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Israeli Report Casting New Doubts on Shooting in Gaza

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JERUSALEM - The images seen around the world were shocking: a young boy being shot dead as he crouched behind his father at a dusty junction in Gaza in September 2000. But the facts behind the images have been disputed almost from the start, and on Sunday, the Israeli government asserted that there was no evidence for the original account of the event, which was that the boy was hit by Israeli bullets - and that it was even possible that neither the boy nor his father had been struck by any bullets at all.

The original television report - filmed by France 2, a public television channel, at the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada - had a powerful impact, galvanizing the uprising and fueling international criticism of Israel.

The boy, who was identified as Muhammad al-Dura, 12, became a symbol of the struggle against Israel; his name was invoked by Osama bin Laden, and images of him cowering behind his father have appeared on postage stamps across the region.

Although an Israeli general initially told reporters at a news conference that the boy had apparently been hit by Israeli gunfire, as the television report stated, an investigation by the Israeli military found a few weeks later that it was more likely that the boy had been hit by bullets fired by Palestinians during the exchanges of fire in the area. In 2007, an official Israeli document described the assertions that the boy had been killed by Israeli fire as “myth.”

The new findings published on Sunday were the work of an Israeli government review committee, which said its task was to re-examine the event “in light of the continued damage it has caused to Israel.” They come after years of debate over the veracity of the France 2 report, which was filmed by a Gaza correspondent, Talal Abu Rahma, and narrated by the station's Jerusalem bureau chief, Charles Enderlin, who was not at the present at the scene.

The Israeli government review suggested, as other critics have, that the France 2 footage might have been staged. It noted anomalies like the apparent lack of blood in appropriate places at the scene, and said that raw footage from the seconds after the boy's apparent death seem to show him raising his arm. The government review implies that the boy could still be alive today, but does not elaborate on where it thinks he might be.

“Contrary to the report's claim that the boy is killed, the committee's review of the raw footage showed that in the final scenes, which were not broadcast by France 2, the boy is seen to be alive,” the review said. “Based on the available evidence, it appears significantly more likely that Palestinian gunmen were the source of the shots which appear to have impacted in the vicinity” of the boy and his father.

France 2 and Mr. Enderlin have pursued a libel case in the French courts against Philippe Karsenty, who runs a French media watchdog group and who accused the network of broadcasting a staged scene as news. A trial court reached a verdict against Mr. Karsenty in the matter in 2006, but the verdict was overturned on appeal in 2008; France 2 appealed that decision to a higher court, which is expected to rule on Wednesday.

France 2, Mr. Enderlin and Mr. Abu Rahma have consistently defended their report. Mr. Enderlin told the Agence France-Presse news service on Sunday, “We are ready for an independent public inquiry.”

Mr. Enderlin described the Israeli government report as a “secret commission,” writing on his Twitter account on Sunday that the committee had contacted neither France 2, the boy's father, Jamal, nor others who were at the scene.

A Statement from France 2 reiterated that position.

“From the start of the incident, until today, France 2 has shown a willingness to participate in any official independent investigation, carried out according to international standards, read the statement, which was posted on the network's blog. “This was the position of France 2 as repeated and explained to the Israeli High Court of Justice on April 23rd 2008.

“At the same time France 2 announced it is ready to help Jamal Al Dura in any way to exhume the body of his son Muhammad for a pathological examination, including, if necessary, a DNA test to help clarify the circumstances of the incident.

“It is hard to believe the special committee formed by Moshe Yaalon, today Israel's Defence minister did not approach France 2 or (to the best of our knowledge Mr. Al Dura â€" despite his willingness to exhume the boy's body. France 2 learned about the existence of the committee from the press- and this speaks for itself.”

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A version of this article appeared in print on 05/20/2013, on page A6 of the NewYork edition with the headline: Israeli Report Casting New Doubts on Shooting in Gaza.

Editors\' Note

Editors' Note | Wednesday, May 22, 2013:

After a post and a slide show about Haitian child servants were featured here and on the Home page on Monday, The Times learned that the photographer had a business relationship with the man whose family was the subject of many of the pictures. The man, Lesli Zoe Petit-Phar, had been paid $100 a day to be the photographer's driver, guide and translator - a so-called “fixer.” Had The Times known this, it would not have published the pictures or written the post describing them. Both the post and the slide show have been removed.

