in Gaza and signed by Abu Rahma in the presence of Raji Sourani, a human rights lawyer. Israel's early response The position of the IDF changed over time, from accepting responsibility in 2000 to retracting the admission in 2005. The IDF's first response, when Enderlin contacted them before his broadcast, was that the Palestinians "make cynical use of women and children," which he decided not to air. On 3 October 2000, the IDF's chief of operations, Major-General Giora Eiland, said an internal investigation indicated the shots had apparently been fired by Israeli soldiers. The soldiers, under fire, had been shooting from small slits in the wall of their outpost; General Yom-Tov Samia, then head of the IDF's Southern Command said they may not have had a clear field of vision, and had fired in the direction from which they believed the fire was coming. Eiland issued an apology: "This was a grave incident, an event we are all sorry about." The Israelis had been trying for hours to speak to Palestinian commanders, according to Israel's Cabinet Secretary, Isaac Herzog; he added that Palestinian security forces could have intervened to stop the fire. Controversy Three mainstream narratives emerged after the shooting. The early view that Israeli gunfire had killed the boy developed into the position that, because of the trajectory of the shots, Palestinian gunfire was more likely to have been responsible. This view was expressed in 2005 by Denis Jeambar, editor-in-chief of L'Express, and , a former France 2 correspondent, who viewed the raw footage. A third perspective, held by Arlette Chabot, France 2's news editor, is that no one can know who fired the shots. A fourth, minority, position held that the scene was staged by Palestinian protesters to produce a child martyr or at least the appearance of one. This is known by those who follow the case as the "maximalist" view, as opposed to the "minimalist" view that the shots were probably not fired by the IDF. The maximalist view takes the form either that the al-Durrahs were not shot and Muhammad did not die, or that he was killed intentionally by Palestinians. The view that the scene was a media hoax of some kind emerged from an Israeli government enquiry in November 2000. It was most persistently pursued by Stéphane Juffa, editor-in-chief of the (Mena), a French-Israeli company; Luc Rosenzweig, former editor-in-chief of Le Monde and