Tötung von Muhammad al-Durrah

Vorlage:Infobox Historical Event 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 finding themselves 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.

The question of whether the Israelis or the Palestinians shot the boy is a matter of ongoing 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. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) quickly accepted responsibility. Muhammad was buried in an emotional public funeral and hailed throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds as a Palestinian martyr. Streets and parks were named after him, and postage stamps bore his image.

Over the following months and years, several official and unofficial investigations questioned the accuracy of France 2's report. A controversial IDF investigation in November 2000 concluded that the IDF had probably not shot the al-Durrahs. France 2's news editor, Arlette Chabot, acknowledged in 2005 that no one could say for sure who fired the shots. Three senior French journalists who saw 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 head. Other commentators, including the director of the Israeli government's press office, said the scenes had been staged by Palestinian protesters as propaganda aimed at the news agencies filming in the area that day. Philippe Karsenty, a French media watchdog, was sued in 2004 by France 2 for suggesting this. A ruling against him in 2006 was overturned by the Paris Court of Appeal in 2008, a decision that France 2 appealed to the Cour de cassation, France's highest court, in a case that is ongoing.

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 killed the boy amounted to a modern blood libel, the centuries-old anti-Semitic 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. Osama bin Laden invoked Muhammad's name, as did a suicide bomber who tried to attack an Israeli hospital. 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.

Background

Politics

Rioting followed Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount

Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount

On September 28, 2000, two days before the incident, the Israeli opposition leader, Ariel Sharon, visited the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem. The Temple Mount contains the holiest site in Judaism and the third holiest in Islam, making its rules of access one of the hotly contested issues in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sharon's visit was seen as provocative, and the following day 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 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.

Netzarim junction

Map of the Gaza Strip showing the Bureij refugee camp, the former Netzarim Israeli settlement, and the Netzarim Junction

The Netzarim junction lies 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. 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. On the day of the shooting, the outpost was manned by 18 Israeli soldiers from the Givati Brigade Engineering Platoon and the Herev Battalion. A small post manned by Palestinian policemen stood on the diagonally opposite side of the junction.

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. Israel's ambassador to the United Nations said stones and Molotov cocktails had been thrown on September 13, an Israeli soldier had been killed by a roadside bomb on September 27, and an Israeli police officer had been killed by a Palestinian police officer in a joint patrol on September 29.

People

Charles Enderlin and Talal Abu Rahma

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

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 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 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 Israeli press credentials, though the court and government refused. Enderlin was 70 miles away in Ramallah during the al-Durrah incident, but kept in touch with the cameraman by cell phone as the story unfolded. He regards the allegations that the scenes were staged as libelous. "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, 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 was presented with a number of awards for his coverage of the al-Durrah story, including the Rory Peck Award in 2001.

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, at the time of the shooting, 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 a.m. 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 shooting, 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 Shifa hospital the day after the shooting.

Incident as initially reported

A diagram showing a crossroads, with the words South (at the top), East to the left, West to Netzarim Settlement to the right, and North to Gaza City at the bottom. The word "orchard" is on the upper right of the crossroads; the upper left says "Palestinian police post," "concrete sewage pipes," "Al Durra and his father." The bottom left says "France 2 Photographer," "Car," and "Fields." The bottom right says "Israel Military Tower" and "Two Palestinian Housing Buildings." In the middle of the crossroads is a diagonal line from the Israeli Military Tower to al Durra and his father. Above the line, it says, "Firing by Israeli soldiers," and below the line it says, "Approximate Distance 80 M."

Diagram by Talal Abu Rahma, the France 2 cameraman. A later diagram by a French ballistics expert alleges that Palestinians were also shooting from a position called "the pita" behind the cameraman, in the area marked above as "Fields"—see below.

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 Israelis returned the fire. 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 Reuters cameraman later moved away, and Jamal and Muhammad were left there alone.