Editors for The Times spoke with the fixer, Lesli Zoe Petit-Phar, on Tuesday night. He confirmed that he had worked for the photographer, Vlad Sokhin, and he expressed concern that Mr. Sokhin had unfairly portrayed his family's relationship with Judeline, the girl who lives with them. Mr. Petit-Phar was shown in one of the pictures being served a beer by the girl.

Mr. Sokhin acknowledged on Tuesday night that he had failed to disclose his relationship with Mr. Petit-Phar to the reporter writing about his photographs. In fact, when the reporter asked him how he had located a family willing to be photographed with child servants, he responded that his fixer had found the family. But he did not say that it was the fixer's family.



Pictures of the Day: Iraq and Elsewhere

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Dancing in the Dark: The Architectural Photography of Hélène Binet

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If the second and third dimensions were battling each other, the Swiss photographer Hélène Binet would be something of the cunning go-between. Well known for photographing architecture, she has a knack for giving depth to the flat plane of a 2-D photograph.

Pitting two dimensions against each other, her pictures seize empty spaces and fold, braid and twist them into knots. For her, light has material properties - cutting like a scythe or covering like a blanket. Her work, collected in a new monograph from Phaidon called “Composing Space,” is about bending preconceptions.

“It comes from the feeling that you cannot represent real space in photography,” said Ms. Binet, 53. “You're looking for this third dimension all the time, but it's almost impossible.”

The book presents work dating back to the late 1980s, conjuring mystery while bridging the flat and the physical in counterintuitive ways. She has worked with architectural luminaries like Peter Zumthor, Le Corbusier and Daniel Libeskind, whose latest high-profile work, One World Trade Center, was recently crowned with a spire in Manhattan. One doesn't get more 3-D than a tower that thrusts 1,776 feet into the air.

But Ms. Binet isn't interested in showing buildings as grand structures on a landscape. Instead, she zooms in, hiding some parts of a space to reveal new qualities in others.

“I try to see how I can bring one experience out that somehow is referring to the third dimension,” Ms. Binet said. “But not saying, ‘This is the building. I'm going to try to tell you everything about the building.' ”

She is now based in London but was born in Switzerland, where her early pictures came out of a job at an opera house in Geneva. But photographing dancers didn't give her much room to experiment, and she soon grew dissatisfied. When she took a picture of a dancer, she said, she was not really taking a picture of a dancer - it was the performance.

“And immediately, you know that you don't know the performance,” she said in a telephone interview. “It's quite clear.”

DESCRIPTIONHélène Binet Monastery of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette, Éveux, France, designed by Le Corbusier, 1953. View of a light well, photographed in 2007.

Eventually, through a friend, Ms. Binet became acquainted with a circle of architects and began to shoot, and interpret, their creations. Her first series, in 1989, of John Hejduk's “Subject/Object” structures in Riga, Latvia, was the fruit of a lonely and exhausting process of discovery. She had no assistants, no experience photographing architecture and no formal instruction in the field, Mark Pimlott writes in an essay in the new book.

“She was alone with her subject, confronted with making architectural photographs in isolation, so was obliged to proceed instinctively, looking for both her subject and a picture,” Mr. Pimlott wrote. “The act of making photographs was bound to the process of understanding.”

Over time, Ms. Binet found an approach that suited her, one that seems less scientific or precise than one might expect. She read the architects' books, went to their lectures and had tea with them. She was looking to synchronize sensibilities - so much so that she even penetrated their dreams.

After seeing one of her early images, Mr. Hejduk declared, “You're bringing me back to the first dream I had when I did the project.”

It was early in Ms. Binet's career, but the compliment meant a lot. It told her not only that she was getting somewhere, but that their mind-meld benefited her, too. “Even if I was not one of his students, he taught me how to look at the world,” she said.

In other chapters of the new book - with enigmatic titles like “Memory,” “Materiality” and “Ground” - Ms. Binet trains her eye on surfaces and things not made by man. Even a crack in stone can be represented in a way that explores the questions that dog her.

“The crack is really about the fascination of shifting from architecture made by man to architecture made by nature,” she said. “So the way I look at the earth, the surface, is how it's been made.”

And she has learned to think of light as something she can wield.

“We cannot appreciate the space and the texture without the light touching it, and we cannot appreciate the light without the material,” she said. “This combination is part of a challenge and quite beautiful. They absolutely need each other.”

