On April 11, witnesses say, a bullet fired by an Israeli soldier in a military watchtower sliced through the back of 21-year-old Tom Hurndall's skull and out his forehead as he stooped to pick up a Palestinian girl and carry her to safety.
The army says it is investigating the shooting in the Rafah refugee camp.
So is the young man's father. Anthony Hurndall, 52, a property lawyer from London, has visited Rafah once already, taking notes from witnesses and drawing exacting diagrams of the area, a few bullet-pocked houses on one side of a no man's land, facing two Israeli guard towers.
"I've got to get to the bottom of this," he said on a recent afternoon outside Sorokka Hospital in this Israeli desert town. He's put his job on hold; he and his wife and three other children are all here, in a kind of limbo, being told little.
The British Embassy has tried unsuccessfully to help Hurndall meet with Israeli military officers and arrange a second visit to Rafah. He wants to hear the story from the soldiers. So far: nothing.
"I can only draw adverse conclusions from the silence," he said.
An army official speaking on condition of anonymity said an initial investigation, based on the soldiers' accounts, indicates that a Palestinian fired on the army watchtower and the soldiers returned fire, hitting someone believed to be the gunman.
That's contrary to accounts by witnesses, including an Associated Press photographer, who said there were no gunmen there at the time.
Tom Hurndall, a photography student from Manchester, England, remains in critical condition with severe brain damage, hooked up to a respirator.
His parents have not yet thought about pulling him off life support if he remains in a coma.
In quiet moments, the elder Hurndall studies his son's final e-mails and scrolls through photographs he sent. They tell of the humor, frustration and shock felt by the young man, who tagged along with members of the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement after abandoning plans to be a human shield in Iraq (news - web sites). The activists volunteer to serve as buffers between soldiers and Palestinians.
In Israeli-Palestinian violence that has dragged on for 30 months, Israeli troops have moved into most cities in the West Bank and occupied parts of the Gaza Strip in a crackdown aimed at stopping suicide bombings and anti-Israeli attacks.
In color and black-and-white photos, Hurndall captured the laughing faces of children, battle-scarred building facades and funeral marches. There's a photo of a Palestinian boy's dirty hands, holding spent bullet casings collected from the street.
"I'm quite impressed. He's quite good," his father said, looking at a picture of shouting Palestinians carrying stretchers with the bodies of two members of the Islamic militant group Hamas killed by Israeli fire. "He's brave, so determined to find out what's going on."
The young man's e-mail on the day of his shooting, April 11, talks of the no man's land in Rafah along the Egyptian border that he would visit later in the day with other activists to try to set up a protest tent on the site where activists say the army fires indiscriminately on private homes.
Hurndall is the third activist from the International Solidarity Movement to be injured or killed in recent weeks. American Brian Avery, 24, of Albuquerque, N.M., was shot in the face in the West Bank town of Jenin. The army said it was firing at gunmen and was not aware it hit Avery. Another American, Rachel Corrie, 23, of Olympia, Wash., died March 16 in Gaza when an Israeli bulldozer she was trying to block ran her over. The army said the bulldozer operator did not see her.
In another message, Hurndall narrated a photo of Palestinians protesting an Israeli missile strike on militants. He offered this note: "It's kind of intimidating when you're the only non-Palestinian out of 850 (people) and they're chanting 'Kill the Americans and Jews; drive them out of Palestine.'"
"You don't meet someone like this every day," friend and fellow activist Michelle De Mello, 25, said of Tom. "He's too precious to be taken away."
Mother's Day is May 11th: Flowers for Mom | 10% Off-FTD.COM | 1-800-FLOWERS |
