Tom Hurndall, 21, was a young, compassionate man
when he went to Gaza in 2003. Months later, while he was rescuing
Palestinian children from gunfire, he was shot by an Israeli army
sniper. On the eve of a Channel 4 film, his parents tell of their
anger, loss, intense grief and political awakening as they sought to
bring his killer to justice

This story begins with an ending. On 11 April 2003, Thomas Hurndall,
a 21-year-old photojournalist, was shot in the head in Gaza by a sniper
from the Israeli army.

Tom
was a brilliant, intrepid young man, driven by an energetic morality, a
wish to make a difference in the world. The shooting left him with
unsurvivable brain damage, but he clung to life – against the odds – in
a coma, for nine months.

While he lay dying in Tel Aviv and
later in the Royal Free Hospital in Hampstead, north London, his
parents, Anthony and Jocelyn Hurndall, took on a heroic struggle
against the Israeli army. They were determined to seek truth and
accountability at all costs. They had no idea how hard this was going
to be.

The Israeli army appeared to view Tom’s death with
indifference; there were no plans to investigate the shooting,
interview witnesses or go to Gaza. Nor, at first, were they willing to
meet the Hurndalls. Their claim was that their soldier had fired at an
armed terrorist. Tom, dressed in an orange jacket (a known sign for
peace workers), was unarmed. What’s more he was shot while rescuing
Palestinian children.

Faced with lies and silence, Anthony, a
commercial lawyer, did the only thing he could: he took the case on
himself. It was his meticulous investigation that led to the
prosecution of Bedouin sniper Sergeant Wahid Taysir, who got eight
years (the longest sentence ever received by an Israeli Defence Forces
soldier for shooting an unarmed civilian in the occupied territories).
Vengeance was not Anthony’s motivation. He wanted only to find out what
had happened. But the verdict was, in the bleakest way imaginable, a
personal victory.

Jocelyn has told her story in a beautifully written, uncompromising book, My Son Tom (Bloomsbury). More riskily, Channel 4
has turned the story into a drama to be broadcast tomorrow: The
Shooting of Thomas Hurndall, written by Simon Block and directed by
Rowan Joffe. Stephen Dillane plays Anthony and Kerry Fox plays Jocelyn.
The film manages to be neither sensational nor sentimental – quite a
feat.

It is its understatement that overwhelms. Anthony and
Jocelyn divorced several years before Tom’s death and the film conveys
the strained decency of their relationship and their admirable
transcending of differences.

The three surviving children –
Sophie, Bill and Fred – are carefully characterised, and what the film
spells out is that the shooting of Tom was a shattering of the entire
family. Each of them took the impact of the sniper’s fire. But I
wondered if the film might have taken some emotional liberties too:
Anthony is seen to be all head, Jocelyn all heart. And they are
presented in rivalrous stances, as if we are being asked to choose
between them. Was it really like that?

I met the Hurndalls
separately: Anthony first, on a cold autumn day, in his offices near
the Bank of England. He is tall, with a shambling gait, and is
absolutely direct. You don’t feel any slipperiness, any side. I liked
him at once and admired his ability to talk with clarity about
complicated issues. At the same time, he often left sentences
unfinished as if he lacked the will to complete them. I noticed how
often he leant back and shut his eyes when speaking, as if closing his
eyes would have the opposite effect – make it possible to see.

For
Anthony, the film is a ‘further memorial’ to Tom. But what matters most
to him is that audiences should understand that what happened was ‘not
a freak accident, but a product of a policy that the Israeli armed
forces were adopting in Gaza’. There is barely suppressed outrage in
his voice as he remembers the British government’s failure to protest
when Tom was shot: ‘The government viewed Israel as a close ally who
they did not want to put out in any way.’

It was only when a Tel
Aviv bar was bombed by two British Muslims three weeks after the
shooting of Tom in 2003 that Anthony became aware of how skewed the
British government’s attitude could be. ‘Jack Straw expressed deep
sympathy to the Israelis and promised to put all the resources of the
British government at their disposal. This was our government taking
responsibility for two people who were not employees of the British
government, merely two citizens of Britain who happened to be in
Israel.’

But when their own British citizens (Tom, along with
Iain Hook, a UN worker shot by an Israeli sniper in November 2002, and
James Miller, a documentary-maker shot by an IDF patrol in May 2003)
were attacked by Israeli soldiers, there was no outcry (no ministerial
interest at all, beyond a standard request, from a junior level, for a
proper inquiry). ‘They were shot not by people for whom the Israeli
government had no responsibility but by their own soldiers. That, for
me, was outrageous.’