The shooting

White buildings in the background, with some people standing in front of them. A green truck is on the left of the image. Ahead of it, a man with dark hair and blue clothes seems to be running. In the foreground, a dark image of a hand against a lump of concrete. The incident from the perspective of the al-Durrahs, from footage taken by Shams Oudeh, a Reuters cameraman, as he crouched behind the concrete cylinder with Jamal and Muhammad. The hand at the bottom left is Jamal's. Oudeh had moved away by the time France 2 started filming.

A man with black hair wearing blue jeans and a white t-shirt crouches behind a wall and a white concrete cylinder. He is looking to his left and waving with his right hand. A young boy with black hair is crouching on the ground behind him. The boy is wearing blue jeans, sandals, and a blue and white top. His right hand is holding onto the man's t-shirt. He looks as though he is crying. Muhammad and Jamal under fire, filmed by France 2

The same scene as above, but now the man is looking toward the camera with his mouth open. Jamal looks toward the France 2 cameraman, standing 15–17 meters away. The cameraman said Jamal was shouting for help, but it was "raining bullets."

The same scene as above, but from a distance. There is a large wall behind the two figures, who are almost hidden by a cloud of dust. The man's head is hanging down. The camera goes out of focus as a burst of gunfire is heard in the background.

The same scene again. The man is sitting with his head hanging to his right. The boy is lying over the man's knees, with his right hand over his face. Four small holes can be seen in the wall behind them. As the dust clears, Muhammad lies slumped across his father's legs. This was the last frame in the footage broadcast by France 2. Shortly after this frame, the boy is seen to move his hand. 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.

The violence at the junction was recorded by cameramen working for several news agencies. Abu Rahma was the only cameraman to record the al-Durrah shooting. 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 in Ramallah during the incident. 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, 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 local time (GMT+2). 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 45 minutes for an ambulance to reach the two, because of the heavy Israeli firing, he said. Bassam al-Bilbeisi, the driver of the first ambulance to arrive was shot dead. The boy and his father were eventually 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.

Jamal's and Muhammad's injuries, and funeral

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. Post-mortem photographs viewed by the French channel, Canal+, showed the body with massive injuries to the abdomen. He was buried before sundown, in accordance with Muslim tradition, in an emotional public funeral at the Bureij refugee camp, his body wrapped in a Palestinian flag.

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

Cameraman's account

Enderlin based his allegation that the IDF had shot the boy on the claim of the cameraman, Abu Rahma. Suzanne 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 shooting was 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, the 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 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 ...

[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.

About an hour after the shooting, during which time the al-Durrahs were evacuated by ambulance, Abu Rahma managed to escape from the scene, he said. His footage was transmitted to France 2's Jerusalem office, where Enderlin compiled his report then transmitted it by satellite to Paris. In an affidavit signed on October 3, 2000, Abu Rahma appears to say 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 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 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. He is reported to have said that he gave this part of the affidavit "under pressure."

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 did not 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, also said no one had seen the boy from the Israeli position.

Three days after the shooting, the Israeli army's chief of operations, Major-General Giora Eiland, apologized for the incident, saying 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. His position was contradicted by Major-General Yom Tov Samia, the chief of the army's southern command, who said he had no doubt that the gunfire 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, "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."

Controversy

The controversy centers on two areas: the raw footage and its interpretation by Charles Enderlin, and the lack of any official investigation into the boy's death. There is confusion regarding how much footage was shot, and why it was blurred at the moment of the final shots were fired. No ballistic tests were conducted. Within days of the shooting, the IDF had demolished the wall the al-Durrahs had sheltered against. There is no evidence that bullets were recovered. There was reportedly no autopsy.

Next to the view that Israeli gunfire killed the boy, which Enderlin stands by, 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. The "maximalist" narrative, which Larry Derfner writing in The Jerusalem Post calls a conspiracy theory, is that the incident was a hoax staged by the Palestinians for propaganda purposes, and that the boy may not be dead at all.

Questions about the footage

Length and content of raw footage

The same scene as above with the man and the boy, but more blurred. The man is crouching, leaning toward his left. The boy is lying across the man's knees. The boy's right arm is slightly raised.

