, said that no one could say for certain who fired the shots. This is known by those who follow the case as the "maximalist" view, as opposed to the "minimalist" view that the shots were probably not fired by the IDF. The view that the scene was a media hoax of some kind emerged from an
Israeli government enquiry in November 2000.
Luc Rosenzweig, former editor-in-chief of
Le Monde and a Mena contributor;
Richard Landes, an American historian who became involved after Enderlin showed him the raw footage during a visit to Jerusalem in 2003; and
Philippe Karsenty, founder of a French media-watchdog site,
Media-Ratings. It was also supported by , a French psychoanalyst, and
Pierre-André Taguieff, a French philosopher who specializes in
antisemitism, both of whom wrote books about the affair. The hoax view gained further support in 2013 from a second Israeli government report, the
Kuperwasser report. Several commentators regard it as a
conspiracy theory and smear campaign.
Key issues Several commentators questioned
what time the shooting occurred; what time Muhammad arrived at the hospital; why there seemed to be little blood on the ground where they were shot; and whether any bullets were collected. Palestinian police allowed journalists to photograph the scene the following day, but they gathered no forensic evidence. According to a Palestinian general, there was no Palestinian investigation because there was no doubt that the Israelis had killed the boy. General
Yom Tov Samia of the IDF said the presence of protesters meant the Israelis were unable to examine and take photographs of the scene. The increase in violence at the junction cut off the Nezarim settlers, so the IDF evacuated them and, a week after the shooting, blew up everything within 500 metres of the IDF outpost, thereby destroying the crime scene. A pathologist examined the boy's body, but there was no full autopsy. According to Jamal al-Durrah, five bullets were recovered from his body by physicians in Gaza and four in Amman. Enderlin then said only 18 minutes of footage had been shot.
Footage cut off Another issue is why France 2, the Associated Press and Reuters did not film the scene directly after the shooting, including the shooting death of the ambulance driver who arrived to pick up Jamal and Muhammad. Abu Rahma's footage stops suddenly after the shooting of the father and son, then begins again—from the same position, with the white minibus behind which Abu Rahma was standing visible in the shot—with other people being loaded into an ambulance. When asked why he had not filmed the ambulance arriving and leaving, he replied that he had only one battery. Enderlin reportedly told the Paris Court of Appeal that Abu Rahma changed batteries at that point. Enderlin wrote in 2008 that "footage filmed by a cameraman under fire is not the equivalent of a surveillance camera in a supermarket." Abu Rahma "filmed what circumstances permitted."
French reaction to the footage In October 2004 France 2 allowed three French journalists to view the raw footage—
Denis Jeambar, editor-in-chief of ''L'Express
; Daniel Leconte, former France 2 correspondent and head of news documentaries at Arte, a state-run television network; and Luc Rosenzweig, former editor-in-chief of Le Monde''. Jeambar and Leconte wrote a report about the viewing for
Le Figaro in January 2005. None of the scenes showed that the boy had died, they wrote. They rejected the position that the scene had been staged, but when Enderlin's voiceover said Muhammad was dead, Enderlin "had no possibility of determining that he was in fact dead, and even less so, that he had been shot by IDF soldiers." They said the footage did not show the boy's death throes: "This famous 'agonie' that Enderlin insisted was cut from the montage does not exist." Several minutes of the film showed Palestinians playing at war for the cameras, they wrote, falling down as if wounded, then getting up and walking away. When Jeambar and Leconte wrote up their report about the raw footage, they initially offered it to
Le Monde, not
Le Figaro, but
Le Monde refused to publish it because Mena had been involved at an earlier stage. Jeambar and Leconte made clear in
Le Figaro that they gave no credence to the staging hypothesis:
Enderlin's response Enderlin responded to Leconte and Jeambar in January 2005 in
Le Figaro. He thanked them for rejecting that the scene had been staged. He had reported that the shots were fired by the Israelis because, he wrote, he trusted the cameraman, who had worked for France 2 since 1988. In the days following the shooting, other witnesses, including other journalists, offered some confirmation, he said. He added that the Israeli army had not responded to France 2's offers to cooperate with their investigation. Contradicting the noon and 3 pm timelines, Mohammed Tawil, the doctor who admitted Muhammad to the Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, told Esther Schapira that the boy had been admitted around 10:00 am local time, along with the ambulance driver, who had been shot through the heart. Tawil later said that he could not recall what he had told reporters about this. Records from the Al-Shifa Hospital reportedly show that a young boy was examined in the pathology department at midday. The pathologist, Dr. Abed El-Razeq El Masry, examined him for half an hour. He told Schapira that the boy's abdominal organs were lying outside his body, and he showed Schapira
images of the body, with a card identifying the boy as Muhammad. A watch on a pathologist's wrist in one of the images appeared to say 3:50.
Interview with soldiers In 2002 Schapira interviewed three anonymous Israeli soldiers, "Ariel, Alexej and Idan," who said they had been on duty at the IDF post that day. They knew something was about to happen, one said, because of the camera crews that had gathered. One soldier said the live fire started from the high-rise Palestinian blocks known as "the twins"; the shooter was firing at the IDF post, he said. The soldier added that he had not seen the al-Durrahs. The Israelis returned fire on a Palestinian station 30 metres to the left of the al-Durrahs. Their weapons were equipped with optics that allowed them to fire accurately, according to the soldier, and none of them had switched to automatic fire. In the view of the soldier, the shooting of Jamal and Muhammad was no accident. The shots did not come from the Israeli position, he said.
Father's injuries In 2007 Yehuda David, a hand surgeon at
Tel Hashomer Hospital, told Israel's Channel 10 that he had treated Jamal Al-Durrah in 1994 for knife and axe wounds to his arms and legs, injuries sustained during a gang attack. David maintained that the scars Jamal had presented as bullet wounds were in fact scars from a tendon-repair operation David had performed in the early 90s. When David repeated his allegations in an interview with a "Daniel Vavinsky," published in 2008 in
Actualité Juive in Paris, Jamal filed a complaint with the
Tribunal de grande instance de Paris for defamation and breach of doctor-patient confidentiality. The court established that "Daniel Vavinsky" was a pseudonym for , a deputy editor at
France 3. In 2011 it ruled that David and
Actualité Juive had defamed Jamal. David, Weill-Raynal and Serge Benattar, the managing editor of
Actualité Juive, were fined €5,000 each, and
Actualité Juive was ordered to print a retraction. The appeal was upheld in 2012; David was acquitted of defamation and breach of confidentiality.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli's prime minister, telephoned David to congratulate him. ==Israel's inquiries==