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Remembering Muhammad Al-Durrah... and the hundreds more
As we mourn Muhammad Al-Durrah, killed by Israeli forces 21 years ago, I’ve been remembering two small personal incidents related to the boy's death.
The first one occurred a few months after his killing. I had gone to the Palestinian Occupied Territories as a freelance reporter to see for myself what was going on. At one point I was walking around the area of Gaza where the boy had been killed. A man came up to me and said he was the cameraman who had filmed the incident.
He told me that afterward Israel had claimed that their soldiers had not shot the boy and that the footage was fraudulent. He was extremely angry at Israel’s misrepresentation of the death and of their outrageous accusations of journalistic malpractice. (By the way, these israeli claims were finally laid to rest in 2013.)
The second incident provides a window into news coverage of Palestine:
Three years later I was in the Palestinian Territories again, and had gone to the AP bureau in the West Bank to interview the bureau chief about their news coverage.
While I was sitting in front of the editor's desk, he received a phone call from a contact in the field. After he hung up, he explained that it was a report about a boy who had just been shot dead by Israeli soldiers.
He phoned the report into the control bureau for the region, which is located in West Jerusalem and staffed by journalists living in Israel; many of them Israeli and/or with Israeli families. I later wrote about the incident in this piece, and in this one, which contains the boy’s photo.
That night I was watching CNN news back at my hotel and noticed that there was no report about this murder of a young boy. I had no doubt that if the murder had been of an Israeli child it would have been feaatured.
I phoned CNN (I believe their London headquarters) and told them I was in the West Bank and had a news tip: a 12-year-old boy had been killed earlier that day by Israeli soldiers.
The woman on the phone said: “I know, I’ve seen the footage.”
I was startled and said: “But I’ve been watching CNN, and I haven’t seen any report about it.” She answered in a regretful tone: “I know… “
She told me that she had been the one who had gotten them to broadcast the footage of Mohammed El-Durrah. She implied that she wasn’t likely to succeed with this one…
And she didn’t.
While we’re mourning Muhammad, let’s mourn all the other hundreds of children also killed by Israeli forces, whose deaths were never shown on TV... and the hundreds more that will come in the coming weeks, months and years… until enough of us around the world finally say
No More.
[Alison Weir
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