This scene from the France 2 footage occurs after the material that was broadcast. Enderlin said he cut it because it showed the boy's death throes. Three French journalists who viewed it said it did not.

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

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

Enderlin cut a final few seconds from the footage, during which the boy appears to lift his hand, leading critics to say the boy 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 in October 2000, and again in a letter to The Atlantic in September 2003, was "unbearable." In response to an article in The Atlantic by James Fallows, Enderlin wrote: "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, after France 2 sued Philippe Karsenty, a French media commentator, for libel, because Karsenty accused them of having broadcast a hoax. A court ruled in France 2's favor, but Karsenty appealed; see below. The court of appeal asked to see the footage, and in November 2007, France 2 presented the court with just 18 minutes of footage. According to Agence France Press, France 2 said the rest had been destroyed because it had not been about the shooting. Enderlin then seemed to deny that 27 minutes had ever existed; according to The Jerusalem Post, he said on the same day, "I do not know where this 27 minutes comes from. In all there were only 18 minutes of footage shot in Gaza."

Senior French journalists view the footage

In February 2004, Arlette Chabot became news director of France 2. On October 22 that year, in response to the disquiet about the images, the network allowed three senior French journalists to view the footage—Daniel Leconte, a former France 2 correspondent who became head of news documentaries at Arte, the state-run Franco-German television network; Denis Jeambar, the editor-in-chief of L'Express; 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, Leconte and Jeambar 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 his film, they said, showed Palestinians playing at war for the cameras, falling down as if wounded, then getting up and walking away. A France 2 official had 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, 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 [an Israeli French-language news agency], 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, Leconte said he believed al-Durrah had been shot from the Palestinian position, and that France 2 or Enderlin should admit their report may have been misleading.

The third journalist to view the footage, Luc Rosenzweig, disagreed with Leconte and Jeambar. He concluded from the footage that the incident had been staged, calling it "an almost perfect media crime."

Enderlin's response to their criticism

On January 27, also in Le Figaro, Enderlin responded to Leconte and Jeambar's article. He wrote that he had said the bullets were fired by the Israelis because he trusted the cameraman, who had worked for France 2 for 17 years. It was the cameraman who made the initial claim during the broadcast, and later had it confirmed by other journalists and sources, he wrote. The context also played a role. "The image corresponded to the reality of the situation," he wrote, "not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank." He said the IDF had killed 118 Palestinians, included 33 children, in the first month of the Intifada, compared to 11 Israelis who had been killed. He said of Jeambar and Leconte that they had never set foot in Gaza, certainly not during a time of conflict, and that he believed them to be mistaken in their criticism of him.

Autopsy, bullets, ballistics, injuries

Bullets, bullet holes

The same scene as above with the man and the boy, from a slightly different angle. The boy is still lying down over the man's legs with his right hand over his face. Five small holes can be seen in the wall behind him.

Bullet holes can be seen in the wall behind the al-Durrahs.

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 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 into the shooting 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."

Time of shooting

Confusion has arisen about the time of the shooting, 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 p.m. Israeli local time (noon GMT): "1500 hours, everything has just erupted near the settlement of Netzarim, in the Gaza Strip."

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 Whitaker writes in The Guardian that the news first arrived in London from the Associated Press at 6:00 pm BST (5:00 pm GMT), followed minutes later by a similar report from Reuters, both mistakenly naming the boy as Rami Aldura. 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 Schapira that the admission time was around 10:00 am local. Abu Rahma, the France 2 camerman, said the intensive shooting 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 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.

IDF investigation

Major General Yom Tov Samia, the IDF's southern commander, set up a team of investigators shortly after the shooting, though the extent to which it was an official investigation remains unclear. The team included Nahum Shahaf, a physicist; Yosef Duriel, an engineer; Meir Danino, a physicist and chief scientist at Elisra Systems; Bernie Schechter, a former police chief superintendent, a ballistics expert, and former head of the weapons laboratory at the Israel Police's criminal identification laboratory; and Chief Superintendent Elliot Springer, also from the criminal identification laboratory. The investigation appears to have been headed by Shahaf and Duriel, who had no forensic or ballistic qualifications. They had met through an earlier campaign to show that Yigal Amir, the settler arrested for the 1995 assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, had not committed the crime; they had blamed instead a conspiracy headed by Shimon Peres, Israel's foreign minster at the time.

