From Ahram:
A French court has ruled in favour of Jamal Al-Dorra, whose son Mohamed’s death by the Israeli army in 2000 was captured by photographers as he died in his father’s arms.
The ruling rejects Israeli claims that Jamal was wounded prior to the incident on 20 September 2000
Remember that James Fallows, a distinguished journalist, showed in the Atlantic that Palestinians staged the boy’s death to tarnish Israel’s pristine image, as Idrees Ahmad reminds me.
Shahaf’s investigation for the IDF showed that the Israeli soldiers at the outpost did not shoot the boy. But he now believes that everything that happened at Netzarim on September 30 was a ruse. The boy on the film may or may not have been the son of the man who held him. The boy and the man may or may not actually have been shot. If shot, the boy may or may not actually have died. If he died, his killer may or may not have been a member of the Palestinian force, shooting at him directly. The entire goal of the exercise, Shahaf says, was to manufacture a child martyr, in correct anticipation of the damage this would do to Israel in the eyes of the world—especially the Islamic world.
