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Killing of Muhammad al-Durrah

Muhammad al-Durrah, a 12-year-old Palestinian boy, was killed by gunfire at the Netzarim Junction in Gaza in 2000, filmed by a France 2 cameraman in footage broadcast worldwide. Through 2010 the opening said that for sections of the Israeli and Jewish communities, the allegations against Israel amounted to a modern blood libel, the centuries-old antisemitic association of Jews with child sacrifice. Today that sentence is gone from the opening, though antisemitism survives three times in the body. A reader arriving now does not learn that Israeli and Jewish communities viewed the accusations against them as invoking that centuries-old antisemitic trope.
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Machine-checked against the full current article on 2026-08-01. “antisemitism” appeared 1 times in this article's opening at its peak. Today the opening has none; the body has 3.
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The opening as it read in 2010

The Muhammad al-Durrah incident took place at the Netzarim junction in the Gaza Strip on September 30, 2000, on the second day of the Second Intifada , amid widespread rioting throughout the Palestinian territories .1 Jamal al-Durrah and his 12-year-old son, Muhammad, were filmed by France 2 cameraman Talal Abu Rahma as they sought cover behind a concrete cylinder after being caught in crossfire between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian security forces. The footage, which lasts just over a minute, shows the pair holding onto each other, the boy crying and the father waving, then a burst of gunfire and dust, after which the boy is seen slumped across his father's legs.2 Whether the Israelis or the Palestinians shot the boy is a matter of dispute.3 Fifty-nine seconds of the scene were broadcast in France with a voiceover from Charles Enderlin , France 2's bureau chief in Israel, who did not witness the incident, telling viewers that the al-Durrahs had been the "target of fire from the Israeli positions", and that the boy had died.4 After an emotional public funeral, Muhammad was hailed throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds as a Palestinian martyr ; streets and parks were named after him, and postage stamps bore his image.5 The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) accepted responsibility within three days, saying the shots had apparently been fired by their soldiers, a position that was formally withdrawn in September 2007. In the months and years following the incident, a number of commentators questioned the accuracy of France 2's report. A controversial IDF investigation in October 2000 concluded that the IDF had probably not shot the al-Durrahs.6 Three senior French journalists who reviewed the raw footage in 2004 argued that it is not clear from the footage alone that the boy died, and that France 2 cut a final few seconds in which he appears to lift his hand from his face.7 France 2's news editor, Arlette Chabot , said in 2005 that no one could say for sure who fired the shots.8 Other commentators, including the director of the Israeli government press office, said the scenes had been staged by Palestinian protesters.9 Philippe Karsenty , a French media commentator, was sued for libel in 2004 by France 2 for suggesting this; a ruling against him in 2006 was overturned by the Paris Court of Appeal in May 2008, a decision that France 2 has taken to the French Supreme Court .10 The footage has acquired what one writer called the iconic power of a battle flag.11 The scene has been evoked in other deaths.12 It was blamed for the lynching of two Israeli army reservists in Ramallah in October 2000, and was seen in the background when Daniel Pearl , a Jewish-American journalist, was beheaded by al-Qaeda in 2002. James Fallows writes that no version of the truth about the footage will ever emerge that all sides consider believable. Charles Enderlin has called it a cultural prism , its viewers seeing what they want to see. Enderlin's report said: "Here, Jamal and his son Mohamed are the target of fire from the Israeli positions ... Another burst of fire.13 Mohamed is dead and his father seriously wounded." See Enderlin, France 2 v. The original French: "Ici, Jamal et son fils Mohammed sont la cible de tirs venus des positions israéliennes ... Muhammed al-Durra is the paradigmatic Palestinian martyr, and discussion on the circumstances of his martyrdom does not take place in Arab countries". Sources for postage stamps, parks, and streets: Carvajal 2005 ; BBC News, October 2, 2000 . Later accounts of this stress that the IDF could not have shot the boy. Shlomi Am-Shalom of the IDF said: "The general [Samia] has made clear that from an analysis of all the data from the scene, including the location of the IDF position, the trajectory of the bullets, the location of the father and son behind an obstacle, the cadence of the bullet fire, the angle at which the bullets penetrated the wall behind the father and his son, and the hours of the events, we can rule out with the greatest certainty the possibility that the gunfire that apparently harmed the boy and his father was fired by IDF soldiers, who were at the time located only inside their fixed position"; also see Haaretz 2000 and Segev 2002 .14 They wrote, however, that they were not convinced that the particular scene was staged, but only that "this famous 'agony' that Enderlin insisted was cut from the montage does not exist." Carvajal 2005 Patience 2007 ; Kalman 2007 .15 Carvajal 2005 : "But it is the harrowing image of a single terrified 12-year-old boy, shielded in his father's futile embrace, that possesses the iconic power of a battle flag." Fallows 2003 : "His name is known to every Arab, his death cited as the ultimate example of Israeli military brutality." Fallows 2003 ; Julius 2006 ; Lauter 2008 ; Glick 2006 ; Patience 2007 . Note: the blood libel was the claim that it was a Jewish custom to sacrifice a Christian child on the eve of Pesach ( Passover ), and to make matzo , or unleavened bread, using the child's blood. Fallows elaborated on his view on his blog: "I ended up arguing in my article that the ‘official’ version of the event could not be true. Based on the known locations of the boy, his father, the Israeli Defense Force troops in the area, and various barriers, walls, and other impediments, the IDF soldiers simply could not have shot the child in the way most news accounts said they had done ... I became fully convinced by the negative case (IDF was innocent). But I did not think there was enough evidence for the even more damning positive indictment (person or persons unknown staged a fake death — or perhaps even a real death, for ‘blood libel’ purposes": see Fallow's blog post , October 2, 2007, and a discussion of it in Beckerman 2007 .16

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Today
“antisemitism” appeared 1 times in this article's opening at its peak. Today the opening has none; the body has 3. Read the current article and compare.
2005201020152020Oct '232025
antisemitism010000
martyr041211
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