Their inquiries were hampered by General 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 Minutes camera crew. Duriel told 60 Minutes that he believed the boy's death was staged to produce an image that would besmirch Israel's reputation. When he saw the interview, Samia removed Duriel from the investigation.

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 findings were described to the media in November 2000 as not ruling out that the IDF had shot the boy, though describing it as unlikely, but in 2008, an IDF spokesman, Col. Shlomi Am-Shalom, said the report showed the IDF could not have shot him. Citing the report in a letter to France 2 in 2008, which requested that France 2 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.

The investigation provoked immediate criticism. IDF Chief of Staff Shaul 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." Israeli historian Tom Segev wrote in Haaretz that, because the measurements were made on a replica of the site, they were of no value as evidence.

Esther Schapira documentaries

In March 2002, the German broadcaster ARD broadcast Drei Kugeln und ein totes Kind ("Three bullets and a dead child"), a documentary by German journalist Esther Schapira. Her film did not conclude that Muhammad had been killed by Palestinian fire, but cast doubt on reports that he was shot by the Israelis. She argued that the lack of an autopsy report, and the destruction of the structures around the intersection where the shooting occurred, had seriously compromised the investigation. She presented testimony from Israeli soldiers on duty at the junction at the time of the shooting, 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 had been protected by the concrete cylinder from shots fired from the Israeli position. On October 2, 2002, 1,000 demonstrators gathered outside the offices of France 2, where Schapira's film was projected on a giant screen; the demonstrators awarded France 2 and Enderlin what they called a "prize for disinformation."

In a second ARD film in 2009, Das Kind, der Tod und die Wahrheit ("The Child, the Death, and the Truth"), Schapira suggests that 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. France 2 responded angrily to the claims made in the film, threatening to end cooperation with ARD; Charles Enderlin called Schapira a "militant journalist" with "a strange understanding of press freedom," who had been taken in by the Israeli right.

Questions about father's injuries

A man with dark hair lying on a bed with what appears to be patterned sheets and a patterned pillowcase. He appears to be naked. There are bandages on his right arm and hand, and some blood is visible. There are more bandages on the right side of his body. The image caption at the bottom says in white letters, "Gaza Hospital Shifa, October 1, 2000." There is a small white "2" on a red background in the top right-hand corner.

Jamal al-Durrah the day after the shooting

Questions were raised in 2007 regarding Jamal al-Durrah's injuries. On December 13 that year, Israel's Channel 10 aired an interview with Maj. (Res.) Dr. Yehuda David, a doctor at Tel Hashomer hospital who served during the 2006 Lebanon War in the IDF's Granite Infantry Battalion. 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.

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, France 2 filed three defamation suits in 2004. 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 French financial consultant who runs a media watchdog, Media-Ratings. He wrote in November 2004, in an article 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 Charles Enderlin should be sacked. Two days after the article appeared, France 2 issued a writ for libel.

The case was heard in September 2006. Jacques Chirac, president of France at the time, wrote a letter to the court in praise of Enderlin. Two witnesses testified on Karsenty's behalf—the French journalist, Luc Rosensweig, and Daniel Dayan, research director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research. Dayan testified that, in his view, the images did not support Enderlin's voiceover. He said: "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 ..." The court was not persuaded by the testimony, and upheld France 2's complaint on October 19, 2006, ordering Karsenty to pay €1,000 in costs and €1 in damages. Karsenty appealed the same day.

Karsenty v. Enderlin-France 2 (2007)

The appeal was heard in September 2007 by the 11th Chamber of the Paris Court of Appeal, the three-judge panel presided over by Judge Laurence Trébucq. The court asked to see the 27 minutes of raw footage the France 2 cameraman had said he had shot. They were instead shown 18 minutes that France 2 said it still had in its possession. Karsenty refers to this discrepancy as "the first tampering of the evidence." Enderlin was present during the screening, the first time he had attended any of the hearings.

