The short life of Imad Abu Zahrah

Imad Abu Zahrah lay on his back on the dusty asphalt of Jenin's main street, bleeding to death from a hole in his right thigh. Israeli bullets cracked into the stone columns lining the avenue.

News photographer Said Dahleh, lightly wounded by Israeli fire, looked on from a side street where he had taken cover. He wanted to pull Abu Zahrah to safety, but stayed back because of sustained shooting.

Moments earlier the two Palestinians had been standing in the street together, watching an Israeli armored personnel carrier that had struck an electricity pole. Mr. Dahleh, wearing a white bulletproof vest marked "PRESS," took a picture of the APC.

Then Israeli soldiers in a nearby tank opened fire from a machine gun fixed to its turret, shooting at the ground in front of the journalists and over their heads. Both men were probably hit by ricochets. Only Dahleh survived.

The killing of Imad Abu Zahrah is partly a testament to the dangers of covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it isn't clear that Abu Zahrah was working as a journalist the day he was shot.

His life resonates for different reasons – for what it says about the difficulty of living anything near a normal life in the Palestinian territories. The Palestinian Authority stifled him. The conflict idled him, and finally, it killed him. His death resonates personally, because I worked with him once.

Lying in the street, Abu Zahrah pressed his hand into the wound to try to slow the bleeding. Several minutes later, he dragged himself around the corner, into the side street. People helped him and Dahleh take shelter in a stairwell.

Dahleh says he used his cellphone to call for an ambulance. Someone else contacted a taxi driver, who reached them first. As the taxi pulled up, other journalists arrived; they recorded what happened next on videotape.

Abu Zahrah staggers out of the stairwell, the right leg of his faded jeans sopping with blood, his sunglasses dangling from a cord around his neck. He stumbles down the last steps, falls to the ground, and then Dahleh and others help him up.

Abu Zahrah is a stocky man with a square jaw and receding, slicked-back hair. His face is dark with fear. Wide-eyed, he gets into the taxi without a word.

Dahleh says that from the moment Abu Zahrah was shot, as he lay on the street, huddled in the stairwell, and rode to the hospital, "he didn't say anything."

He soon lost consciousness. At the hospital, doctors worked to repair his leg and replenish his blood supply. At one point he followed his father's instructions to open and close his eyes, but he never spoke.

He was shot during the afternoon of July 11 and died early the next morning.

The West Bank is the worst place in the world to be a journalist, says the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a New York-based nonprofit organization. For one thing, reporters and photographers must work around Israeli restrictions, imposed

in the name of journalists' safety and Israel's security, that limit press freedom. Then there is the danger.

Israeli forces shot dead an Italian photographer on March 13 in the West Bank hub city of Ramallah. A Palestinian reporter died on July 31, 2001, when Israeli missiles struck an office of the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas, in the northern West Bank city of Nablus. The reporter planned to interview a Hamas leader, the target of the Israeli attack.

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