Eighteen minutes of filmed footage by a Gazan Arab photographer were screened in a Paris courtroom Wednesday, the basis for a France-2 TV report broadcast around the world that supposed shows the killing of a 12-year-old Muhammad al-Dura in September 2000.
The reports emerging from that courtroom drama indicate that many of those who saw the tape emerged concluding that the death was staged, the video tampered with, with key segments still missing, despite a court order to produce all of the file.
Melanie Phillips, writing in The Spectator, called it a modern Blood Libel.
On September 30, 2000, France-2 broadcast a 55 second report from Netzarim junction in Gaza in which France-2's Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Charles Enderlin, declared the boy killed by Israeli fire. Enderlin and France-2 distributed the 55-second clip free of charge, and all major news networks picked it up. Coming at the very start of what came to be known as the Second Intifada.
Tom Gross, former Middle East correspondent for the London Sunday Telegraph and the New York Daily News, and a frequent contributor to Israel Insider, was at Wednesday's proceedings and viewed the raw footage. In an interview with Honest Reporting, Gross expressed surprise "that the film that France-2 produced wasn't more convincing of Enderlin's case. It was clearly cut up with lots of bits missing. It was a very shoddy film. We didn't even see one instance, during the 18-minute film, of any Israeli soldiers shooting. We didn't see the boy, Muhammad al-Dura die."
Gross noted that France-2's Enderlin was not in the Gaza Strip the day of the shooting and that he relied exclusively on "one Palestinian local cameraman who was not an employee for France-2 and about whom we know from other instances is a very unreliable source."
Gross said that for Enderlin to claim in a broadcast that the boy was killed, when that was unclear, and that he was killed by the Israel Defense Forces, when that was unproved and he wasn't even there, is "very irresponsible journalism."
Your feeling is much more that you are in Hollywood than on a battle site." Andre Mozes, describing the impression left by the video evidence.
Andre Mozes, Chairman of TakeAPen.org, attended Wednesday's trial and said that he saw many video frames which supported the allegation that the whole event was staged, and not one frame that implicated Israel in the boy's death. He noted that while youth are seen fleeing from danger of bullets, you see others in their 30's walking peacefully by in no hurry. "So your feeling is much more that you are in Hollywood than on a battle site," said Mozes.
Enderlin submitted 18 minutes of footage, but Alain Benjamin, who attended the trial, noted that "The judge, without any prompting from lawyers, asked what happened to the [full] 27 minutes. Enderlin said on record in court that he had to manipulate some footage that was not relevant to that day."
When the judge asked if anyone in attendance had seen the full footage, Richard Landes, a Boston University professor who has released several documentaries on the al-Dura case, testified that he had seen more footage at Enderlin's office, totalling at least 21 minutes long. Landes later expressed certainty that France-2 presented tampered evidence to the court. "They cut scenes," he declared, adding that he could prove it. The Augean Stables blog contains detailed descriptions of the likely tampering.
Nidra Poller of Pajamas Media describes in amusing detail the courtroom drama and the machinations of Enderlin, showing how the "raw footage" was "cooked."
Doubts about the credibility of the France-2 report began to surface over time and were documented by German filmmaker Esther Schapira in her March, 2002 release, "Three Bullets and a Dead Child: Who Shot Mohammed al-Dura?" She concluded that Israeli bullets could not have killed the boy. But France-2, sister station of the German ARD which produced the film, refused to air it.
Several months later, the Arab cameraman who filmed the footage, Talal abu Rahma, sent a fax to the France-2 offices in Jerusalem, recanting testimony he gave in October 3, 2000, claiming that it was given under duress.
As the evidence mounted that the killing by Israeli troops was implausible, the France-2 news director, in a November 16, 2004 interview with French Radio J, admitted that it was impossible to know with 100% certainty whether the Israelis or the Arabs killed Al-Dura.
In 2004, Philippe Karsenty, director of the French website Media Ratings, published an article calling for the resignation of Charles Enderlin and another France-2 employee for staging the Al-Dura boy's death. France-2 sued Karsenty for libel and won the initial case in October, 2006. Enderlin and France-2 were awarded symbolic damages of one euro each, and Karsenty was ordered to pay a small fine and court costs.
Earlier this year, the head of Israel's government press office went on record saying that the IDF did not kill the boy. Earlier research by the IDF had pointed to the physical impossibility of his being killing by Israeli soldiers. Initially, however, the IDF had not contested or questioned the Palestinian claims, or highlighted the substantial evidence of fakery in the staging of scenes of alleged Israeli aggression.
Karsenty appealed the initial court decision. At the outset of his second trial in September, 2007, the French judge ordered France-2 to hand over the raw footage to the court.
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