The footage is horrifying. A Palestinian man crouches behind a concrete cylinder with his back against the wall, caught in crossfire between Palestinian gunmen and Israeli soldiers on a Gazan street. Gunfire rings out. The man gestures frantically, and tries to melt into the crevasse between the barrel and the wall. But he is not alone.

His young son is with him.

The little boy tries to wedge himself behind his father, who reaches back to push him closer to the wall, shielding him with his own body. The boy is terrified. The father, desperate.

Bullet holes appear in the wall just behind them.

The Day

It is Sept. 30, 2000. Today is the second day of the second intifada. The latest round of negotiations between Palestinians and Israelis crumbled when Yasser Arafat rejected Israeli concessions back in July, and since then Palestinian Authority leaders have been planning a new outburst of violence demonstrating their cause. On the 27th, a roadside bomb fatally wounded Sgt. David Biri, 19, of Jerusalem, near the Gazan village of Netzarim. The following day, a Palestinian policeman shot and killed the Israeli officer with whom he was conducting a joint patrol. On the same day, Ariel Sharon visited the Temple Mount, an event of which Palestinian leaders said, “This was the most appropriate moment for the outbreak of the intifada.”

Violent Palestinian protests are fomenting across Israel, one of which is at a crossroads beside an Israeli outpost near Netzarim.

Hundreds of Palestinian civilians and a number of Palestinian police are in and around the intersection, accompanied by a large number of reporters, photographers and cameramen recording the day’s events and ready to send rushes of the most intense footage back to their newsrooms.

Hours of combined footage show a mix of scenes, the most intense of which include instances of Palestinians throwing rocks toward the soldiers’ position as well as fiery Molotov cocktails. Some cameras capture Palestinian street fighters firing much heavier weapons, including machine guns, and others indicate idf guns are being fired from concealed positions inside the outpost.

Associated Press, Reuters and other cameramen rush their most dramatic film back to their newsrooms, but none of them has anything nearly as tragically captivating as France 2.

The Shooting

Only the France 2 cameraman captures the most climactic, iconic and inflammatory 55 seconds of the day—and the entire intifada.

Jamal al-Dura, who later said he was returning with his son, Mohammed, from a used car market, appears through the lens of France 2 cameraman Talal Abu-Rahma around 3:00 in the afternoon. A heavy crossfire has pinned them behind a concrete barrel-shaped object about 3 feet in height with a large paving stone on top. The boy looks completely terrified, and the father is panicking, alternately looking toward the Israeli position then in the direction of the cameraman.

Five bullet holes appear in the wall behind them.

The camera swings wildly.

As Abu-Rahma re-steadies the camera and re-focuses, through a cloud of white smoke, your worst fears have come true.

The father’s wounded figure is slumped behind the barrel, his head bobbing in an uncontrolled daze.

His boy is dead.

Sprawled face-down across the ground and his father’s lap, the boy lies in a lifeless-looking heap. His stomach is stained with bright, plainly visible blood. The cameraman shouts, “The boy is dead! The boy is dead!”

The Aftermath

Talal Abu-Rahma immediately contacts Charles Enderlin, a respected French journalist, who is on the other side of Jerusalem in Ramallah. Enderlin and France 2 compose a report depicting the day’s conflict featuring the explosive and heart-rending footage. Enderlin’s voice-over states the man and child were “the target of fire coming from the Israeli position. The child signals, but … there’s a new burst of gunfire …. The child is dead and the father is wounded.”

The footage creates a global firestorm. France 2 releases the segment to other news outlets. Western networks and publishers widely reported the tragedy, and local and regional networks broadcast the images of the al-Duras hundreds of times, elevating Mohammed to martyr status and establishing the ultimate intifada icon: a 12-year-old unarmed Palestinian boy cut down in cold blood by savage Israeli troops. Soon, the agonizing image of the boy’s crouching figure is plastered on everything in the Arab world from gigantic murals to postage stamps. Mohammed al-Dura becomes the name of parks, newborns, and the Cairo avenue where the Israeli Embassy is located. It is also invoked by Osama bin Laden, by multiple suicide bombers, by the terrorists who beheaded Daniel Pearl, an American Jewish journalist for the Wall Street Journal; and it is chanted by the Palestinian mob that bludgeoned and strangled two Israeli reservists in Ramallah, then beat and dragged their corpses to bits, cheering and holding aloft body parts.

Global opinion descends with a fury on Israel, which apologizes for the tragedy. Two days after the shooting, Deputy Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon says, “It could very much be—this is an estimation—that a soldier in our position, who has a very narrow field of vision, saw somebody hiding behind a cement block in the direction from which he was being fired at and he shot in that direction.”

The Problem

Before the dust had “settled,” however, inconsistencies began to arise regarding the official—and heavily televised—version of Mohammed’s murder. The storyline didn’t quite add up.

Firstly, the cameramen working the site were largely Arabs, equipped and employed by Western newsmedia corporations. Abu-Rahma, France 2’s man on the spot, was one such Arab, and can fairly be described as ardently partisan.

In addition, the number of camera crews at the intersection that day resulted in hours of original raw footage, some of which is, upon close evaluation, suspicious to say the least.

In multiple clips, Palestinians who appear to be injured seem to be exaggerating their wounds. In at least two different cases, young Palestinians are running or being carried away from the Israeli outpost, presumably injured by Israeli fire. But the victims are then carried, in one case by a group, in the other by one man, back in the direction they came from to waiting ambulances—with several cameras catching the action. The curious part is that the ambulances are parked in full view of the outpost, and everyone in the crowd appears to have forgotten to be afraid of Israeli guns.

