Al Dura affair: ‘a modern blood libel’
The Israeli military didn’t fire at or kill the 12-year-old who became a symbol of the Second Intifada, Jerusalem has concluded.
According to a report by France 2, Israeli gunfire killed Mohammed al-Dura in Gaza in September 2000, as he crouched behind his father. The channel’s footage was broadcast internationally.
But an Israeli government review committee concluded this week that “France 2 report’s central claims and accusations had no basis in the material which the station had in its possession at the time”.
A statement issued by the Prime Minister’s Office said that the report “was edited and narrated in such a way as to create the misleading impression that it substantiated the claims made therein”.
Charles Enderlin, the journalist who provided the voice-over for the clip, is standing by the integrity of his report.
The committee claimed that it reviewed raw footage in which the boy was seen to be alive and found “numerous indications” that neither he nor his father was struck by bullets at all. It is “highly doubtful” that bullet marks in his vicinity came from Israeli fire.
The committee questioned why France 2 was the only station to record the alleged incident, even though there were other media crews at the scene, and stressed that the report relied entirely on the station’s local stringer.
Unaired raw footage showed “the boy was alive” when the France 2 camera stopped recording, according to the report, which also cited the lack of blood stains at the scene, among other findings.
Among other experts, the report contains testimonies by Dr Ricardo Nachman, deputy director of Israel’s National Centre of Forensic Medicine in Tel Aviv, and Yehuda David, a French-Israeli physician who claimed that scars presented by Jalal al-Dura as evidence of Israeli violence in 2000 actually had been incurred eight years earlier at the hands of Hamas.
Upon receiving the committee’s report, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “It is important to focus on this incident which has slandered Israel’s reputation. This is a manifestation of the ongoing, mendacious campaign to delegitimise Israel.
“There is only one way to counter lies, and that is through the truth. Only the truth can prevail over lies.”
Yuval Steinitz, Minister of International Affairs, Strategy and Intelligence, called the al-Dura affair “a modern-day blood libel against the State of Israel” and claimed: “The France 2 report was utterly baseless.”
The al-Dura family reacted angrily to Israel’s conclusions, even saying that it is prepared to exhume the boy’s body to prove that the TV report was true. “Every year the Israelis come up with a new narrative,” Mohammed’s father Jamal al-Dura told the Palestinian Ma’an news agency. He maintained: “Israel committed that crime in cold blood.”
NATHAN JEFFAY
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