Killing of Muhammad al-Durrah

Muhammad al-Durrah and his father Jamal before the shooting on September 30 2000. The scene, now iconic, was recorded by Talal Abu Rahma for France 2.

Muhammad Jamal al-Durrah (1988-2000) Template:Lang-ar), was a Palestinian boy reported to have been killed by gunfire from Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers during a clash with Palestinian police and gunmen in the Gaza Strip on September 30 2000, at the start of the Second Intifada. His father was severely wounded in the same incident and was treated in hospital in Jordan for multiple bullet wounds. The incident occurred during a period of widespread violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, in which many people were killed.

The shooting was filmed by a solo cameraman working for the French television channel France 2, with commentary by the channel's veteran Israel correspondent Charles Enderlin (who was not present during the incident). Enderlin's commentary and much media reporting immediately after the incident blamed Israeli forces for the shooting. This position was initially accepted by the Israeli army, which said that the shots had apparently been fired by its soldiers, and which issued a public apology. A later semi-official army investigation suggested al-Durrah had probably been hit by Palestinian bullets, a conclusion backed by a 2002 documentary film broadcast by the German television channel ARD. France 2's news editor, Arlette Chabot, acknowledged in 2005 that no one could now say for certain who might have fired the fatal shots.

The incident became the subject of controversy when a number of commentators challenged the original reporting of the incident. Two French journalists, Denis Jeambar, a former editor of L'Express, and Daniel Leconte, a documentary producer, questioned Charles Enderlin's ability to determine the facts of the incident in a 2004 article in Le Figaro, arguing that when Enderlin had compiled his report he "had no possibility of determining that [al-Durrah] was in fact dead, and even less so, that he had been shot by IDF soldiers." Other commentators — including Daniel Seaman, the Israeli government's chief press officer — have gone further in their criticism, alleging that the entire incident was staged with the knowledge of the cameraman. In 2004, France 2 sued Philippe Karsenty, a French media commentator, for defamation after he accused the channel of faking the shooting. France 2 won the case after the court ruled that Karsenty had "seriously failed to meet the requirements expected of an information professional." In May 2008, that judgment was set aside by the Paris Court of Appeal, which ruled that Karsenty had presented a "coherent mass of evidence" and that his criticism of France 2 was legitimate, although the factual accuracy of his evidence was not examined. France 2 has said it will appeal the decision to the Cour de cassation, France's highest court. A petition in support of France 2 has been signed by 80 senior French writers and journalists.

Personal background

Muhammad al-Durrah was in fifth grade when the shooting occurred, living with his four brothers, two sisters, his mother, Amal, and his father, Jamal, in the United Nations-run Bureij refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. His father was a house painter who worked for Israelis in north Tel Aviv.

On the day of the incident, the school was closed because of a general Palestinian "protest day" strike. His mother, Amal, stated that Muhammad enjoyed watching people set fire to things on such protest days and that three days before the incident, the boy asked her "if you're killed in Netzarim, do you die as a martyr?".

The incident

Muhammad and Jamal under fire.

The camera goes out of focus at the moment of the shooting.

As the dust clears, the father and son are slumped across each other.

Background

In an interview with Talal Abu Rahma on the day after the shooting, the cameraman who filmed the incident, Jamal al-Durrah said that he and Muhammad had been out that day looking for cars at a used car dealership. Having failed to buy anything, they decided to take a cab home, which was two kilometers away.

Around lunchtime, they arrived near a road junction where Palestinians were throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at Israel Defence Forces (IDF) soldiers protecting the nearby settlement of Netzarim, which was dismantled following the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. With the cab driver unwilling to go further because of the rioting, Jamal decided to cross the junction on foot to look for another cab.

According to Matt Rees of Time, Palestinian gunmen started shooting at the Israeli soldiers from a nearby orange grove. Muhammad and his father crouched behind a cylinder or drum, with their backs to a cinderblock wall, to shelter from the gunfire.

The shooting incident

The incident was recorded by Talal Abu Rahma, a veteran freelance Palestinian cameraman who lives in the Gaza Strip and had worked for France 2 for many years. Working alone, Abu Rahma captured 27 minutes of the incident on tape. He also reported that the Israelis had fired at the boy and his father for a total of 45 minutes.