One of the clips used by Enderlin depicts a Palestinian trying to enter a truck suddenly convulsing and clutching his right leg. He falls hard to the ground, and literally 3 seconds later, an ambulance rolls to a stop. Footage from another camera shows three men grabbing the same man, dragging him across the pavement and then loading him by grabbing him roughly by both legs, without protest from the apparent victim.

Either case could be real or staged, but both were presented by media outlets as hard news.

In another case, a dozen or more Palestinians directly in front of the Israeli outpost act as if they are under fire running about and apparently fearful of the Israelis in the building. However, at the same time, the majority of the crowd in the periphery of the shot stand around conversing, smoking, sitting, again apparently unaware that bullets are flying all around them. Traffic, including a taxi, moves through the street, next to a man walking on the sidewalk with approximately five small children, looking as if he is on a casual stroll.

In another instance, a young man who has just helped a frantic group load a supposedly wounded victim into another nearby ambulance walks away from it grinning and laughing. In another case, another smiles and claps his hands for a job well done.

Watching the raw footage at length, one becomes increasingly confused as to why people under threat of imminent death act in such incongruous ways.

The Truth

But then you realize. You’ve just been to Pallywood.

Pallywood is grittier than Hollywood, less musical than Bollywood, but it has its own actors, directors, props, storylines, sets, special effects, professional film crews—and worldwide audiences. It is a recognized phenomenon in which Palestinians exaggerate or completely fabricate violence and injuries and portray Israelis as bloody, dispassionate aggressors intent on maiming and killing Palestinian men, women, youths and, wherever possible, children.

Several pieces of evidence indicate that the shooting of Mohammed al-Dura itself was a theatrical production brought to you by Pallywood.

Despite Abu-Rahma’s claim that the Israel Defense Forces shot at the father and son for 40 minutes, there were only approximately one dozen bullet holes in the wall, and apparently none at all in the barrel. In addition, the bullet holes are round, rather than elliptical, indicating they were fired more or less straight on rather than from a steep angle. At least one source claims that in the aftermath no blood was seen next to the barrel until just before international journalists arrived to film the spot, and at that point the bright red blood was still not precisely where the boy’s stomach supposedly bled for 20 minutes.

Last week, an independent ballistics expert corroborated earlier investigations that found that the angle of the Israeli position and the situation of the concrete obstacle made it impossible for Israeli troops inside the outpost to have hit the al-Duras anywhere except in their extremities, which were unharmed.

“If Jamal and Mohammed al-Dura were indeed struck by shots, then they could not have come from the Israeli position, from a technical point of view, but only from the direction of the Palestinian position,” Jean-Claude Schlinger, a 20-year French ballistics veteran, stated.

The finding comes in the midst of a case in which France 2 has sued for libel a media watchdog for claiming that the public news channel’s treatment of the questionable report “disgraces France and its public broadcasting system.”

France 2 is thought to have 27 minutes of raw footage from the day, and over seven years later has still refused to release the full footage, although it caved to pressure to let a handful of prominent and concerned French journalists view it. The three said that it contained obviously staged scenes of Palestinians being “shot” by Israeli troops and concluded that Charles Enderlin had lied.

The French judge has ordered that France 2 provide the full footage, but the station has been eluding the request, standing by Enderlin and Abu-Rahma, who increasingly appear to have produced activist and sensational journalism that led to violence and multiple deaths.

When additional footage was presented to the courtroom, footage that was left out of Enderlin’s broadcast, those in attendance perceptibly reacted when the last take, filmed just after the famous take of the boy’s collapse and the father being wounded, was presented.

In it, the “dead” boy is moving.

Enderlin claims France 2 cut the take because it showed the boys death throes. But close examination reveals that he is shielding his eyes with his hand and, briefly, peeking out in the direction of the camera.

If Pallywood had an awards night, it seems Mohammed al-Dura would be there—and standing on his own two feet.

The Aftermath

For all its faults and shortcomings (which, it seems, trained journalists notionally pick up on and filter out), Pallywood is hugely successful. In the case of Mohammed al-Dura, it created a child martyr superstar that inspired, and likely is still inspiring, dozens of Palestinians to commit murder. Literally over and over and over and over and over the image of the al-Duras being “shot” is pounded home to shame Islamic viewers of bin Laden’s newest recruitment tape. It poisoned international opinion toward Israel from the Middle East to Europe and beyond. In Paris and elsewhere, huge demonstrations equated Jews with Nazi exterminators. The hatred grew until at the Sept. 7, 2001, Durban conference against racism, Israel and the United States were demonized, with effigies of al-Dura carried through the streets.

Four days later, everyone forgot about al-Dura and Enderlin when a new voice-over burned its way into our conscience: “Another plane has just hit the World Trade Center.”

While it’s true that Bin Laden probably didn’t abruptly conspire to murder thousands of Americans simply upon seeing Enderlin’s report, there’s no denying an indirect connection between that explosive log on the fire and Bin Laden’s subsequent calculation that the Muslim world was ready for September 11.

It’s hard to say such an impression would have been miscalculated. As the World Trade Center appeared on television screens in Gaza, Ramallah, Israel and the world, Palestinians filled the streets, old women and young children cheering and smiling along with men and youths, expressions of relief and delight on their faces.

Recent evidence not only indicts the deadly al-Dura France 2 broadcast, but also other generally respected organizations such as cnn, the New York Times, the Associated Press, Reuters, the bbc and others who have turned a blind eye to partisan and even terrorist newsfeeds in Israel, Lebanon and elsewhere.

If it’s fiction and an anti-Israel bias you’re looking for, you now have two choices: Hollywood and Pallywood.