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.
