel Seaman is the director of the Israel Government Press Office , which is a part of the Office of the Prime Minister in Jerusalem. He is one of the foremost experts on the foreign press coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, as a result of having headed the Information and Foreign Press...
, director of the Israeli government press office, said he believed the event had been staged.
Richard LandesRichard A. Landes is an American historian and author, specializing in Millennialism. He currently serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of History at Boston University...
, a
Boston UniversityBoston University is a private nonsectarian university located in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. Although chartered by the Massachusetts Legislature in 1869, Boston University traces its roots to the establishment of the Newbury Biblical Institute in Newbury, Vermont in 1839...
historian, studied footage from other Western news outlets on the day of the shooting, and concluded that the shooting had probably been faked; he called it an example of "
PallywoodPallywood, a portmanteau of "Palestinian" and "Hollywood", is a coinage that has been used by a number of bloggers, news analysts, and pro-Israel media watchdog advocates to describe what they regard as "media manipulation, distortion and outright fraud by the Palestinians and other Arabs .....
" cinema, arguing that Palestinian cameramen stage action scenes for the news media. Doreen Carvajal writes in
The New York Times that, from the perspective of France 2, the controversy is motivated by different agendas, including the ideology of extreme rightist groups, and efforts to have Enderlin removed from his Jerusalem post.
Raw footage
France 2 provided just over three minutes of footage to other news organizations free of charge, saying it did not want to profit from the incident. The footage became controversial because it showed only 59 seconds of 27 minutes of raw footage—27 minutes according to an affidavit given by the cameraman—and did not appear to show the boy's death. A final few seconds had been cut, during which the boy appears to lift his hand, leading critics to say he was peeking at the camera. Enderlin said he had cut this scene from his original report, and from the footage supplied to other media, 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."
Leconte, Jeambar, and Rosenzweig
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,
ArteArte is a Franco-German TV network. It describes itself as a European culture channel and aims to promote quality programming especially in areas of culture and the arts...
, and former France 2 correspondent; Dennis Jeambar, the editor-in-chief of
L'ExpressL'Express is the name of:*L'Express , the first news magazine in France*L'Express Airlines, a commuter airline in the southern USA between 1989-1992.*L'Express , a Toronto based newspaper...
; and Luc Rosenzweig, a former managing editor of
Le Monde—to view all 27 minutes of the raw footage. 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." 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."
The first 20 minutes of the 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," 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. 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." 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."
On February 15, 2005, Daniel Leconte said that al-Durrah had been shot from the Palestinian 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." Leconte said that, because of the consequences of the pictures, which he said included the public lynching of two Israeli soldiers and a rise in antisemitism among French Muslims, France 2 or Enderlin should admit that their report may have been misleading.
Enderlin's response to criticism
Enderlin responded to the charges 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. The context also played a role. "The image corresponded to the reality of the situation, not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank," where in the first month of the Intifada, the IDF had already killed 118 Palestinians, included 33 children, compared to the 11 Israelis killed, he wrote. 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.
Other footage shot at Netzarim junction
Footage shot by a Reuters cameraman shows the gun battle from a different angle. According to
Nidra PollerNidra Poller is an American writer and journalist who has lived in Paris since 1972.She has contributed to English language publications and web sites such as National Review, FrontPage Magazine and The New York Sun....
, 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. 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.
Bullets, bullet holes
No autopsy was performed, 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 a ballistics test could be carried out.
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. 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."
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."
Israel Standard TimeIsrael Standard Time is the standard time zone in Israel. It is two hours ahead of UTC .-History:...
is two hours ahead of GMT, while Israel Summer Time is three hours ahead; according to a law enacted by the
KnessetThe Knesset is the legislature of Israel, located in Givat Ram, Jerusalem.-Operation of 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.
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.
Brian WhitakerBrian Whitaker is a journalist for the British newspaper The Guardian since 1987 and its Middle East editor from 2000-2007. He has a degree in Arabic from the University of Westminster. He was formerly a Ph.D. candidate in Middle Eastern studies, but did not finish the degree...
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. Abu Rahma explained later that early reports named the boy as 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.
Against this, Mohammed Tawil, the local doctor who admitted Muhammad to the Shifa hospital, told German journalist
Esther SchapiraEsther Schapira is a German journalist and filmmaker. She is co-author of The Act of Alois Brunner, and producer of two award-winning documentaries, Drei Kugeln und ein totes Kind , about the death of Muhammad al-Durrah, and Der Tag, als Theo van Gogh ermordet wurde Esther Schapira (born January...
that the admission time was around 10:00 am local. Abu Rahma, the France 2 camerman, said the intensive shooting that Jamal and Muhammad were caught up in began at noon. 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. 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, 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. 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.
Samia investigation
Major General Samia, the IDF's southern commander, set up a team of investigators shortly after the shooting to begin a second investigation, though whether this was an official investigation remains unclear. The team included
Nahum ShahafNahum Shahaf is an Israeli physicist. After completion of his master's degree in 1977 at Bar-Ilan University, he went on to become a leading figure...
