Phillipe Karsenty’s take on Muhammad al-Durrah 

Just over a hundred and fifty years ago Leo Tolstoy sent home graphic descriptions of the blood and gore from the Crimean War front, and inaugurated what Israeli reporter Amotz Asa-El terms journalism's trickiest task: war correspondence (On War Coverage, The Jerusalem Post 9/5/2002). Then Abraham Lincoln granted the press free access during the American Civil War, (despite the fact that his trusted general, William Sherman, saw journalists as a 'nuisance at best, a fifth column at worst'), and kick-started the concept that democracies should enable, and even assist, war coverage.

Asa-El traces the bumpy progress of this coverage: as technology improved, reporting from the front lines evolved. Thus, armed with a telephone, broadcast journalist Ed Murrow climbed onto a London rooftop in the middle of a bombing raid in World War II and brought the terrifying thumps of the Blitz closer to his American listeners than to many Britons who had no radio. And television reporters like Peter Arnet and Ted Koppel filmed the Vietnam War live, beaming casualties bleeding and dying on camera into living rooms on the other side of the world. The shocking footage traumatized viewers, helping to convince the American public that South Vietnam was not worth the price they were paying.

Today war correspondents face a new challenge. In an age where technology can photoshop pictures according to agendas, and every child carrying a cell-phone can film and manipulate testimony, television 'truth' becomes a tricky concept. More and more Israel finds itself grappling with iconic images that mould hearts and minds, but which just might not be authentic.

Take Muhammad al-Durrah, for example. On September 30^th, 2000, Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma filmed the 12-year-old Palestinian boy as he crouched under his father's arm while caught in the crossfire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian security forces. It was Day Two of the Second Intifada. Abu Rama passed the footage on to Charles Enderlin, bureau chief of France 2 Television, who broadcast 50 seconds of the film in France. The clip, picked up by international TV stations and screened endlessly on news channels for days, shows little Muhammad and his father, Jamal, cowering behind a water cylinder, as the child screams in terror. Jamal seems to wave toward the Israeli position, and shouts something in the direction of the cameraman. There is a sharp burst of gunfire, the focus blurs and then clears again to reveal Jamal sitting upright and apparently injured, with the boy lying over his legs.

Enderlin, who was not at the site of the shooting, got his information by telephone from Abu Rahma. On the segment of the film that he aired Enderlin added the voiceover: "15:00 hours, everything has just erupted near the settlement of Netzarim, in the Gaza Strip…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 … Mohamed is dead and his father seriously wounded …"

Almost instantaneously Muhammad al-Durrah became the face of the Intifada. Parks and streets were named for him throughout the Arab world, al-Durrah t-shirts and al-Durrah postage stamps became must-have items, and his image was even emblazoned on Coca-Cola bottles in certain countries. A Muslim model in an Arab Beauty Pageant had the boy's face embellishing her dress. Osama bin Laden mentioned the shooting in a "warning" to President George Bush after 9/11 and the boy's picture was in the background when journalist Daniel Pearl, an American Jew, was beheaded in February 2002. Enemies of Israel use the now iconic (almost) minute of film as a justification for killing Israeli kids: if the IDF can slaughter al-Durrah, what's to stop others blowing up Israeli babies?  

But did al-Durrah really die?

The case has been controversial from the outset. Soon after the shooting the IDF accepted responsibility, and apologized for the death, but retracted immediately after a contested Israeli investigation under Major General Yom Tov Samia showed that the boy was probably killed by Palestinian fire. Two German documentaries took up the case, questioning Israel's blame in the shooting and raising the possibility that al-Durrah did not die at all. Esther Schapira, of the German network ARD, suggests that there may have been another dead child, confusingly named Rami al-Durrah, who was buried in Gaza that day – not Muhammad who was supposedly 'shot' in the incident.

In April 2002, Philippe Karsenty, a financial consultant and deputy mayor of Neuilly-sur-Seine in Paris, was invited to view the first ARD German documentary, Three Bullets and a Dead Child. Shocked, he began to research the case. "At first I thought France 2 had made a mistake," he says. "Only later did I realize that the whole incident was a hoax." Karsenty claimed that the scene had been faked, the boy did not die during the shooting, and that Enderlin and his news editor should be sacked. Enderlin and France 2 sued for libel, and the court-case began. In 2006 Karsenty was found guilty of libel, and fined 1,000 Euro; Karsenty appealed the same day.  