The footage showed demonstrators throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at an IDF outpost, apparently being injured and carried into ambulances—some or all of which is regarded by several commentators as faked—an interview that the cameraman conducted 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.

A colored diagram. In the middle, a crossroads. To the right, it says, "To Gaza" in green letters with a green arrow. To the left, it says "To Netzarim," in white letters. At the top of the image, it says, "The twins, and "The factory," and there are three white rectangles. Underneath is a smaller blue shape, and the words "Israeli position." Opposite is an open space with a red circle and underneath, the words, "Palestinian 'Pita' position". Underneath that, there is a purple rectangle that says in white letters, "FR2 cameraman's position." Opposite this are two small red squares and above them the words, "Palestinian position." Below the small red squares is an orange rectangle that has the words "the barrel" in white. An orange arrow points to something above the rectangle and to the right of the small red squares.

A French ballistics expert, Jean-Claude Schlinger, presented a diagram to the court that included a Palestinian position called the "pita," from which he said shots may have been fired at the al-Durrahs. This position did not appear on the France 2 cameraman's diagram in 2000; see above.

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 for the court included a position behind the France 2 cameraman, and in front of the al-Durrahs, from which he said Palestinian gunmen may have been shooting, a position known locally as "the pita" because of its shape. This position did not appear in the cameraman's eyewitness report. 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."

On February 27, 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.

On May 21, 2008, in a 13-page decision, the court overturned Karsenty's conviction, ruling 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. After the appeal, a petition in support of France 2 was started by Le Nouvel Observateur, and signed by 300 French writers and journalists. It accused Karsenty of engaging in 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." Elie Barnavi, a former Israeli ambassador to France, called for an independent inquiry into the affair, as did Richard Prasquier of the Council of Jewish Organisations in France.

Personal and political impact

Two postage stamps, the top one showing the man and the boy crouching as above. Above the image, it says "H.K. of Jordan" with symbols above that, and to the right an image of a building topped by a golden globe. There is other writing to the left and right, and below. The stamp underneath it shows another image of the man and boy, and a close-up of a boy's face. It also says "H.K. of Jordan."

Jordanian stamps, captioned, "The martyr Muhammad al Durrah."

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 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 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 for the burning of synagogues in France. Al Qaeda spokesmen mentioned Muhammad several times, including Osama bin Laden shortly after 9/11 in a "warning" to President George Bush. 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.

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. An image of Jamal and Muhammad was seen in the background as journalist Daniel Pearl, an American Jew, was beheaded in February 2002. 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 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.

Bamako, Mali, 2006

The situation has been compared 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. Enderlin, himself a Jew and an Israeli, has expressed astonishment at the argument that the incident was faked. "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—who has faced death threats—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, the al-Durrah family is reported as profoundly affected, in part because of the repeated broadcasting of the footage. A therapist who treated the seven remaining children in 2000 said they were suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder—wetting their beds, having recurring nightmares, becoming withdrawn and isolated, 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 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

Wikisource: Karsenty v. Enderlin-France2 – Quellen und Volltexte

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• Zomersztajn, Nicolas (2004). "Affaire Al-Dura: la pseudo enquête d’une imposture ("The Al-Dura Affair: the pseudo-inquest of an imposture"), Regards 563, February 17, 2004, accessed October 19, 2009.

Further reading

• Enderlin, France 2 v. Karsenty (French) 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.
• Karsenty v. Enderlin-France2 (French) May 21, 2008; rough English translation, accessed January 3, 2010.
• Website of Phillipe Karsenty (French), accessed January 7, 2009; in English.
• Amnesty International (2001). Broken Lives: A Year of Intifada, pp. 15–16, accessed January 2, 2010.
• Phillips, Melanie (2007). The al Durah blood libel, The Spectator, November 16, 2007.
• 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.
• Sharansky, Natan (2007). "Palestinian Propaganda Coup", The Wall Street Journal, October 7, 2007.

Video

• 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.
• A final 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.

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