The mother of Palestinian Abdul Fattah al-Shareef holds his poster during a protest in the West Bank city of Hebron on Jan. 4, 2017. Picture by Xinhua SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved. Media all over the world have covered the case of the killing of Abdul Fattah al-Shareef, the Palestinian teenager who was shot in his head in cold blood by Israeli soldier Elor Azaria on 24th March 2016 in the Tel Rumeida district in Hebron. Hebron, the largest city in the West Bank, is unique among other West Bank cities in that illegal Israeli settlements are distributed not only at its periphery, but also in the heart of the city, including in Tel Rumeida. These are accompanied by military checkpoints spread out over the city centre preventing the free movement of its inhabitants, and dividing the city into isolated sections which have become a sort of exhibition of contemporary apartheid, or - from the point of view of the terrorised inhabitants who remain - a ghost town.
The wide publicity which the video of this particular killing received is a good and important thing, in so far as it helped to reveal the criminal acts which are perpetrated by Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank - the founding purpose of our group, Human Rights Defenders. Yet, there are facts that have seldom been spoken about in the Israeli media, or indeed the international media, which continue to rely disproportionately on Israeli media sources for its information.
In particular, international media has had little to say about the story behind the filming of the attack. It wasn’t just good luck that placed a camera in the hands of a local Palestinian resident on that day in March. Rather, it was the result of a long, difficult campaign to organise a community.