The tape was edited for broadcast by Charles Enderlin, a French-Israeli journalist who was France 2's bureau chief in Israel at the time. The original tape was edited down to 59 seconds, with a voice-over provided by Enderlin. Enderlin was not present during the shooting itself.

The tape as broadcast shows Muhammad and his father crouching behind a concrete cylinder, situated between the Israeli and Palestinian positions. The two are shown in considerable distress, with the child screaming and the father shielding him. According to Matt Rees writing in TIME, Muhammed told his father "Don't worry, Daddy, the ambulance will come and rescue us." The father is shown waving toward the Israeli position, shouting "Don't shoot!" The camera goes out of focus at the moment of the shooting. A final frame shows the father sitting upright, injured, and the boy lying over his legs.

In his voiceover, Enderlin stated that the IDF had killed the boy.

Reports of injuries

Muhammad and his father Jamal were taken to the Shifa hospital in Gaza, where Muhammad was pronounced dead on arrival. There were conflicting reports on the injuries sustained by the two. Muhammad was reported by the BBC to have been shot four times, though other reports stated that the pathologist had identified three injuries. Talal Abu Rahma referred in his affidavit to one shot to the boy's right leg. No autopsy was performed on the body and Muhammad was reported to have been buried that night. Doctors were reported to have removed bullets from both Jamal al-Dura's arm and pelvis, though other reports stated that no bullets were found because they fragmented upon entering the body, and that no fragments were found either. The BBC also reported that the father's right hand was paralyzed permanently.

Father's story

In an interview with the father, the BBC reported that Muhammad had pleaded with his father for protection. "For the love of God protect me, Baba (Dad),". The boy's father told the BBC that Israeli troops had fired relentlessly, and had shot at an ambulance that tried to rescue the pair, killing the ambulance driver, Bassam al-Bilbeisi, and injuring another.

The father said: "I appeal to the entire world, to all those who have seen this crime to act and help me avenge my son's death and to put on trial Israel ..." He said he planned to take Israel to the international courts. In another interview, he said his son had died for "the sake of Al-Aqsa Mosque," which was the subject of Palestinian protests at the time following a controversial visit by the Israeli politician Ariel Sharon.

Cameraman's testimony

This diagram of the incident is based on one provided by the cameraman in an affidavit given to the Palestine Centre for Human Rights.

Charles Enderlin, the France 2 correspondent, later wrote that he had based his initial conclusion that the IDF had shot al-Durrah on the testimony of the cameraman, Talal Abu Rahma. Abu Rahma stated in a sworn affidavit given to the Palestine Centre for Human Rights in Gaza in October 2000 that he believed the IDF had intentionally shot the boy. According to Rahma, "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".

The cameraman stated in his affidavit that he had been alerted to the incident while at the northern part of the road leading to the Netzarim junction, also called the al-Shohada junction. He said he could see 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 Security Forces outpost (police station), located south of the junction, just behind the spot where the father and his boy were crouching. He observed shooting coming from there too, but not, he said, during the time when the boy was reportedly shot. The Israeli fire was being directed at this Palestinian outpost. There was another Palestinian outpost 30 meters away. His attention was drawn to the child by Shams Oudeh, a Reuters photographer who was sitting beside Muhammad al-Durrah and his father. The three of them were sheltering behind a concrete block.

Regarding the shooting incident, Abu Rahma stated:

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 Muhammad 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 Muhammad 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.

Initial Reaction

Family's reaction

Muhammad's mother, Amal, watched the incident on television, worried that her husband and son had not returned home, but without recognizing the two figures she saw sheltering from the gunfire. It was only when she watched the scene in a later broadcast that she realized who it was. Her children said she screamed at the sight, then fainted.

She told reporters: "My son didn't die in vain. This was his sacrifice for our homeland, for Palestine." and "[n]othing good will come of this. We will have many more martyrs, and nothing will change." One of Muhammad's brothers, Iyad, told TIME magazine: "He's a symbol not only for Palestinians. He left his impact on the whole world. It was shaken by his death."

Israel

IDF operations chief Giora Eiland announced that "there had been an investigation by the major-general of the southern command and apparently [al-Durrah] was killed by Israeli Army fire at the Palestinians who were attacking them violently".

However, upon further investigation, an IDF inquiry strongly concluded that

we can rule out with the greatest certainty the possibility that the gunfire was fired by IDF soldiers . . . al Durrah had probably been killed by Palestinian fire.

