The story of the Israel Defense Forces' purported killing of Muhamed al Dura is a modern blood libel. Richard Landes introduces the affair as follows:
People who followed Middle East news in 2000 cannot forget the image of Muhamed al Durah, gunned down in a hail of Israeli bullets at the very beginning of the Al Aqsa Intifada. The impact of this dramatic footage on global culture is close to incalculable.
It appears that just about every relevant element of the story originally reported by France 2 is false. Examination of the available evidence shows that al Dura's death was deliberately staged for film.
Nidra Poller's 2005 article "Myth, fact, and the al-Dura affair" provides an invaluable narrative account. Now Poller reports that al Dura's father -- allegedly wounded by the IDF in the events that led to his son's death -- was in fact injured by axe-wielding Palestinian forces in 1992, according to an Israeli surgeon who performed reconstructive surgery on the wounds two years later.
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