“It shouldn’t be me presenting it,” apologized his colleague and friend Saira Shah after the world premiere of Miller’s 77-minute documentary.

On May 2, 2003, the 34-year-old filmmaker fell under a hail of bullets fired by Israeli soldiers just as he was bringing his work to a close.

“James and I set out to make a film on the culture of violence in Gaza. The aim was, below politics, to look on human beings, on the people who get sucked in the spiral of violence,” Shah said.

The film begins with 12-year-Old Ahmed, a football fan but also a boy who dreams of becoming a martyr in the intifada, the armed Palestinian uprising, and his best friend Muhammad, whose mother pleads with him to avoid trouble.

Then there is Nailja, a 16-year-old high school student who lives near the sector destroyed by Israeli bulldozers so that a security zone can be erected.

Ahmed and Muhammad have never seen a real Israeli in Gaza, apart from on television screens or behind a military uniform. When they throw rocks at tanks they’re playing ‘Jews and Arabs;’ almost like ‘Cowboys and Indians’ but where the winners die and become martyrs.

Ahmed spends time with the Palestinian paramilitaries, keeping watch for them at night. The boy proudly poses for a photograph alongside his masked ‘big brothers,’ a rocket launcher propped up on his small shoulder, and demonstrates how to put together homemade grenades.

When a fighter asks him if he’s not too young to die as a martyr, Ahmed’s reply is quick and firm: “We are men and this is war.”

The film lifts the veil on propaganda and Palestinian indoctrination, but it also shows human suffering in the face of arbitrary military action and the many children dying from Israeli bullets.

Miller’s emotions behind the camera are never really hidden, bringing to the project skills honed in other conflict zones – in Afghanistan, Algeria, Bosnia, Lebanon, Sierra Leone, and Iraq.

The film ends with Miller’s death, which came as he and his team approached an Israeli tank with Shah saying: “We are British journalists.”

In a terrible irony in the days that followed his death, Miller was made a new martyr by the Palestinians. His face was put on posters commemorating those who have died in the jihad, or holy war, against Israel, despite desperate pleas by the crew for them not to do so.

Miller’s tragically premature death meant he never got a chance to make his second project: a ‘twin’ for Death in Gaza documenting the lives of young Israelis living in Jewish settlements.