Israeli Army Says Palestinians May Have Shot Gaza Boy

JERUSALEM, Nov. 27 — The 12- year-old Palestinian boy shot to death eight weeks ago as he crouched beside his father, in a scene that television broadcasts made well known around the world, might have been killed by Palestinian gunmen, not Israeli soldiers, the Israeli Army said today.

In a report that came under instant attack from Palestinians, including the cameraman who filmed the shooting at close range, the army said an internal investigation showed that "it is quite plausible that the boy was hit by Palestinian bullets."

Maj. Gen. Yom Tov Samia, who commands Israeli forces in the West Bank, said the army had concluded after a reconstruction of the incident that the shots could have been fired by a Palestinian policeman who, he said, was shooting at an Israeli Army post from a position behind the boy, Muhammad al-Durrah.

By contrast, preliminary findings of the investigation, reported in the Israeli press, were more forthright in assigning blame to the Palestinians. That followed an initial assumption that the Israeli Army was responsible.

Today the army did not rule out the possibility that one of its soldiers had killed the boy. But General Samia said the army had "great doubt" that it was responsible and believed that the evidence indicated "a very reasonable possibility" that the boy "was hit by Palestinian gunfire."

The report received slight attention today in Israel, where the press was focused on the possibility that the opposition could muster a majority for its planned motion in Parliament on Tuesday to oust the government of Prime Minister Ehud Barak and call new elections.

But Palestinians reacted immediately and angrily.

Since the shooting, on Sept. 30, was filmed in excruciating detail by a France 2 television crew, the boy's death has become the dominant image of the conflict throughout the Arab world.

Local and regional television networks have broadcast the scene hundreds of times. Arab poets and songwriters have composed dozens of tributes to the boy's memory. The boy's wounded father, giving interviews from his hospital bed in Amman, Jordan, became a regional celebrity. In one pointed gesture, the avenue in Cairo where the Israeli Embassy is situated was renamed Muhammad al-Durrah Street.

"This is a desperate attempt to distort the facts," Nabil Abu Rudeineh, spokesman for Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, said today in reaction to the Israeli Army report. "The whole world has seen the pictures, and the pictures speak for themselves."

The graphic videotape of the boy's death showed him cowering behind his father as the two crouched against a cinder-block wall and behind a round cement block, seeking protection from fierce gunfire.

As his father signaled to unseen gunmen, trying to get them to hold their fire, he and his son were hit by a volley of bullets. The boy crumpled into his father's lap.

Three days later, Gen. Giora Eiland, the Israeli Army chief of operations, said, "As far as we understand, the child was hit from our fire."

But a study of the trajectory of the fire, the army said in its report, "casts serious doubt" on the assumption that Israeli soldiers were the source. The report, released today, is accompanied by schematic diagrams of what the army says were the lines of fire, second-by-second analyses of crucial portions of the France 2 videotape, and aerial photographs of the site.

The army also said it had reconstructed the shooting at a firing range, though local press accounts of the re-enactment raised questions about how closely it replicated the scale and conditions of the Gaza junction.

The army destroyed most of the physical evidence at the site soon after the incident. In a site-clearing operation it said was needed to remove hiding places for snipers, the army razed the wall that it says contained bullet holes indicating that the boy and his father were fired on by fellow Palestinians.

Critics of the report noted that the army based its findings on the father's initial testimony that his son had been hit in the back. Doctors in Gaza who examined the boy said that he had been shot through the upper abdomen and that the back wound his father had seen as the boy slumped over was an exit injury.

Talal Abu Rachmeh, the cameraman for France 2 television who filmed the shooting, challenged the report's assertion that the boy had been killed during intense cross-fire. Though there was an initial furious exchange of fire for five minutes, he said, the boy and his father were shot afterward, during a sustained half- hour fusillade from the Israeli side.

"I saw the bullets, and I saw where they were coming from," Mr. Rachmeh said in an interview today. "I want General Samia to understand one thing. This was a child. This was a civilian. They were asking for help; they were asking for the fire to stop."

At one point in the investigation, two Israeli civilians who worked as unpaid advisers to the inquiry went so far as to suggest that the boy's killing had been set up by the Palestinians, with the possible connivance of the cameraman. The army's reliance on the men, a physicist and an engineer with no professional expertise in ballistics, drew scathing criticism from the Israeli press.

"These people, who have volunteered their services, had their own preconceived ideas about the reason why al-Durrah was killed," Haaretz, a leading daily, wrote in an editorial this month. "It is hard to describe in mild terms the stupidity of this bizarre investigation."

The army report contained no inference that the killing had been a premeditated publicity ploy. Nor did it reiterate army accusations that the boy had gone to the Gaza junction to join in rock-throwing attacks against the soldiers stationed there.

But the report did make the unexpected charge that the father, Jamal al-Durrah, a Hebrew-speaking carpenter and house painter who had worked for 20 years near Tel Aviv, was "suspected of collaborating with Israel" and had been accused locally of drug trafficking.