Major General Yom Tov Samia, the IDF's southern commander, set up a team of investigators shortly after the incident, though the extent to which it was an official investigation remains unclear. IDF Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz said the team was put together by Samia alone, not by the IDF's General Staff,[65] but Daniel Seaman, the Israeli government's press spokesman, said in 2008 that the investigation was an official one by virtue of Samia's rank.[3] James Fallows writes that Israeli commentators questioned the legitimacy of it as soon as it started; Haaretz called it "almost a pirate endeavour."[8] The team appears to have been led by Nahum Shahaf, a physicist, and Joseph Doriel, an engineer and former director of the Israel Institute of Productivity.[66] The team included Meir Danino, a physicist and chief scientist at Elisra Systems; Bernie Schechter, a ballistics expert and former head of the weapons laboratory at the Israel's police criminal identification laboratory; and Chief Superintendent Elliot Springer, also from the criminal identification lab. A full list of names was never released, and a request by Haaretz to see the team's order of appointment was turned down.[26]
Nahum Shahaf is known as one of the leading developers of pilotless light aircraft and video instrumentation, and was awarded a medal in 1997 by the Israeli Ministry of Science for his work on compressing digital video transmission.[67] He had previously worked as an inventor, and for a time was a hang-glider instructor in California. According to Anat Cygielman in Haaretz, Shahaf was involved in some of the conspiracy theories surrounding the murder of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.[68] Shahaf contacted Samia shortly after the al-Durrah incident to say he had noticed an anomaly, namely that the concrete drum itself seemed undamaged, though the people sheltering behind it were alleged to have been hit from a direction that should have seen the drum punctured too.[8] He suggested that he and Doriel—they knew each other from previous discussions about the Rabin assassination, according to Cygielman[68]—be engaged to conduct an investigation, free of charge. Enderlin said that Shahaf wrote to him requesting a copy of the unedited footage, saying it was for "various professional audiences, including film schools," with the name of a company, Eye to Eye Communications, next to his signature.[31] Enderlin declined, and was subsequently concerned to learn that Shahaf was associated with an IDF inquiry.[6Passages Malibu self defense
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