Snapped Shot

The Israeli army, using the angles of the shots, demonstrated that the gunfire could not have come from their position. The independent investigators led by Philippe Karsenty, a director of the Media-Ratings watchdog, went further and said the scenes had been staged and that report was a “hoax”.

He was successfully sued for defamation but opted to press on to a higher court.

Last week, he was vindicated. Senior French judge Laurence Trebucq, sitting on the Court of Appeals in the Palais de Justice, acquitted Karsenty and ruled against France 2 and its reporter, Enderlin. They now intend to take the matter to the nation’s highest court, which rules on technicalities, not facts.

Judge Trebucq’s meticulous ruling upheld - point-by-point - Karsenty’s case against the al-Durra footage.

The inflammatory report was essentially destroyed when he ordered the government-owned broadcaster to produce all the raw footage shot of the incident and instead of a few seconds of film, an 18-minute excerpt, still not the complete sequence, was shown to the court.

It revealed staged battle scenes, rehearsed ambulance evacuations - but nothing to substantiate the toxic television report.

No shots were seen coming from the Israeli position, no bullets were shown striking the boy, no blood was seen on the father’s shirt, though he was said to have cradled his eviscerated son in his arms, and the boy is seen to move, even to look conspiratorially at the television camera, when he is supposed to have been dead.