Physicist and engineer Nahum Shahaf will address the Knesset today seeking to end a controversy over the shooting of a 12-year-old Palestinian Arab boy named Mohammed al-Dura. Mr. Shahaf has used forensic science to advance the theory that al-Dura was not killed by Israeli troops and believes that he may be alive.

While not necessarily a household name in the West, al-Dura has become a potent symbol of violence in the Middle East and a rallying point for those who have tried to paint Israel as the aggressor in the five-year-old intifada.

Al-Dura was caught on film by a French television crew on the second day of the Palestinian intifada, September 30, 2000. He crouched in terror, pinned against a wall in the arms of his father, as Israeli soldiers and Palestinian Arab demonstrators exchanged gunfire. The camera captured the moment in which the young boy slumped to the ground, apparently hit by the hail of bullets flying at an Israeli village in Gaza, Netzarim Junction.

The images were quickly broadcast across the world and splashed on front pages alongside accusations that Israeli soldiers murdered the boy. The picture of al-Dura’s father cradling his dead son became the Palestinian Pieta. Mr. Shahaf has cast doubt on how that story unfolded.

An abstract from a presentation he made at the American Academy of Forensic Sciences annual meeting in New Orleans in February provides a glimpse of the evidence that he is likely to present today.

“This presentation will impact the forensic community and humanity by demonstrating the inaccurate impression created by the media in the description of the al-Dura episode,” the abstract from the AAFS reads. “It emphasizes the need for caution in interpreting critical death news reports published by the media unless it is based on accepted forensic science criteria.”

He said the scene opened on the second day of the intifada with a crowd of Palestinian policemen and civilians, some armed, attacking an isolated Israel Defense Force outposts at a junction near Netzarim. “The event developed initially as a demonstration and turned violent when Palestinian policemen began to shoot at IDF soldiers in the outpost,” he writes. “French television showed a father and his son Muhammed al-Dura hiding behind a concrete barrel. The IDF soldiers claimed that they did not see the pair crouched behind the barrel and they didn’t shoot them.”

Mr. Shahaf used geometric and ballistic findings to show that the boy and his father were protected by the barrels from the direction of the Israeli outpost. A “spread of particles of stone” caused by the impact of the two bullets next to the boy’s head proved that the fire came from a direction consistent with the Palestinian position, the reports stated. Mr. Sharaf also said that some of the bullet holes in the nearby wall were made after the incident.

According to evidence provided by the doctors at the hospital where al-Dura was supposedly taken, the boy had reached the hospital hours before the time of the shooting. Mr. Shahaf said the boy presented at the hospital as Muhammad al-Dura could not have been the boy from the Netzarim junction incident.

Mr. Shahaf has also come to the conclusion that the galvanizing images of al-Dura in the world media might well have been staged. This was not a war crime or a tragedy, he said during his American Academy of Forensic Sciences presentation; this might have been blood libel.

Two New York City law enforcement officials who attended the AAFS meeting and subsequently met with Mr. Shahaf in New York said his scenario and methodologies were very convincing. The same type of rifles used by the IDF soldiers and the Palestinians were fired toward the barrel and the wall at the angles of the alleged fire from the Israeli outpost. The television footage, still photographs of the incident, and still photographs of the body were also studied.

Mr. Shahaf finished his presentation at AAFS with a series of questions. He asked why there was no film footage of al-Dura after he was shot? Why did the boy appear to move, putting his hand over his eyes, after he was supposedly killed? He questioned why one Palestinian policeman was wearing the kind of earpiece usually reserved for the Secret Service and why another Palestinian man waved his arms and yelled as if “directing” the scene.

Similarly, Mr. Shahaf noted that there was no blood on the father’s shirt just after his son was shot and that the shadows in the funeral footage taken by a French cameraman indicate that the funeral might well have occurred before the shooting actually happened.

“Many manufactured incidents were revealed in the television pictures,” he concluded in his abstract. “These included gunfights in front of the cameras in areas that were hidden from the IDF outpost. All the events around al-Dura seemed to be created.”