Anthony approves of the film and thinks
Dillane got a lot of things right. But he resists the idea of himself
as the ‘dry lawyer’. He feels a ‘little put out’ at a scene in which he
is in a hurry to get back to the office while Jocelyn waits devotedly
by Tom’s bedside: ‘It was not like that.’ He finds Dillane’s Anthony
‘more confident than I am. I am much more uncertain about things.’ He
admits he can switch gear into ‘detached’ mode and adds: ‘I do live in
my head.’ But he wants it on record that ‘there is a lot of emotion
there’.

I don’t doubt it. The way he uses Tom’s name as
emotional shorthand reveals the strength of his feelings: ‘When I heard
that Tom had been shot, I felt angry and worried, but already I knew
that if this had happened, this was Tom doing something which was Tom.
When we heard he had been going to rescue children – that was
absolutely Tom. He had this strong, protective urge – a tremendous
feeling of caring about putting things right.’

It was Tom’s
need to put things right that became, for Anthony, an unspoken
direction, an imperative. He remembers it like this: ‘Tom, you are
lying there. This is what you want. This is what we are going to do for
you, Tom – with you.’ That ‘with’ is affecting because the more
accurate word would have been ‘without’.

Anthony describes Tom as
a little boy who was ‘troubled’, although ‘outgoing’, and ‘determined
to do his own thing’. He ‘hated arrogance’, intellectual or otherwise.
He was much loved because he was ‘always there for people. He would
talk to anybody, on any level, about anything.’

Tom was 15 or
16 when his parents split up. ‘Being the angry teenager he was, we
didn’t talk for a while,’ Anthony recalls. But football (Arsenal) and
photography were shared passions. And by the time Tom left England in
2003, ‘we had re-established quite close bonds. We were still a little
aloof but much closer. We discussed his preparations for the trip. I
remember talking about what he was going to do to keep safe.’

Tom
also discussed the trip with his ‘very closest friends, who happened to
be Jewish’. But his attitude would have been: ‘I want to find out for
myself.’

It is painful listening to Anthony piecing together the
past, trying to reconfigure his relationship with Tom before he died. I
suggest that it was remarkable that he and Jocelyn managed to work
together with such dignity. ‘There have been enormous stresses,’ he
admits. ‘Don’t be under any illusions about that, but I think we are
now closer in many ways.’

Before I leave, I hear myself asking
– I hadn’t meant to put it so baldly – how much Tom’s death has changed
his life? ‘The whole experience has changed my view of life and of what
is important,’ he answers. He describes being ‘in the City, in a bar,
seeing people have a good time – it seems completely unreal’. He admits
he has lost the taste for ‘life’s pleasures’. ‘Work is what matters.’

Anthony’s
work now is to create a forum for people to solve their legal
difficulties outside the court. He finds, in this good-hearted project,
an af finity with Tom. But he remains hard on himself. He believes that
because of Tom’s death: ‘I am a lesser parent. I don’t take the
children on holidays.’ He bought some golf clubs: ‘They haven’t been
out of the cupboard.’

He feels that Tom’s death has made him more
spiritual: ‘I used to read to Tom in intensive care. I spent hours with
him. I read the Koran for the first time and Taoism. It was a time for
contemplation, working out what was important.’

Gaza, he
explains, was ‘so dramatic and powerful. The best journalist cannot
portray the reality of what is happening. What is an Israeli-only road?
What is a checkpoint?’ He believes we have ‘so little idea of what is
happening’.

Grief, he recognises, can make you see more keenly.
It has also made the political personal: ‘I remember saying to someone
[about Gaza and the Middle Eastern conflict] the Israelis can’t say the
problem is only theirs. This is now our issue.’

Jocelyn Hurndall
lives in Tufnell Park, north London. She has a radiance that is
immediately attractive. But faces carry their recent emotional history
and her grief is as indelible as a watermark. She wonders whether we
might sit in her garden. It is a is lovely, peaceful, idiosyncratic
place – a shrine of sorts. I exclaim at the tiny, weeping silver birch
at its centre: ‘It was planted for Tom,’ she says. ‘It’s going to make
me cry.’ ‘Don’t,’ I say. ‘It’s doing your weeping for you.’ I feel an
immediate rapport with this woman whose emotions, five years on, are
still so close to the surface, so available to her.

In her book,
she wrote: ‘People know about death in the Middle East… it is one of
the things that gives life there its vibrancy. In the West we are not
forced to look death in the face in the same way – we barely
acknowledge its existence. We take our lives very much for granted.’
Tom’s death has changed that permanently: ‘I never take my life for
granted.’

