Thomas Hurndall (27 November 1981 – 13 January 2004) was a British photography student, a volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), and an activist against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories.
He arrived in the town of Rafah on 6 April 2003 and began emailing images of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Palestinians back to his family.
Hurndall and a group of activists were in the area, having planned to set up a peace tent on one of the nearby roads to blockade IDF tank patrols.
Six weeks after the surgery, he was flown back to the United Kingdom, where he was taken to the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in London, where he remained in a persistent vegetative state, suffering from irreversible brain damage.
[7][8] His father told a British inquest that, according to ISM and Palestinian witnesses, Hurndall had seen a group of children playing and had noticed that bullets were hitting the ground between them.
"[2] The IDF initially refused more than a routine internal inquiry, which concluded that Hurndall was shot accidentally in the crossfire, and suggested that his group's members were essentially functioning as human shields.
[2] As pressure from the parents mounted, supported in part by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, in October 2003 Israel's Judge Advocate General Menachem Finkelstein ordered the IDF to open a further military police investigation into Hurndall's death.
Idier Wahid Taysir Hayb (or al-Heib) claimed he had shot at a man in military fatigues although photographic evidence clearly showed Hurndall was wearing a bright orange jacket denoting he was a foreigner.
Chen Kugel, an Israeli forensic pathologist appearing for the defence, stated that the pneumonia had not been properly treated and "the large amounts of morphine" Hurndall was receiving contributed to his death.
[1][3] In August 2010, an army committee headed by Advocate-General Avichai Mandelblit shortened Hayb's sentence for good behaviour, resulting in his serving a total of six and a half years in custody.
After an appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court, in early August the state prosecution offered the legal team access to the report, but not to the Hurndall family themselves.
Hurndall's father told reporters that there had been a "general policy" to shoot civilians in the area without fear of reprisals,[2] as stated by the soldier who fired the shot, Taysir Hayb.
"[16] Tom's mother Jocelyn Hurndall wrote a commentary in The Guardian on 10 January 2004, in which she stated: It seems that life is cheap in the occupied territories.
[17]On 13 October 2008, Channel 4 broadcast a dramatised documentary The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall,[18] which was written by Simon Block and directed by Rowan Joffe.
Anthony and Jocelyn Hurndall were interviewed at length in The Observer prior to the airing of the documentary:[19] They shot our son but they can't kill his spirit.The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall was nominated for the 2009 British Academy Television Award for Best Single Drama (Simon Block, Rowan Joffe, Barney Reisz, Charles Furneaux)[20] and won Best Actor (Stephen Dillane) and Best Director Fiction/Entertainment (Rowan Joffe).