Salam Daher

Salam Daher (Arabic: سلام ضاهر, born 1967) is a Lebanese civil defense worker who was involved in the aftermath of the Israeli airstrike on Qana on July 30, 2006, where widely published photographs showed him removing dead children from the rubble of a house struck by an Israeli attack.

Background Daher was born in 1967 in the predominantly Christian south Lebanese town of Marjayoun and began working as a civil defense volunteer at the age of 12. In 1986, during the 1982-2000 South Lebanon conflict and Lebanese civil war of 1975–1990, he joined the civil defense service of the Lebanese interior ministry as an apprentice and worked his way up the ranks. His home town was at the centre of the 1982-2000 conflict, being the headquarters of the pro-Israeli South Lebanon Army militia, and was repeatedly attacked by Palestinian militias during the civil war and subsequently by the Hezbollah militia during Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon. He moved to the coastal city of Tyre in 1996, where the influence of Hezbollah is far weaker (the city is run by Hezbollah's secular rival Amal. By the time of the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict, he was working as the head of civil defense operations for Tyre and the surrounding region, including Qana.

He has described himself as a first responder, "often the one who takes the phone call alerting the civil defense to an emergency, and he is often part of the first team to reach the site." According to the Associated Press, which interviewed him, "when bombs strike, he races his ambulance along narrow country roads, digs through rubble and tries to save the living from flattened buildings". He has previously been seen in widely distributed photographs of the 1996 shelling of Qana in which 106 people were killed and 116 injured in an Israeli attack. On that occasion, he was photographed carrying the mutilated body of a child killed in the attack. though later reports revised this to a lower figure of 28, including 16 children.

The 2006 photographs and footage led to a number of websites labelling Daher the "Green Helmet", in reference to his distinctive headgear, and accusing him of being a member of Hezbollah and of using bodies for propaganda purposes.

The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse news agencies, whose photographers had taken the "Green Helmet" pictures, all denied that the pictures from Qana had been staged. The Washington Post's photographer Michael Robinson Chavez rejected the claims of staging, commenting: "Everyone was dead, many of them children. Nothing was set up. There was no way photos could have been altered with a dozen photographers there." The Post's ombudsman, Deborah Howell, reviewed the pictures published by the newspaper and reported that they "didn't show any obvious manipulation."

The Associated Press was eventually able to identify "Green Helmet" as Salam Daher and interviewed him twice. He strongly denied having anything to do with Hezbollah, stating that the blog allegations were not true and that he was not affiliated with any party. He told the agency: "I am just a civil defense worker. I have done this job all my life."