, 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 PoliceThe Israel Police is a civilian force in the State of Israel. As with most other police forces in the world, its duties include crime fighting, traffic control and maintaining public safety...
's criminal identification laboratory; and Chief Superintendent Elliot Springer, also from the criminal identification laboratory.
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 AmirYigal Amir is the Israeli assassin of Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Rabin. The assassination took place November 4, 1995 at the conclusion of a rally in Tel Aviv...
, the settler arrested for the 1995 assassination of Israeli prime minister
Yitzhak Rabin' was an Israeli politician and general. He was the fifth Prime Minister of Israel, serving two terms in office, 1974–1977 and 1992 until his assassination in 1995. In 1994, Rabin won the Nobel Peace Prize together with Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat...
, had not committed the crime; they had blamed instead a conspiracy headed by
Shimon Peres' is the ninth and current President of the State of Israel. Peres served twice as Prime Minister of Israel and once as Interim Prime Minister, and has been a member of 12 cabinets in a political career spanning over 66 years...
, Israel's president.
The investigation was hampered by Samia's decision to destroy the structures around the junction a week after the shooting. 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. On October 23, 2000, Shahaf and Duriel arranged a re-enactment on an IDF shooting range in front of a CBS
60 Minutes60 Minutes is an American investigative television newsmagazine, which has run on CBS since 1968. The program was created by long time producer Don Hewitt who set it apart by using a unique style of reporter-centered investigation. It has been among the top-rated TV programs for much of its life,...
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. When the results of the investigation were released on November 27, 2000, Samia said the tests showed it was plausible that the boy had been hit by Palestinian bullets.
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.
The investigation provoked immediate criticism. IDF Chief of Staff
Shaul Mofaz' is an Israeli politician and former soldier who currently serves as a member of the Knesset for Kadima. He formerly served as former Minister of Defense, Minister of Transportation and as the 16th Chief of the General Staff of the Israel Defense Forces.-Biography:Born in Tehran , Mofaz...
insisted that it was a private enterprise of Samia's. 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."
In February 2005, Shahaf presented his views to the
American Academy of Forensic SciencesThe American Academy of Forensic Sciences is a professional society for people in all areas of forensics.For nearly sixty years, the AAFS has served a distinguished and diverse membership. Its nearly 6,000 members are divided into eleven sections spanning the forensic enterprise...
. He said that ballistic evidence indicated that Muhammad had not been in the line of fire of the Israeli outpost; 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 Palestinian positions; that some of the bullet holes were made artificially after the shooting; that the boy's injuries were more consistent with a knife than a bullet; 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 blood was not visible on the boy's body at the Netzarim junction.
Esther Schapira documentaries
In 2002, the German broadcaster
ARDARD , is a joint organization of Germany's regional public-service broadcasters...
broadcast
Drei Kugeln und ein totes Kind ("Three bullets and a dead child"), a documentary by German journalist
Esther SchapiraEsther Schapira is a German journalist and filmmaker. She is co-author of The Act of Alois Brunner, and producer of two award-winning documentaries, Drei Kugeln und ein totes Kind , about the death of Muhammad al-Durrah, and Der Tag, als Theo van Gogh ermordet wurde Esther Schapira (born January...
. 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. 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."
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.
Questions about father's injuries
Questions were raised in 2007 regarding Jamal al-Durrah's injuries. On December 13 that year, Israel’s
Channel 10Channel 10 , formerly known as Israel 10 is a commercial broadcasting television channel licensed in Israel. It operates under the auspices of the Second Israeli Broadcasting Authority . On 28 January 2002 the channel began broadcasting and it now operates seven days a week...
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 shooting were actually scars from a tendon repair operation that David had performed in 1994.
France 2 v. Philippe Karsenty
France 2 filed three defamation suits in October 2004. It sought symbolic damages of
€The euro is the official currency of 16 of the 27 Member States of the European Union . The states, known collectively as the Eurozone, are Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Malta, the Netherlands, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia and Spain...
1 from each of the defendants, suing for a "press offence" under the Press Law of 1881. The first and most notable of the lawsuits was against
Philippe KarsentyPhilippe Karsenty is a French media analyst and the founder of Media-Ratings, a media watchdog, which monitors the media in France for bias....
, 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. 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.
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."
Karsenty appeal
Karsenty appealed. The court asked to see the France 2 footage, which according to the cameraman's affidavit amounted to 27 minutes; he wrote in October 2000: "I spent approximately 27 minutes photographing the incident which took place for 45 minutes." 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. According to
The Jerusalem Post, Enderlin 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."
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, 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.
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. 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."
On May 21, 2008, the court overturned Karsenty's conviction, ruling that his claims fell within the boundaries of permitted expression. The judge said there had been "inexplicable inconsistencies and contradictions in the explanations by Charles Enderlin." In response, France 2 appealed the case to the Cour de cassation, France's highest court, a case that continues. After Karsenty's appeal, a petition in support of France 2 was started by
Le Nouvel ObservateurLe Nouvel Observateur is a weekly French newsmagazine. It is the most prominent French general information magazine based in Paris in terms of audience and circulation ....
and signed by 300 French writers and journalists. Elie Barnavi, a former Israeli ambassador to France, called for an independent inquiry, as did Richard Prasquier of the
Council of Jewish Organisations in FranceConseil Représentatif des Institutions juives de France is an umbrella organization of French Jewish organizations. CRIF opposes anti-Semitism and policies that they perceive to be anti-Semitic....
