Television folk will tell you, quietly, that it’s a nightmare doing programmes critical of Israel. A breath of criticism – just a breath! – and a hundred bright websites leap from their scabbards, ready to run you through as an anti-semite, a holocaust denier – at best, a dupe. Channel 4 thus broadcast The Shooting of Thomas Hurndall (Monday) into a field pockmarked by battles.

Hurndall, British, died, incontestably, at the hands of an Israeli soldier. This dramatic reconstruction showed him in Rafah, on the Gaza Strip, during the second intifada in 2003 (that is, before the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza). He was taking pictures for the International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian-led movement “committed to resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land”. Firing breaks out from an Israeli strongpoint; as he tries to gather Palestinian children to safety, he is shot through the head. His (divorced) parents come together to get at the truth – which the film shows was covered up by the army. As Hurndall lingers near death, his father, a lawyer, succeeds through persistence and publicity in pressuring the Israelis to open a full-scale investigation, which finds that the Israeli soldier who fired, Sergeant Taysir Hirb, a Bedouin Arab, was guilty of manslaughter. He is given an eleven-and-a-half-year sentence; soon after, Thomas dies.