The legacy of Tom Hurndall: making solidarity with Palestine more effective
Tom Hurndall at al-Rweished refugee camp, Jordan, 30 March 2003
Ilan Pappé writes in The Palestine Chronicle:
On January 13, we commemorated the 20th anniversary of the murder of Tom Hurndall, who was only 23 when he was killed by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip.
Tom was a photography student and volunteered with the International Solidarity Movement. An Israeli sniper shot him in the head on April 11, 2003. He was left in a coma and died nine months later. The family, his mother Jocelyn, and his sister Sophie are still active in the solidarity movement as are his close friends who commemorate his work in annual conferences, a film, and a book.
Even before coming to Palestine, Tom was a committed young man and joined other brave activists from the West offering themselves as human shields against the imminent Anglo-American assault on Iraq.
Shortly after, he spent time helping Iraqi refugees, before focusing on Palestine. Tom chose to be active in the Gaza Strip, as he felt that the Western and, in particular, British press avoided honest reporting of what was going on there and he began photographing so that “no one could say, I wasn’t seeing what needs to be seen now”, he wrote back home.
On April 11, along with eight other activists, Tom was about to build a “peace tent” to protect the people, and in particular the children, from the Israeli army tank patrols.
I do not know how many of our readers have been exposed to the noise and sights of a tank rolling fast toward you on a narrow road. This is a nightmare by itself, even before one shell is shot. It was a routine action in those days in the Gaza Strip. On that day, the Israeli soldiers at a nearby checkpoint began shooting at the activists. Tom noticed that the bullets were dangerously close to a group of children playing nearby. Some of the children began to escape, but others froze out of fear. Tom went to help them.
His father told a British inquest that Tom “went to take on a girl out of the line of fire, which he did successfully, but when he went back, as he knelt down to collect another child, he was shot”. While running for cover, the sniper shot Tom in the head. Three hospitals tried to save his life: one in Rafah, one in Israel, and finally one in London; but to no avail.
As we know, Tom was not the only one. There is the infamous case of the murder of Rachel Corrie and less known victims of Israeli snipers: Iain Hook, a British UNRWA worker also killed by a sniper in the West Bank, in November 2022; and James Miller, a filmmaker shot in Gaza in May 2003. And in this respect, one should not forget Brian Avery, an American ISM volunteer shot and severely disfigured in Jenin in April 2003.
These killings caught the international media’s attention for only a very short while and this enabled Israel to get away with these crimes, in the same way it was absolved from the killing of one hundred Palestinians in the last one hundred days, many of them as young as Tom was, and even much younger.