.
Karsenty launched two libel suits in 2008 regarding criticism aired or published about him, one against
Canal+Canal+ is a French premium pay television channel launched in 1984. It is owned by the Canal+ Group, which in turn is owned by Vivendi SA. The channel broadcasts several kinds of programming, mostly encrypted...
, a pay TV company owned by Vivendi SA, and a second against
L’Express for describing him as an "obsessive nut case."
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.
The
Arab streetThe Arab street is an expression used to denote the broad mass of public opinion in the Arab world, as opposed to the opinions of ideologues, or parties involved in a particular event....
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 shooting 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 the burning of synagogues in France. Al Quaeda spokesmen mentioned Muhammad several times, including
Osama bin LadenOsama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden is a member of the prominent Saudi bin Laden family and one of the founders of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, best known for the September 11 attacks on the United States and its associations with numerous other mass-casualty attacks against...
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 PearlDaniel Pearl was an American-Jewish journalist who was kidnapped, tortured and murdered in Karachi, Pakistan by al Qaeda terrorists. At the time of his kidnapping, Pearl served as the South Asia Bureau Chief of the Wall Street Journal, and was based in Mumbai, Maharashtra, India...
, an American Jew, was beheaded in February 2002. 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 to blow up Israeli children in his memory.
Like other battle images—Carvajal gives as an example the 1945 Associated Press image of U.S. Marines
raising the U.S. flagRaising the Flag on Iwo Jima is a historic photograph taken on February 23, 1945, by Joe Rosenthal. It depicts five United States Marines and a U.S. Navy corpsman raising the flag of the United States atop Mount Suribachi during the Battle of Iwo Jima in World War II.The photograph was extremely...
on
Iwo JimaIwo Jima, officially , is an island of the Japanese Volcano Islands chain, which makes up the southern end of the Ogasawara Islands. The island is located 1,200 kilometers south of mainland Tokyo and administered as part of Ogasawara, one of eight villages of Tokyo...
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 libelBlood libels against Jews are false accusations that Jews use human blood in certain aspects of their religious rituals and holidays. Although the first known instance of blood libel against Jews was in the writings of Apion, an early 1st century pagan Greco-Egyptian who claimed that the Jews...
"—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 an example of antisemitism.
David GelernterDavid Hillel Gelernter is a professor of computer science at Yale University. In the 1980s, he made seminal contributions to the field of parallel computation, specifically the tuple space coordination model, as embodied by the Linda programming system...
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?" Luc Rosenzweig, a retired managing editor of
Le MondeLe Monde is a French daily evening newspaper with a circulation of 371,803. It is considered the French newspaper of record, and is generally well respected, often the only French newspaper easily obtainable in non-Francophone countries....
, has called the images an "almost perfect media crime."
A few writers have compared the situation to the
Dreyfus affairThe Dreyfus Affair was a political scandal that divided France in the 1890s and the early 1900s. It involved the conviction for treason in November, 1894 of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a young French artillery officer of Alsatian Jewish descent...
in 1894, when a French-Jewish army captain in Paris,
Alfred DreyfusAlfred Dreyfus was a French artillery officer of Jewish background whose trial and conviction in 1894 on charges of treason became one of the most tense political dramas in modern French and European history...
, 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. 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?" 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. 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 ..."
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 disorderPosttraumatic stress disorder is an anxiety disorder that can develop after exposure to one or more traumatic events that threatened or caused great physical harm....
—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. 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. "I can't get over that moment," he told the
Los Angeles Times in 2003. "He sticks to me."
Further reading
- Some of the France 2 footage, the al-Durrah material begins around 7:18 minutes, TCR 01:17:06:08, YouTube, accessed October 15, 2009.
- Enderlin, France 2 v. Karsenty (2006). Decision du 19 octobre 2006 par la 17ème Chambre du Tribunal correctionnel de Paris, no. 0433823049, accessed October 19, 2009.
- s:Karsenty v. Enderlin-France2 (2008). Karsenty appeal decision, May 21, 2008.
- Beckerman, Gal. The Unpeaceful Rest of Mohammed Al-Dura, Columbia Journalism Review, October 3, 2007.
- Schapira, Esther. Propaganda against Israel: The Mohammed Al Durah Case and Staging Reality in the Media, European Forum on Antisemitism, June 18, 2008, accessed October 14, 2009.
- Segev, Tom
Tom Segev is an Israeli historian, author and journalist.-Biography:Tom Segev was born in Jerusalem in 1945. He studied history and political science at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned a doctorate in history from Boston University in the 1970s.-Professional career:He is associated...
. Who killed Mohammed al-Dura?, Haaretz, March 22, 2002.