On Tuesday this week the lead story in our tabloid second section, G2, was about the shooting in Gaza of the 12-year-old Palestinian boy, Mohammed al-Durrah. It was illustrated with all but one of the eight available frames showing the last moments of the boy's life, filmed by a Palestinian cameraman working for French television.

These images were shown on television on Saturday night. Two of the frames appeared on the front page of late editions of the Observer, the only paper to use them so prominently on Sunday - something for which several of the paper's readers criticised it (in my view misguidedly, or let us say precipitately, since I believe that the events of the week have endorsed the decision to use the pictures).

I inquired about the reaction from Observer readers to see whether it had differed in any way from the response to the Guardian's use of these images. On almost every occasion in the past three years when we have used pictures as strong as these, and certainly when we have shown pictures of dead people - in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Sierra Leone or Zimbabwe - a number of you have complained, and on all of those occasions we have considered the pros and cons in this column. This time, by Thursday anyway, many of you had voiced your reaction to the event, and a selection of your letters was published, but no one complained that our use of the pictures was intrusive, exploitative, cynical or sensational, the accusations made on previous occasions. Did we do something right?

By the time the Guardian used the pictures on Tuesday it seems likely that most of the paper's readers had seen some of them already. By Tuesday our website had considered and rejected the idea of putting up the movie footage, I think rightly, although one of the senior journalists involved in our treatment of the story in the paper said he could not see any distinction in ethical terms between showing still pictures (which we did) and moving pictures (which we did not). Can you?

Our Middle East editor has written about this in his column on our website. For those of you who do not have internet access, this is what he says: "Inevitably, video clips have appeared on the internet and now all you need do is click your mouse to have Mohammed brought back to life and shot again and again and again. Apart from being unbelievably ghoulish, this removes the event from the brutal realities of Middle East politics and dumps it in the realm of fantasy video games."

Let us turn back to G2. The front page was stripped of the contents panel that normally runs across the top of the page and instead the contents were flagged in a single line across the foot of the page. This released almost the whole of the page for an image of the terrified Mohammed sheltering beneath the protective arm of his father. It carried the headline: What really happened at Netzarim crossroads?

The following three pages, which included six more of the images from the sequence, sought an answer. Our correspondent went to the scene, spoke to the cameraman, and interviewed the boy's mother and others in a straightforward and memorable piece of reporting that suggested that the boy and his father had been targeted and shot by Israeli soldiers. The Israeli authorities have since said the two were mistaken for gunmen.

The deputy editor (news) said that looking at the situation on Monday he felt that what was needed was a piece of reporting to try to cut through the obfuscation that was then prevalent. The presentation was obviously shocking but not gratuitously so. "For all sorts of reasons you wanted to know exactly what had happened. The boy and his father were there for something like 45 minutes. You felt indignation. And the internal reaction, the reaction inside Israel - 21 lines in the main paper - was past understanding."

The editor of G2 said the image on the front on Tuesday would radicalise you. "It would make you want to pick up a stone." But he said his main anxiety was not to act as judge and jury. If it was a trial you would want more evidence than we had been able to produce, good though it was.

I asked the journalist who wrote the report what effect she thought the pictures had had. She said inside the country they had hardened the hearts of Israelis and made the Palestinians more violent. She felt that more rather than fewer people had died as an immediate result.

Farther away, we hope they have a different effect. Someone in the office said, "You immediately think of the child closest to you, whether you have children of your own or not." You want it to stop. In passing we might ask ourselves what we know about the other children, one of them only two years old, who have died in the violence this week.

• For more on our coverage of the events in Israel and the Middle East visit: www.guardianunlimited.co.uk/israel Readers may contact the office of the readers' editor by telephoning 020-7239 9589 between 11am and 5pm Monday to Friday. Surface mail to Readers' editor, The Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1R 3ER. Fax 020-7239 9897. Email: reader@theguardian.com