This echoes her early days with dancers who darted in and out of darkness. In her photo of Peter Zumthor's Kolumba Diocesan Museum in Cologne, Germany, for example (Slide 1), natural light danced with electric light, dappling the brick and speckling the ceiling. It was a fleeting, precise moment, when the indoor and outdoor light was blending and bouncing in a single frame. She likened the elements to players in an orchestra.

Performing.

“The sense of the light, the sense of coming out of the dark, it's something that stays very much in the way I photograph,” she said. As when she photographed dancers, she had to be quick. “There's the dark, and then there's the things coming out of it,” she said. “I say, ‘Oh, that's a performance.' Then they disappear. It's light again.”

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Pictures of the Day: Oklahoma and Elsewhere

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Societal Ills Spike in Crisis-Stricken Greece

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ATHENS - “Five euros only, just 5 euros,” whispered Maria, a young prostitute with sunken cheeks and bedraggled hair, as she pitched herself forward from the shadows of a graffiti-riddled alley in central Athens on a recent weeknight.

As a chill wind swept paper and trash across a grimy sidewalk, Angelos Tzortzinis, a Greek photographer, caught sight of Maria lowering her price to the equivalent of about $6.50. Maria, who would only give a pseudonym, had hoped to get some money for food - and for a cheap but dangerous new street drug that has emerged during Greece's crisis, guaranteed to obliterate her sorrows, if only for a moment.

With the country heading into the fifth year of economic depression, and unemployment near 60 percent for young people, greater numbers of women and men are offering their bodies for next to nothing to get any scrap of money. According to the National Center for Social Research, the number of people selling sex has surged 150 percent in the last two years.

Many prostitutes have been selling their services for as little as 10 to 15 euros, a price that has shrunk along with the income of clients afflicted by the crisis. Many more prostitutes are taking greater health risks by having unprotected sex, which sells for a premium. Still more are subject to violence and rape.

Now a new menace has arisen: a type of crystal methamphetamine called shisha, after the Turkish water pipe, but otherwise known as poor man's cocaine, brewed from barbiturates and other ingredients including alcohol, chlorine and even battery acid.

DESCRIPTIONAngelos Tzortzinis An addict on an Athens street.

A hit of shisha, concocted in makeshift laboratories around Athens, costs 3 to 4 euros. Doses come in the form of a 0.01-gram ball, leaving many users reaching for hits throughout the day. They include prostitutes, whom Mr. Tzortzinis photographed in a seedy central neighborhood of Athens called Omonia, next to a large police station.

Shisha is most often smoked. But it is increasingly being taken intravenously; because of the caustic chemicals it contains, a rising number of users are winding up in the emergency room. Health experts say the injections are also adding to an alarming rise in H.I.V. cases around Greece, which surged more than 50 percent last year from 2011 as more people turn to narcotics.

With scant money left in the government's coffers, and an austerity program in place until Greece repays hundreds of billions of euros in bailout money, programs for health care, treatment and social assistance have been curbed sharply.

That leaves the problems in the hands of Greece's police to clean up. In daily sweeps, officers at the nearby police station arrest prostitutes and jail them overnight. There, they are out of reach of the drug, but also cut off from assistance of any type.

For Mr. Tzortzinis, who grew up in the area, seeing women give themselves for as little as 5 euros underscores one of the many horrors of Greece's drawn-out crisis.

“These women need help,” he said. “But they cannot help themselves. Nobody is helping them.”

DESCRIPTIONAngelos Tzortzinis A drug addict's mattress was hung on the front of a closed store in central Athens.

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Pictures of the Day: Oklahoma and Elsewhere

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Photos from Oklahoma, Egypt, France and Golan Heights.

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Sunday Column: Tattoo Removal on the Photo Desk

Tattoo Removal on the Photo Desk

A POWERFUL picture taken by the Swedish photographer Paul Hansen last year, of men carrying the bodies of dead children through the streets of Gaza City, was artfully composed and filled with anguish.

But was it authentic? After it won a prestigious award, selected photo of the year by World Press Photo, questions arose about whether it was a digitally altered composite. Mr. Hansen denied that, and last week, World Press Photo confirmed that the image was genuine.

