Civilian casualties, Gaza and the political war

Anne Herzberg
Op-Ed/JPost
02 January '11

The writer is the legal adviser of NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem-based research institution that promotes accountability and transparency among nongovernmental organizations that claim to protect human rights in the Middle East. She is the author of NGO ‘Lawfare’: Exploitation of Courts in the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

The distortion of international law is a primary weapon in the political war attacking Israel’s legitimacy.

During the Gaza War, casualty statistics were used by many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) claiming a human rights agenda to bolster these campaigns.

NGOs issued dozens of publications purporting to document the number of Palestinian civilian casualties. They frequently compared those figures to the number of Israeli casualties, which were lower. To pursue their political objectives, NGOs often deliberately and grossly inflated the Palestinian count, mislabeling combatants as civilians or “children,” and made other false accusations.

NGOs such as B’Tselem, Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), and Defence for Children International – Palestine Section (DCI-PS) each issued differing reports, alleging that between 70 – 85% of those killed were civilians.

In contrast to these NGO reports, the Israeli military stated that of 1166 Palestinian deaths, 709 “militants” were killed in combat; the Israeli evidence was largely ignored or derisively dismissed. Recently, though, the IDF figures were confirmed and the NGO accounts debunked by the most unlikely of sources – Hamas.

In a November 2010 interview given by Hamas Interior Minister Fathi Hamad to the Al-Hayat newspaper, Hamas acknowledged that 600-700 Hamas members were killed in the Gaza fighting – more than double the number of combatants published by the NGOs’ and Richard Goldstone’s unreliable version of events.

With these new revelations by Hamas, NGOs, media correspondents, UN officials, and others that presented the NGO statistics as authoritative should now issue corrections.

(Read full "Civilian casualties, Gaza and the political war")

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