Nonetheless, Israeli officials said it would be a "losing proposition" to reopen the case formally, because they would be "accused of blaming the victim." (See Shahaf/Duriel investigation below.)

Muslim world

File:Muhammad al-Durrah stamp.jpg

A Tunisian postage stamp entitled: The young Palestinian martyr, Muhammad al-Durrah

Enderlin's statement that the IDF had killed the boy was widely accepted as fact in the Islamic world and his death became a symbol of opposition to Israel. Egypt and Tunisia issued postage stamps depicting him as a martyr. Egypt re-named the street on which the Israeli embassy is located in his honor. The Palestinian Authority gave the same name to a street in Jericho; similarly a main thoroughfare in Baghdad was named "Martyr Mohammed al-Dura Street"; and Morocco created an al-Dura Park. The Iranian Ministry of Education developed a website to commemorate him, and the Iranian foreign ministry suggested renaming a street in Tehran in his honor. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, composed a poem in his honour.

On October 7, 2001, Osama bin Laden warned President George W. Bush that he "must not forget the image of Mohammed al-Dura and his fellow Muslims in Palestine and Iraq. If he has forgotten, then we will not forget, God willing." In May 2004, the Kuwaiti investment company Global Investment House created the "Al-Durra Islamic Fund" with the investment objective of seeking "capital growth through investing in Sharia'a-compliant local shares."

Jamal al-Durrah is reportedly dismayed by the way that images of Muhammad's death have been commercialized. He told the Media:

I had very bad feelings when I saw some toilet paper — they put the picture of the killing of Mohammed with me on the cover just to sell it. I didn't like it, because this is a symbol and a martyrdom. The next day people took the roll cover and threw it in the garbage.

Amnesty International

Citing the cameraman's statement that the IDF had killed the boy deliberately, a November 2001 Amnesty International report entitled "Broken Lives — A Year of Intifada" said that photographs taken by journalists showed a pattern of bullet holes indicating that the father and son were targeted by the Israeli post opposite them. AI also stated that, on October 11, 2001, the IDF spokesperson in Jerusalem had shown AI delegates maps that purported to prove that al-Durrah had been killed by Palestinian crossfire.

Controversy

The controversy over al-Durrah's death centers on two main areas. First, neither Palestinian nor Israeli officials appear to have conducted a full investigation. No bullets appear to have been recovered; there was no autopsy; and no ballistics tests were conducted at the scene to determine the angle of the shots. Second, there is controversy regarding the way the France 2 footage was shot, edited, and reported.

No autopsy, bullets, or ballistics examination

File:Al-Durrahs-bullets.jpg

Bullet holes can be seen in the wall behind the al-Durrahs. It was reported that no bullets were collected by the Palestinians, and that the IDF demolished the wall before ballistics tests could be carried out.

It was reported that no autopsy was performed, and no bullets appear to have been recovered, either at the hospital or at the scene. In an interview with Esther Shapira for Three Bullets and a Child, a 2002 documentary for Germany's ARD channel, Talal Abu Rahma, the cameraman, said that bullets had been recovered; he said that Shapira should ask a named Palestinian official, a general, about them. The general told Shapira that he had no bullets, and that there had been no Palestinian investigation into the shooting because there was no doubt about 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 Shapira, he replied: "We have some secrets for ourselves ... We cannot give anything ... everything."

Shapira also reported that the wall the al-Durrahs sheltered behind, in which bullet holes are visible in the footage, had been destroyed by the IDF before a ballistics examination could be conducted. Shapira's documentary concluded that the boy could not have been shot by the IDF, and that the shooting and his death were accidental.

What the raw footage showed

The France 2 footage became controversial because Enderlin's report showed only 59 seconds out of 27 minutes of raw footage, and did not include the scene of the boy's death. Just over three minutes of footage was provided to other news organizations and to the Israeli army. France 2 provided the footage free of charge to the world's media, saying it did not want to profit from the incident. None of the distributed footage shows the boy dying.

Independent journalists view the footage

Charles Enderlin, the France 2 bureau chief in Jerusalem, said that he had cut the death scene from his original report, and from the footage supplied to other media, because it showed the boy in his death throes ("agonie"), which he said in an interview with Télérama in October 2000 was "unbearable."