The challenge to the photo, called “Gaza Burial,” illustrates a point: In news photography, manipulation of images is strictly forbidden. At The Times, such rules have been stated and vigorously enforced for many years. Whether from the South Bronx or Syria, news photos must represent unaltered reality.

That hasn't changed, but in one corner of The Times, different rules prevail.

I stumbled across this last week when I wrote a blog post about readers' objections to a fashion photo spread in T, the monthly style magazine. I asked its editor, Deborah Needleman, about one objection: that the cover model was too skinny. She responded that she, too, felt that many models were too thin, and with this one she had considered “adding some fat to her with Photoshop.”

John Schwartz, a Times reporter, was among the first to react. On Twitter, he called her comment “jaw-dropping.” That reflected how deeply most journalists feel about the integrity of photographs.

“That is inviolate, and the standards are very clear,” Michele McNally, assistant managing editor for photography, told me. The Times does not stage news photographs, or alter them digitally.

But Times editors see the fashion photography in T as an exception. “Fashion is fantasy,” Ms. McNally said. “Readers understand this. It's totally manipulated, with everything done for aesthetics.”

Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards, agreed. “This is a different genre of photography,” he said. “It has different goals, different tools and techniques, and there is a different expectation on the part of the reader.”

When I followed up with Ms. Needleman, she too said that fashion magazines abided by different standards than news organizations do. In T's fashion photography, she confirmed, “images are sometimes retouched,” she said. “Red taken out of someone's eye, a wrinkle in a skirt smoothed, a model's tattoo removed.” But even within T, various standards prevail. Only with “fashion/glamour photography” is manipulation allowable, she said. A travel article or personality profile would be subject to traditional rules.

These Times editors agree that readers' expectations are important here. After all, no one opens Vogue with the expectation that they're seeing Gisele Bundchen looking like she does when she wakes up. In a 2009 article in The Times, the style writer Eric Wilson noted how pervasive photo alteration was at fashion magazines: “It now seems fresh, even exclamation-worthy, when a magazine presents an unvarnished image.”

The editors are confident that readers know the difference.

But here's the catch: T magazine is still a New York Times editorial product. Although it generates (and is intended to generate) plenty of advertising revenue, its content is not “advertorial,” that strange hybrid that looks like journalism but is actually advertising copy. T is produced by journalists who are part of the newsroom structure, and readers might reasonably have the expectations that standards are the same across the board.

I asked Stuart Emmrich, editor of the Styles section, about fashion photography there. He responded that Styles adheres to traditional rules: “We strictly forbid any altering or manipulation of photos that have been shot for Styles, including fashion shoots.” I heard the same from Kathy Ryan, director of photography for The Times Magazine, which also allows no manipulation. (In all cases, minor color-toning and brightening for production purposes are acceptable.)

Photos from outside sources may have been altered before they reach The Times, Mr. Emmrich said. “We can't control everything, but our photo editor does look closely to see if she can spot any heavy retouching,” he said.

And sometimes, in various parts of The Times, the label “photo illustration” on what Ms. Ryan calls a “high-concept” picture makes it clear that this is not a rendering of reality. It is all part of making sure readers know that what they are looking at is authentic.

Granted, a dramatic news photo from the streets of Gaza is a far cry from a magazine's fashion spread. Maybe readers intuitively get the difference. But they may not. In the words of one surprised reader, Fred Zimmerman, “Is such doctoring allowed at The Times?”

Newspaper people sometimes assume too much about what readers know - for example, the difference between the opinions expressed in editorials and those expressed by a news-page columnist, or even the difference between a staff-written obituary and a paid death notice.

It would be best if all the photography produced by the Times newsroom could be held to the same standard. If that is deemed unrealistic for some parts of a fashion magazine, some transparency (and not the kind that has to do with gossamer fabrics) is needed. For example, a brief statement in each issue of T stating its photo practices would help.

Being forthcoming with readers is the answer to many of journalism's trickiest questions. The world of fashion photography - where a waistline may shrink or a tattoo may disappear at the tweak of a few pixels - is distinctive in many ways, but not in that one.

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In last week's Public Editor's Journal, I wrote about the Justice Department's secret seizure of phone records from Associated Press journalists and its negative effect on a free press.

Follow the public editor on Twitter at twitter.com/sulliview and read her blog at publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com.  The public editor can also be reached by e-mail: public@nytimes.com.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on May 19, 2013, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Tattoo Removal on the Photo Desk.

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