[2] Fifty-nine seconds of the footage were broadcast on television in France with a voiceover from Charles Enderlin, the station's bureau chief in Israel.

[1] On 28 September 2000, two days before the shooting, the Israeli opposition leader Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount in the Old City of Jerusalem, a holy site in both Judaism and Islam with contested rules of access.

The violence that followed had its roots in several events, but the visit was provocative and triggered protests that escalated into rioting across the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

[23][24] Jamal al-Durrah (Arabic: جمال الدرة, romanized: Jamāl ad-Durra; born c. 1963) was a carpenter and house painter before the shooting.

[35] Highly regarded among his peers and within the French establishment,[4] he submitted a letter from Jacques Chirac, during the Philippe Karsenty libel action, who wrote in flattering terms of Enderlin's integrity.

[4] As a result of the al-Durrah case, he received death threats, his wife was assaulted in the street,[38] his children were threatened, the family had to move home, and at one point they considered emigrating to the United States.

[3][4][39] Talal Hassan Abu Rahma studied business administration in the United States, and began working as a freelance cameraman for France 2 in Gaza in 1988.

[40] On the day of the shooting—Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year—the two-story Israel Defense Forces (IDF) outpost at the Netzarim junction was manned by Israeli soldiers from the Givati Brigade Engineering Platoon and the Herev Battalion.

Abu Rahma was filming events and interviewing protesters, including Abdel Hakim Awad, head of the Fatah youth movement in Gaza.

[59] Abu Rahma remained at the junction for 30–40 minutes until he felt it was safe to leave,[31] then drove to his studio in Gaza City to send the footage to Enderlin.

[63] According to Abed El-Razeq El Masry, the pathologist who examined Muhammed, the boy had received a fatal injury to the abdomen.

[65][66] During an emotional public funeral in Bureij, Muhammad was wrapped in a Palestinian flag and buried before sundown on the day of his death, in accordance with Muslim tradition.

[76] On 3 October 2000, the IDF's chief of operations, Major-General Giora Eiland, said an internal investigation indicated the shots had apparently been fired by Israeli soldiers.

[45] It was most persistently pursued by Stéphane Juffa, editor-in-chief of the Metula News Agency [fr] (Mena), a French-Israeli company;[85] Luc Rosenzweig, former editor-in-chief of Le Monde and a Mena contributor;[86] Richard Landes, an American historian who became involved after Enderlin showed him the raw footage during a visit to Jerusalem in 2003;[87] and Philippe Karsenty, founder of a French media-watchdog site, Media-Ratings.

[96] 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.

[112][page needed] Records from the Al-Shifa Hospital reportedly show that a young boy was examined in the pathology department at midday.

[120] 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.

"[45] The team was led by Nahum Shahaf, a physicist, and Joseph Doriel, an engineer, both of whom had been involved in the Yitzhak Rabin assassination conspiracy theories.

Doriel said the actors in this staged incident included the Palestinian gunmen, the cameraman Abu Rahma and even the boy's own father "who apparently didn't understand that the act would end in the murder of his son".

[10] In 2005 Major-General Giora Eiland publicly retracted the IDF's admission of responsibility, and a statement to that effect was approved by the prime minister's office in September 2007.

Then bring him to me.In September 2012 the Israeli government set up another inquiry at the request of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, led by Yossi Kuperwasser, director-general of the Strategic Affairs Ministry.

[11] France 2 and Enderlin asked the Israeli government to supply the commission's letter of appointment, membership and evidence, including photographs and the names of witnesses.

[135] In response to claims that it had broadcast a staged scene, Enderlin and France 2 filed three defamation suits in 2004 and 2005, seeking symbolic damages of €1.

[102] During the screening, the court heard that Muhammad had raised his hand to his forehead and moved his leg after Abu Rahma had said he was dead, and that there was no blood on his shirt.

[2] A report prepared for the court by Jean-Claude Schlinger, a ballistics expert commissioned by Karsenty, said that had the shots come from the Israeli position, Muhammad would have been hit in the lower limbs only.

[143][144][145] The left-leaning Le Nouvel Observateur began a petition in support of Enderlin that was signed by 300 French writers, accusing Karsenty of a seven-year smear campaign.

[16][146] The footage of Muhammad was compared to other iconic images of children under attack: the boy in the Warsaw ghetto (1943), the Vietnamese girl doused with napalm (1972), and the firefighter carrying the dying baby in Oklahoma (1995).

[25] Catherine Nay, a French journalist, argued that Muhammad's death "cancels, erases that of the Jewish child, his hands in the air before the SS in the Warsaw Ghetto.

Parks and streets were named in Muhammad's honour, and Osama bin Laden mentioned him in a "warning" to President George Bush after 9/11.

[152][90] In the view of Charles Enderlin, the controversy is a smear campaign intended to undermine footage coming out of the occupied Palestinian territories.