In October 2004, in response to criticism that the footage may have been edited inappropriately, executives at France 2 allowed three senior French journalists to view all 27 minutes of the raw footage. The three were Daniel Leconte, a former France 2 correspondent; Dennis Jeambar, the editor-in-chief of L'Express; and Luc Rosenzweig, a former editor-in-chief of Le Monde, and a Metula News Agency (Mena) contributor.

Shortly after the viewing, Mena's editor-in-chief Stéphane Juffa asserted that the footage did not show the boy's death. Leconte and Jeambar wrote about the footage in an article co-authored a few weeks after viewing it, although it was first published five months later on January 25 2005 by Le Figaro, allegedly only after it had been offered to, and rejected by, Le Monde. In their article, Leconte and Jeambar write that there is no scene in the France 2 footage that shows the child had died. They wrote that they did not believe that the scene had been staged, but that "this famous 'agony' that Enderlin insisted was cut from the montage does not exist."

They also wrote that the first 20 minutes or so of the film showed young Palestinians "playing at war" for the cameras, falling down as if wounded, then getting up and walking away. They told a radio interviewer that a France 2 official had said "You know it's always like that." In an interview with Cybercast News Service, Leconte said that he found France 2's statement 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 of the boy and his father was faked; in his view "At the moment of the shooting, it's no longer acting, there's really shooting, there's no doubt about that."

In February 2005, France 2 also showed the raw footage to the International Herald Tribune. The reporter, Doreen Carvajal, writes that the footage of the father and son lasts several minutes, but does not clearly show the child's death. She also writes there is a cut in the scene that France 2 executives say was caused by the cameraman's efforts to preserve a low battery.

Leconte asks France 2 to correct its report

On February 15, 2005, Leconte said in an interview with the Cybercast News Service that al-Durrah had been shot from the Palestinian position. He said: "The only ones who could hit the child were the Palestinians from their position. If they had been Israeli bullets, they would be very strange bullets because they would have needed to go around the corner." He dismissed an earlier claim by France 2 that the gunshots that struck al-Durrah were bullets that could have ricocheted off the ground, stating "It could happen once, but that there should be eight or nine of them, which go around a corner? They're just saying anything."

Leconte also told the Cybercast News Service that the cameraman had retracted his testimony. France 2's communications director Christine Delavennat said that Abu Rahma had not retracted his testimony, but rather "denied making a statement — falsely attributed to him by a human rights group [the Palestine Centre for Human Rights] — to the effect that the Israeli army fired at the boy in cold blood."

Leconte said that because the pictures had "devastating" consequences, which 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. "Who will say it, I don't know, but it is important that Enderlin or France 2 should say, that on these pictures, they were wrong — they said things that were not reality," he said.

Enderlin's response

Enderlin responded to Jeambar and Leconte's charges in a January 27, 2005 article in Le Figaro. He wrote that he had alleged the bullets were fired by the Israelis for a number of reasons: first, he trusted the cameraman who, he said, had worked for France 2 for 17 years. It was the cameraman, he said, who made the initial claim during the broadcast, and later had it confirmed by other journalists and sources. The initial Israeli statements also played a role, he said.

Enderlin said "the image corresponded to the reality of the situation, not only in Gaza but also in the West Bank," where, he wrote, in the first month of the Intifada, the IDF had already fired around one million bullets, and killed 118 Palestinians, including 33 children, compared to the 11 Israelis killed. Enderlin attributed these figures to Ben Kaspit of Maariv.

Leconte responded: "I find this, from a journalistic point of view, hallucinating. That a journalist like him can be driven to say such things is very revealing of the state of the press in France today."

Enderlin also wrote that a journalist does not have to take note of "possibly dishonest" later uses by "extremist groups," and accused Jeambar and Leconte of promoting "censorship".

Allegations that the incident was staged

Richard Landes

Richard Landes, a Boston University professor specializing in medieval cultures, and founder and director of the Center for Millennial Studies, studied full footage from other Western news outlets shot on the day of the shooting, including the pictures of the boy, and concluded that the shooting had probably been faked.

He called the footage an example of "Pallywood" cinema, writing: "I came to the realization that Palestinian cameramen, especially when there are no Westerners around, engage in the systematic staging of action scenes." Landes went on to found the website Second Draft, dedicated to gathering evidence on the al-Durrah case and other controversies in journalism.

