Summary
Defy The Stars is the story of a young man who went to the Middle East as an observer and lost his life through a single selfless human act. In April 2003, twenty-one-year-old Tom Hurndall, an English photojournalism student, was shot in the head as he carried a Palestinian child out of the range of an Israeli army sniper in the town of Rafah in the Gaze Strip. Tom was unarmed, and wearing the internationally recognised peace worker's fluorescent orange jacket. Severely wounded, he never regained consciousness and died nine months later in a London hospital.
A year after his death, following the family's own investigation and their determined and impartial fight to see justice done after a cover up by the Israeli Defence Force, a soldier was sentenced to eight years for Tom's manslaughter. It was an unprecedented outcome, and a case that made legal history in bringing the IDF to account for its killing of an unarmed civilian. Tom's mother, Jocelyn, tells the story of this courageous young Englishman's question, of its tragic end and its effect on his family.
