It was September 2000 when Ariel Sharon, then leader of Israel's opposition Likud Party, decided to go for a walk on Temple Mount: this would have led, two days after, on September 30, to a Palestinians' demonstration at Netzarim Junction in Gaza. That same day, a 55-second video footage of the demonstration was spread all over the world by the French TV station France 2.
In the video, a 12 year old boy, Mohammed Al-Dura, sat crouching behind his father Jamal, trying to shelter themselves next to a barrel, under what was said to be Israeli gunfire. The footage ended with the image of al-Dura's body slumping to the ground, while the voice-over by France 2's Jerusalem correspondent, Charles Enderlin, declared him dead.

Al-Dura became a symbol for the Palestinian war against Israel, showing the cold blood killings of Palestinian children by the merciless hand of Israel's army. The day after France 2 broadcast the video, the second intifada broke out. According to 2001 Mitchell report, there was a direct connection between the two events.
References to al-Dura were made also when al-Qaeda decapitated the journalist Daniel Pearl, and by Osama Bin Laden himself, after September 11 2001.
But now we know that all that violence was based on a lie: the boy was still alive and kicking after France 2's footage.

The truth, along with the unabridged version of the whole video shooting, was shown recently in a French courtroom. This was due to a libel suit brought against a French media watchdog, Philippe Karsenty, by France 2 and Enderlin.
Karsenty first claimed that the “killing” was “pure fiction”. In May this year, a Paris local court seemed to believe Enderlin's version, mostly thanks to a letter by the then French President Chirac, in which he stated that Enderlin was an authoritative journalist.
Nevertheless, the Appeal court ordered France 2 to show the untrasmitted 27 minutes footage filmed by Talal Abu Rahma, the Palestinian cameraman on whose accounts Enderlin – who was in Jerusalem at the time – based his Netzarim's report.

I was in the Paris court when the filmed evidence was being produced and everybody could see that the whole thing was a complete set-up. Denis Jeambar, director of “L'Express” and TV producer Daniel Leconte, who too saw it, wrote in “Le Figaro”: “Palestinians seem to have organised a staged scene. They 'play' at war and simulate injuries”.

The cameraman said the gunfire lasted about 45 minutes, yet there showed no one falling under fire. The video showed, instead, Palestinians throwing rocks, youths grinning at the camera, boys on their bikes. No wounds, no blood, no agony. Al-Dura and his father, while supposedly riddled with bullets, had no marks on them. Before the boy slumped to the ground, a voice in Arabic said: “The boy is dead!”, thus foreseeing what was yet to come. Then the “corpse” assumed four different positions. The cameraman gave the “take two” signal and the little dead peeped through his fingers, as to ascertain if the scene had to be repeated.

Nahum Shahaf, a physicist in Israel's defence establishment, first discovered the footage after revising untrasmitted frames from many TV crews. He found out several short films, shot in Netzarim area on those days: “They used directors, cameramen and volunteer actors,” he said. “You can see them shooting little horror scenes. The wounded get up and go back for another take”.
Shahaf's investigation started on the ground of incontrovertible evidence: from pictures of al-Dura's autopsy, he observed that the body must had been dead for at least one day.
Two doctors at Gaza's al-Shifa hospital told him that al-Dura's corpse was brought there before 1 pm, but incidents at Netzarim had not started until 3 pm. From the hospital's records, he discovered that a dead boy named Rami Jamal al-Dura had been brought there the day before, but he was older than 12. All TV reports stated that the boy “killed” in the video was Mohammed Rami Jamal al-Dura. “It was just lie after lie after lie”, said Shahaf.

It seems to confirm that the use of staged fiction testifying supposed Israeli atrocities, has become a habit by Western media. Such a practice is so widespread to be labelled as “Pallywood”.
According to Danny Seaman, director of Israel government's press office, almost every local stringer, on whom Western journalists depend for getting Gaza photos and news, is bound to Hamas. And Western reporters don't mean any harm to Hamas, unless they'd want their own lives to be harmed. The result is that, most of the times, footage from Gaza is routinely fabricated. “These were good pictures, always getting on the front pages,” says Seaman. “ 'Bad Jews, poor Arabs' sold papers”.

But both Western media and Israel itself, haven't realized yet that Pallywood is the essential tactique in what has become a psychological war.
Surprisingly enough, even after Shahaf's findings and after the Netzarim footage was shown in the French appeal court, Israel's government has said nothing. And, except for a few newspapers, some TV documentaries and the internet, media all over the world deliberately ignored the news.
So the video perfectly fit the cause of Palestinians and Islamists against the 'bad Jews'.

For France, this scandal is to be its second “affaire Dreyfuss”: it clearly recalled to mind the Jewish French army captain Alfred Dreyfuss, who was convicted in 1894 for being a spy, under fabricated evidence. The fact then arose a spreading, state-based anti-semitism.
In medieval times, the Christian blood libel led to annihilation of Jews. In modern times, al-Dura and other similar libels are promoting the annihilation of the state of Israel. Once more, the Western media have shown themselves to be the best allies of Islamists' propaganda.

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