Shahaf/Duriel investigation

Nahum Shahaf, a physicist, and Yosef Duriel, an engineer, were informally commissioned by IDF Southern Commander Major General Yom Tov Samia to begin a second investigation of the case. Shortly after the shooting, the IDF acknowledged that there was "a high probability" that IDF gunfire had killed al-Durrah. Ha'aretz writes that Deputy Chief of Staff Moshe Ya'alon expressed his sorrow over the tragedy, assuming that "the damage to Israel's reputation was irreversible, and knowing that Israel faced the reality of more children dying ..." Senior officers in the Southern Command were allegedly bitter about what they saw as this hasty capitulation, which is why Shahaf and Duriel's offer to help investigate was accepted. The two were already familiar with one another after being involved in attempts to develop alternative theories about the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

On October 23, 2000, Shahaf and Duriel arranged a re-enactment of the shooting on an IDF shooting range, in front of a CBS 60 Minutes camera crew. Duriel told 60 Minutes that he believed al-Durrah was killed by Palestinian gunmen collaborating with the France 2 camera crew and the boy's father, with the intent of fabricating an anti-Israel propaganda symbol. Samia immediately removed Duriel from the investigation, but Duriel continued to insist that his version was accurate and that the IDF were refusing to publicize it because the results were "explosive".

The results of the investigation were released on November 27, 2000. Samia stated: "A comprehensive investigation conducted in the last weeks casts serious doubt that the boy was hit by Israeli fire. It is quite plausible that the boy was hit by Palestinian bullets in the course of the exchange of fire that took place in the area." IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz later insisted that this investigation was a private enterprise of Samia's. Yossi Almog, a retired senior police officer who specializes in evidence-gathering, told Ha'aretz: "I don't believe the IDF would release a conclusion revising a previous declaration without first conducting a thorough examination, using the best professionals in the security establishment. I wouldn't rely on an approach made by some anonymous person. I might welcome that person's initiative, but I certainly wouldn't accept his conclusions without conducting a systematic, orderly examination, under the best possible conditions. Anything less than that isn't serious."

James Fallows, in a June 2003 article in The Atlantic Monthly titled Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura? characterized Shahaf's evidence for his conclusion as follows:

The reasons to doubt that the al-Duras, the cameramen, and hundreds of onlookers were part of a coordinated fraud are obvious. Shahaf's evidence for this conclusion, based on his videos, is essentially an accumulation of oddities and unanswered questions about the chaotic events of the day. Why is there no footage of the boy after he was shot? Why does he appear to move in his father's lap, and to clasp a hand over his eyes after he is supposedly dead? Why is one Palestinian policeman wearing a Secret Service-style earpiece in one ear? Why is another Palestinian man shown waving his arms and yelling at others, as if 'directing' a dramatic scene? Why does the funeral appear — based on the length of shadows — to have occurred before the apparent time of the shooting? Why is there no blood on the father's shirt just after they are shot? Why did a voice that seems to be that of the France 2 cameraman yell, in Arabic, 'The boy is dead' before he had been hit? Why do ambulances appear instantly for seemingly everyone else and not for al-Dura?"

— James Fallows, The Atlantic Monthly.

France 2 legal action

The Palais de Justice in Paris, where France 2's lawsuits were heard

France 2 filed a series of defamation suits against some of its critics in October 2004, to defend itself against the charges that its reporting of the incident had not been accurate. It sought symbolic damages of €1 from each of the defendants, suing them for a "press offence" under the Press Law of 1881. The law obliges the court to determine whether an accusation is defamatory, whether it is being made in good faith and whether a defendant has undertaken at least a basic verification of the source(s) for the accusation. Truth is not an absolute defence and the law forbids the court from investigating the truth of an accusation.

Philippe Karsenty

The first of the France 2 lawsuits was against Philippe Karsenty, who was charged with defaming Charles Enderlin's and France 2's honor and reputation on his website, Media-Ratings. Based on reporting by the Israeli Metula News Agency (MENA), Karsenty he had claimed that Enderlin's original broadcast was fraudulent and called for the dismissal of Chabot and Enderlin. He asserted that the events filmed by the France 2 cameraman had been faked, that al-Dura had not been killed in front of the camera, and that the boy was in fact still alive.