Karsenty came well-prepared to the second case. Originally the cameraman had claimed that the shooting lasted 45 minutes, and that he had filmed for 27 of them. The court asked France 2 to turn over all the raw footage; the TV station produced only 18 minutes of film. Karsenty analyzed the footage, pointing out that the boy moves his leg, and raises an arm after he was supposedly shot dead. A ballistics expert testified that technically (based on angles, weapons and reported injuries) the bullets could not have come from the Israeli position, only from Palestinian shots.

There is other evidence to suggest that the shooting was staged: despite the protracted shooting and alleged injuries, there is no blood on the boy. The cameraman claimed the death occurred at 3 p.m.; but Mohammed Tawil, a doctor at Gaza's Al-Shifra Hospital, said the boy was admitted at 10 a.m. (hours BEFORE he was shot). According to Karsenty there is no evidence that bullets were recovered from the body, or the scene. An Israeli investigator, Nahum Shahaf, claimed that the concrete drum behind which the pair huddled was not punctured or hit – a fact that would be impossible if the bullets were coming from the Israeli position and had struck the victims. Then there is the AWAL footage: what happened to the missing 9 minutes?

Another imponderable is the strange case of Jamal al-Durrah's wounds; the ones he claims were inflicted when he was hit 12 times by Israeli bullets. Dr. Yehuda David, a physician at Tel Hashomer, has come out on Israel's Channel 10 TV as claiming to have treated Jamal in 1994 for knife and axe injuries during a Palestinian gang attack. According to him the wounds are not compatible with those caused by bullets, and are certainly old scars from the street battle (which Karsenty believes was in retaliation for Jamal's alleged cooperation with the Israelis).  

Karsenty won his appeal in 2008, and the judge ruled that the cameraman's statements were 'not perfectly credible either in form or content.' But the saga continues – this judgment has recently been overturned on a technicality, (the judges didn't have the right to ask for the raw footage), and yet another court case is looming at the Paris Court of Appeals on January 16^th, 2013.

Karsenty, who has given up his day job to focus on the al-Durrah issue, has been compared to a modern-day defender of Dreyfus. His detractors are less complimentary, likening him to a conspiracy theorist and a Holocaust denier. The former financier, who is now running for a seat in the French Parliament, says he has no private interest in the case. "I am doing it only because I think this is an important historical case," he insists, adding that clearing the IDF of wrongdoing in this instance will aid Israeli, Jewish and French society. "Al-Durrah has a son," he explains, "and his name is Toulouse. As long as our enemy can say they are slaughtering our kids in revenge for theirs who were deliberately killed too, we have a serious problem."

Karsenty claims that he is fighting a lonely battle; according to him Enderlin has powerful friends at home and abroad. Nicolas Sarkozy awarded Enderlin the Legion of Honor, (after Karsenty's victory in the courts); according to Karsenty this was a message of support. In Israel too, claims Karsenty, many important figures want to see Enderlin vindicated. "I am a bit disillusioned," admits Karsenty, "that so few Israelis seem to care enough about the sense of history to expose the truth." But he is determined to continue to spread what he is sure is the true story behind those 50 seconds of tape which shocked the world.

Yigal Palmor, spokesperson of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, says that Karsenty has overstated his case, making it impossible to conduct a "serene debate" on the Al-Durrah controversy. While the Israeli official position agrees that evidence evokes doubt about the credibility of France 2's claim that al-Durrah was shot by the IDF, and even states that there is a high probability that the boy was killed by Palestinian fire, Palmor balks at the idea that the whole incident was faked, and that the boy is still alive. The Israeli communique on the subject acknowledges the fact that Palestinians have staged media events like Jenin (the so-called massacre that never happened) and numerous 'smaller' cases of dead people who, thinking they are off-camera, stand up and walk away; but Palmor insists that there is no evidence that the al-Durrah case was a hoax. He claims that Karsenty is living in a "twilight zone" between truths and half-truths, and that is why official bodies are not helping him in his struggle. (Karsenty claims that he has provided more than 100 pieces of evidence to prove the event was staged, and insists that al-Durrah was alive at the end of the shooting. According to him Enderlin and France 2 have not shown any evidence to substantiate their own claims).

Enderlin, who has lived in Israel for more than 40 years, refused to respond to me on the record to Karsenty. Although he is sticking to his story he was unequivocal on one point: no quotes. So – no quotes from Charles Enderlin of France 2, whose short, sharp broadcast at the outset of the Intifada has caused such a commotion.

And Karsenty continues to claim that the cowering kid is just one more example of "Palywood" – staged media events that, at best, hoodwink the media – or, at worst, entail media complicity.  Leo Tolstoy could write a book.

Phillipe Karsenty