Tom Hurndall

Thomas 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.

Aged 21, Tom Hurndall took a working break from his degree course at Manchester Metropolitan University in photographic journalism to join the "human shields" in Iraq before the 2003 Iraq War.

As the volunteers ran out of money and war became inevitable, he moved to Jordan and donated £500 to medical supplies for refugees from Iraq.

It was here he encountered the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), and decided to make his way overland to Gaza.

He arrived in the town of Rafah on 6 April 2003 and began emailing images of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and the Palestinians back to his family.

His Guardian obituary states that "the tone of his journals changed dramatically".

and he justified his new location with "No one could say I wasn't seeing what needs to be seen now".

"What do I want from this life? What makes you happy is not enough. All the things that satisfy our instincts only satisfy the animal in us. I want to be proud of myself. I want more. I want to look up to myself and when I die, I want to smile because of the things I have done, not cry for the things I haven't done."

- Tom Hurndall

In April 2003, the IDF were on a mission in the Gaza border town of Rafah.

Hurndall and a group of activists were in the area, having planned to set up a peace tent on one of the nearby roads to blockade IDF tank patrols.

Hurndall was shot in the head on 11 April 2003.

According to the IDF, an Israeli checkpoint came under fire from Palestinian militants, and the soldiers at the checkpoint returned fire.

Hurndall's group of nine activists abandoned their protest to seek cover.

Hurndall then ran out into the street to save two children and was shot in the head by an IDF soldier.

He was taken to a Palestinian hospital in Rafah, and was declared clinically dead.

The IDF transferred him to Israel, and he was taken to Soroka Medical Center in Beersheba, where he was kept on a ventilator and underwent surgery.

Six weeks after the surgery, he was flown back to the United Kingdom, where he was taken to the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in London, where he remained in a persistent vegetative state, suffering from irreversible brain damage.

As pressure from the parents mounted, supported in part by British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, in October 2003 Israel's Judge Advocate General Menachem Finkelstein ordered the IDF to open a further military police investigation into Hurndall's death.

Idier Wahid Taysir Hayb (or al-Heib) 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.

The defence in the trial of Sergeant Hayb attempted to raise doubts as to what ultimately caused Hurndall's death.

A military court was informed that Hurndall died of pneumonia.

Chen Kugel, an Israeli forensic pathologist appearing for the defence, stated that the pneumonia had not been properly treated and "the large amounts of morphine" Hurndall was receiving contributed to his death.

The court rejected these claims.

He died on 13 January 2004, after nine months in a coma.

His father told a British inquest that, according to ISM and Palestinian witnesses, Hurndall had seen a group of children playing and had noticed that bullets were hitting the ground between them.

Several children had run away but some were "paralysed with fear" and Hurndall went to help them.

Hurndall's father told the inquest: "Tom went to take one girl out of the line of fire, which he did successfully, but when he went back, as he knelt down [to collect another], he was shot."

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.

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.

Hayb was convicted of manslaughter and obstruction of justice by an Israeli military court in April 2005 and sentenced to eight years in prison.

On 10 April 2006, a British inquest jury returned a verdict of unlawful killing.

Tom's mother Jocelyn Hurndall has written a biography of him called Defy the Stars: The Life and Tragic Death of Tom Hurndall, published in April 2007 and reprinted in May 2008 with the alternative title My Son Tom: The Life and Tragic Death of Tom Hurndall.

His sister, Sophie, works for Medical Aid for Palestinians.

Hurndall was educated at Winchester College, a boarding independent school in Winchester in England.