James Henry Dominic Miller (18 December 1968 - 2 May 2003)

was a Welsh cameraman, producer, and director, and recipient of numerous awards, including five Emmy Awards.
He often worked with Saira Shah with whom he founded and operated an independent production company called Frostbite Productions in 2001. He was killed by a single shot fired by a soldier from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on 2 May 2003 while filming a documentary in Rafah. The soldier who shot him was identified in the press as Captain Hib al-Heib.

The Israeli Military Police investigation into Miller's death closed on 9 March 2005 with an announcement that the soldier suspected of firing the shot would not be indicted as they could not establish that his shot was responsible, though he would be disciplined for violating the rules of engagement and for changing his account of the incident.
On 6 April 2006, the inquest jury at St Pancras Coroner's Court in London returned a verdict of unlawful killing, finding that Miller had been "murdered."

After meetings with the Miller family, the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, sent a formal request to his Israeli counterpart in June 2007 for prosecution proceedings to be enacted within six weeks against the soldier responsible for firing the shot

Miller's sister, Anne Waddington, was interviewed by the BBC on the morning of 7 August 2007, the day the six-week deadline was due to expire. She said, "Unfortunately, we have had four and a half extremely painful years of experiencing the Israeli tactics, and they are the masters of delay - they have always played for time, and they have always failed to deliver." She added, "The Israelis put out a lot of false and misleading statements immediately after my brother was murdered, and they did try to suggest he was killed by a Palestinian in the back and as a result of crossfire, but they put out many, many lies and false stories, which of course have been shown not only on the APTN video footage of the actual murder, but also through eyewitness testimony and the additional evidence which was very, very clear at the time." Asked whether she used the word "murder" very deliberately, she replied, "Yes I do, and of course the jury in the inquest last year found, very unusually, that it wasn't just unlawful killing, it was actually murder



Thomas "Tom" Hurndall (27 November 1981 – 13 January 2004)

was a British photography student, a volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), and an activist against the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. On 11 April 2003, he was shot in the head in the Gaza Strip by an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) sniper, Taysir Hayb. Hurndall was left in a coma and died nine months later.

The IDF initially refused more than a routine internal inquiry, which concluded that Hurndall was shot accidentally in the crossfire, and suggested that his group's members were essentially functioning as human shields.[citation needed] However, witnesses at the demonstration in the Palestinian town of Rafah said he had been hit by a rifle bullet while trying to shield the children rather than having been merely hit in the crossfire, and Hurndall's parents demanded an investigation

Idier Wahid Taysir Hayb (or al-Heib), whose sister Amira al Hayb is the first female Bedouin soldier in the IDF, claimed, he had shot at a man in military fatigues although photographic evidence clearly showed Hurndall was wearing a bright orange jacket denoting he was a foreigner. Hayb was an award-winning marksman and his rifle had a telescopic sight. He claimed to have aimed four inches from Hurndall's head, "but he moved". Hayb said a policy of shooting at unarmed civilians existed at the time

Tom Hurndall's family and their legal team were denied access to the military police report which led to the trial. After an appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court, the state prosecution offered access to the report to the legal team, but not the Hurndall family, in early August. According to a spokesman for the Tom Hurndall Foundation, this will allow them to decide whether Hayb could be indicted for the more serious charge of murder, and to find out if responsibility for Hurndall's death lies higher up the chain of command
Tom's mother Jocelyn Hurndall wrote a commentary in The Guardian on 10 January 2004, in which she stated:
It seems that life is cheap in the occupied territories. Different value attached to life depends on whether the victim happens to be Israeli, international or Palestinian


Brian Avery (born 1979)

is a former American volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), who was shot in the face and seriously disfigured on April 5, 2003 while working for the ISM in the West Bank town of Jenin.

According to the Jerusalem Post (9/20/07; 11/19/08), Brian and his associates were "wearing red reflector vests with the word "doctor" in English and Arabic." Avery was hit in the face, his cheek was torn and his eye socket and jaw bones were smashed. The army refused to order a formal investigation of the incident, since that their probe found that no soldiers on patrol in the area that night reported such an incident as it
was described by the four witnesses
Avery appeared before the Israeli Supreme Court on February 28, 2005 to request a criminal investigation into his shooting. He accused Israeli troops of shooting him without provocation. The court responded by ordering the military to reopen Avery's case. Avery's attorney, Michael Sfard, said that the ruling "shows the military that even internal inquiries should be managed professionally and with care to get testimony from all sides, not just from military
In November 2008, Avery accepted a settlement for NIS 600,000 (USD $150,000) from the state of Israel in exchange for dropping the lawsuit. According to Shlomo Lecker, his Israeli lawyer, "The sum does not reflect the injuries Avery suffered... On the other hand, it's one of the very few times the state has awarded damages to anyone hurt by the IDF during the Second Intifada." Lecker said that Avery was willing to settle because of the need to defray some of the costs of the reconstructive operations he must still undergo, in addition to skepticism that the 15-month-long investigation would ever reach a satisfactory conclusion

There was a very moving interview with Tom Hurndall's parents on UK radio earlier today