I checked the date again. No, I am not mistaken. It is May 2013 and an official commission of inquiry just submitted its findings to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as to who killed Muhammad al-Durrah, if he was, in fact, killed at all. 

“Hold on,” I start to wonder. “It took them 13 years to investigate who killed that 12-year-old boy at the start of the second intifada?” Impossible. The Agranat Commission, which was established in 1973, in the wake of the Yom Kippur War, took just a year and a half to conduct its investigation, and published its findings in 1975. The Kahan Commission, another official commission of inquiry, which investigated the massacre in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps [in Lebanon] in September 1982, took only three months to find that then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon bore ministerial responsibility for what happened there. Then there was the Winograd Commission which investigated the failures of the Second Lebanon War. It heard the testimony of hundreds of witnesses and examined thousands of documents, but it was also able to publish its findings in considerably less time — it was appointed in September 2006 and released a partial report in late April 2007.

How is it possible that a commission created to investigate Durrah’s death took 13 years to reach its conclusions? Were there that many witnesses to interrogate? Did the commission uncover incriminating new evidence, perhaps even a smoking gun of sorts that was heretofore unknown, and which cast the whole incident in an entirely different light?

Obviously, the commission of inquiry that was formed to look into the killing of Muhammad al-Durrah at the Netzarim intersection on Sept. 30, 2000, did not really spend 13 years conducting its investigation. It is also quite obvious to me that no one in Israel, or the world for that matter, was waiting with bated breath to hear what the commission had to say. In fact, very few people even knew that it existed.