She tells me: ‘Tom valued the moment, the meaning of
things. I respect that. It is what I have learnt from him.’ And after
his death, she learnt that being able to ‘meet the moment’ was an
essential part of grieving too – not running away even from the most
agonising details: the scent of Tom’s clothes, the look of his
handwriting.

We talk about gardening, how it insists you live
in the present (but with an optimistic eye on the future). Her hands,
she says, have been roughened by it, but it has helped her heart. Being
able to garden is emotional progress for her. ‘For a long while I could
not look at anything beautiful – lichen, for example, that has taken a
lifetime to grow on a stone. I couldn’t look at the beauty of this
world without thinking about what Tom had lost.’

The film conveys
the profound alienation after Tom’s death – the shock of being pitched
from London into a Middle East war zone. Isn’t grief itself like this;
doesn’t it bring with it a feeling of being in a foreign country, an
attendant unreality? A sense of not being at home in your own skin? She
agrees. ‘Back then, even being with a group of friends felt foreign.
You weren’t able to give anything back – and that was shocking.’

One
insight in her book is that a family is seldom united by grief.
Mourning is an individual thing, a lonely road. I can see (as Jocelyn
herself recognises) that her emotional articulacy might not always have
been easy for her family. And it must have been hard for her too.
Looking back, she finds Anthony’s grieving ‘completely different’ from
hers because ‘it was so far under the surface’. She says: ‘My brain was
shot. He seemed to be able to use his.’ Her son Billy was different
again. He coped by completely rebuilding his little brother Fred’s room
after Tom’s death, an awesome job for a boy with no formal carpenter’s
training. Jocelyn is still so proud of this that she takes me to
inspect his handiwork.

I wonder how Jocelyn feels now about
allowing a child, albeit a grown-up child, to go to a war zone. ‘When
Tom first said he was going away [Iraq was his initial destination], I
froze. I could not speak when I found out my challenging, extremely
bright son was planning to do this. I felt: how could he put us through
this?’

It was a long time before she was able to respect his
decision. Now she believes ‘we learn so much from risk takers’, from
people not content to ‘sit on their comfortable sofas’. She remembers
Tom asking her ‘why a 21-year-old on the other side of the world should
live a much more difficult life than I do in London’. She salutes his
thinking: ‘He saw acceptance of difference as one of the answers to the
universe,’ and she agrees with him: ‘Inclusion is essential – on
climate change, on banking crises. We need to think in a more global
way.’

Since Tom’s death, Jocelyn no longer works as a head of
learning support at a state school. She is, instead, the director of
the Middle East charity Friends of Birzeit University, which raises
funds for academic scholarships for Palestinian students. ‘It is to do
with education for an oppressed group who experience barriers to
learning,’ she says. Her daughter, Sophie, has also gravitated towards
charity work; in her case, Map (Medical Aid for Palestinians). She has
become an exceptionally effective campaigner (the importance of her
role in the family has been written out of the film).

Jocelyn
hopes the film will make audiences ‘abandon an emotional response to
the conflict and make an objective attempt to open their minds to what
this is really about. Highly intelligent people often lose all their
logic about this conflict.’ It is interesting that just as Anthony
wants me to know that he is emotional, she wants me to know she can be
logical. But both Hurndalls want people to know what is happening in
Gaza. Her eyes blaze as she describes the ‘wanton destruction of
people’s homes’. She wishes she could bring politicians in ‘by the
busload’ to see what she has seen.

And yet it is clear that
Jocelyn will never find it possible to abandon the emotional response
to the Middle East conflict. ‘The life-changing moment for me was when
Fred, who was only 12, was interviewed by the BBC. “How do you feel?”
they asked him. He was standing next to Tom’s blood on the ground. He
was like a ghost. He said, “They shot my brother, he was doing
something good, he was rescuing children.”‘

She tells me that
part of Tom’s legacy is the realisation that how a story is told is
crucial – words matter to her, as they did to him, tremendously. It is
this that suddenly reminds me to ask her about the Israeli judge who
passed sentence in words so unjudiciously lyrical they take the breath
away. She knows ‘nothing about him’, she says, but continues to cherish
the words he chose. This was his summing up: ‘Sergeant Wahid Taysir
caused a soul to leave this world. He spilt the blood of a young man in
the bloom of youth, causing the loss of an entire world. When that
young man was alive, there was no one else like him, and there will
never be anyone like him again.’

• The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall will be broadcast on C4 Monday October 13 at 9pm(BBC)

• Friends of Birzeit University campaigns for the educational rights of Palestinian students. For more information, visit fobzu.org or to make a donation, call 020 7832 1340