Responding to the claims, Enderlin told the Jerusalem Post that "I don't mind people elaborating any conspiracy theory about me and France 2 and writing about it. Another French guy even made a fortune by writing a book about 9/11 saying that it was a missile that hit the Pentagon. I can accept any polemic; what is unacceptable is to be publicly insulted and be called a liar. This is why we sued Karsenty, not for his eccentric theories."

Karsenty called four witnesses in his defence, including Richard Landes. The defence was bolstered by support from Sandrine Alimi-Uzan, the procureur de la République (a lawyer appointed by the court to represent the interests of civil society), who argued that although Karsenty had defamed Enderlin, it would be in the public interest for him to be exonerated.

The case was heard before the 17th Chamber of the Correctional Court of Paris on 7 September 2006. In a judgement released on 19 October, the court convicted Karsenty of libel and ordered him to pay €1,000 in costs and €1 in damages to the plaintiffs. The presiding judge, Joel Boyer, was scathing about Karsenty's actions. Noting that Karsenty had relied on a single source, the judge stated that "primarily based on extrapolations and amalgams, [the argument of the defendant] depends 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." Judge Boyer commented that "the accused, [by] showing in his account, without distance or critical analysis of his own sources, the idea that scenes have been staged for the ends of propaganda has seriously failed to meet the requirements expected of an information professional."

Following an appeal by Karsenty, the case was transferred to the 17th Chamber of the Court of Appeal of Paris in November 2007 and a further hearing was held in February 2008. The court asked to see the full set of images of the clashes at Netzarim, totalling some 27 minutes. France 2 presented it with 18 minutes of footage, stating that the rest had been destroyed because it did not concern the incident in question. France 2 was supported by the public prosecutor, Antoine Bartoli, who argued that Karsenty had not conducted a "serious investigation" and that his claims were "undoubtedly defamatory".

On 21 May 2008, the court overturned Karsenty's libel conviction. It found that his claims had clearly been "undoubtedly damaging [to] the honor and reputation of information professionals". However, the court found that his claims were nonetheless within the boundaries of permissible expression in the context of media criticism. The judge commented, "it is legitimate for a monitoring agency to investigate the media, because of the impact of the images which were reviewed across the world, [and] on the conditions in which the report was filmed and broadcast." The court ruled that the evidence presented by Karsenty "did not allow it to rule out the opinion of [France 2] professionals", but rejected Bartoli's assertion that Karsenty's evidence was "neither complete nor serious". Although the court did not endorse Karsenty's views, it stated that "the examination of [the] rushes [makes it] no longer possible to dismiss the views of professionals heard during the case" and had put in doubt the authenticity of the reporting.

Karsenty told the press shortly after the verdict was issued, "The verdict means we have the right to say France 2 broadcast a fake news report, that al-Dura's shooting was a staged hoax and that they duped everybody - without being sued".

In response, France 2 pledged to take the case to the Cour de cassation, France's highest court.

Others

The other two lawsuits were brought against Pierre Lurçat, of the group "Liberty, Democracy and Judaism" whose website, "Ligue de Défense Juive," urged people to attend a rally where France 2 and Charles Enderlin were "awarded' the "Prize for Misinformation"; and against Dr. Charles Gouz, whose blog republished an article by Stéphane Juffa in which Enderlin and France 2 were criticized and accused of disseminating misinformation. Lurçat's case was dismissed on a technicality and Dr. Gouz received a "mitigated judgement" for allowing the word "misinformation" to be used on his blog with respect to France 2 and its staff.

Further reading

• Fallows, James. "Who shot Mohammed al-Durra?", The Atlantic Monthly, June 2003.
• Huber, Gérard. Contre-expertise d'une mise en scène. Editions Raphael, 2003. ISBN 2-87781-066-6
• Goldenberg, Suzanne. "Analysis of the shooting", The Guardian, undated.
• Gutman, Stephanie. The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy. Encounter Books, 2005. ISBN 1-893554-94-5
• Karsenty, Phillipe. French Court Vindicates Al-Dura Hoax Critic, Pajamas Media, May 21, 2008
• Schary Motro, Helen. Maneuvering Between the Headlines: An American Lives through the Intifada. Other Press, 2005. ISBN 1-59051-159-X
• "Israeli ambassador defends troops". BBC.
• Mohammed al-Dura lives on, op-ed by Gideon Levi for Haaretz 7 October 2007
• Mohammed Al-Durra footage may have been a hoax, op-ed by Piers Akerman for Daily Telegraph Aus May 29, 2008