Commentary Magazine..
09 August '14..
Even after Hamas brazenly flouted the latest attempts to end the fighting in Gaza, demonstrators marched around the globe to protest what they and the Palestinians claim are Israeli war crimes. The crux of their critique is that the Israel Defense Forces has engaged in indiscriminate attacks on Palestinian civilians in Gaza. But, as even some of the mainstream media is beginning to acknowledge, a deep dive into the statistics that are cited to damn Israel tell a different story.
As the Times of Israel notes the analyses of both the BBC and the New York Times of United Nations casualty figures show that those Palestinians killed in the fighting are disproportionately male as well as having a massive overrepresentation of men in the 20-29 age group that is most likely to be members of terrorist armed cadres.
These facts do not gainsay the fact that Palestinians of all age groups and both sexes have been killed in the fighting in the past month. The people of Gaza have suffered cruelly from this war of choice launched by Hamas.
But the point of the breakdown of the casualty figures is that when you stop obsessing about heart-rending pictures of dead and wounded children that have been running in a video loop on all the news channels and start asking serious questions about the age and gender of most of the casualties, the libels about Israeli “war crimes” don’t stand up to scrutiny. The talk about “indiscriminate killing” that is casually tossed about at demonstrations, on op-ed pages and in the debates between television’s talking heads (including some who falsely claim to be friends of Israel) is often taken as a given. But the facts tell us a very different story that vindicates Israel’s claims that rather than firing into civilian areas without concern for the consequences, their targets are the fighters from Hamas and Islamic Jihad that have been holding Gaza hostage since 2007.
Like the subsequent debunking of similar charges about Israeli cruelty during Operation Cast Lead in 2008-09, it may well be that the lies told by Hamas and its enablers among the staff of the United Nations in Gaza are too good a story to be undone by careful analysis. After that round of fighting, subsequent analyses of the casualties proved that Israel’s claims that the bulk of those killed in Gaza were, in fact, Hamas personnel. But that didn’t stop the global lynch mob of Israel-haters from repeating false accusations that Israel had engaged in war crimes reminiscent of the Nazis. Those who march against Israel or blast it in the media claim they aren’t supporting Hamas but merely reacting to the slaughter of civilians even though they are mum about far worse examples of wartime killings in places like Syria or Iraq.
But the point here is that if those listed as civilian casualties are not a random sample of the Palestinian population but, instead, a group that is disproportionately young and male — i.e. the age group that is most likely to be part of Hamas’s so-called “military wing” or members of the Islamic Jihad cadres in Gaza — then it is more than obvious that claims of indiscriminate Israeli attacks are lies. When the dust settles this time — something that may not happen for a while given Hamas’s appetite for continuing the fighting so as to continue to inflate the number of Palestinian casualties — it is now obvious that we will find that the proportion of combatants to actual civilians among those killed by Israel’s strikes will be even more lopsided than is now acknowledged. As the Times reported, once you add in those that the Palestinians do admit to be fighters, the numbers are even more compelling.
That this is now becoming clear is even more striking because the only sources cited by most news outlets about Gaza casualties have been from the Hamas government of the strip or the UN which seems just as likely to inflate their numbers and to downplay any possibility that those hurt were legitimate targets.
Those venting indignation about the situation in Gaza have sought to depict Israel’s actions as the act of a heartless oppressor of Palestinians rather than those of one side in a war of aggression launched by their opponents. It is not just that, thanks to Iron Dome, Israelis aren’t dying in the sort of numbers that would generate sympathy from the international community. It’s that its counter-attack on Hamas rocket launchers and terror tunnels is being portrayed as a war on civilians. It’s time for those lecturing the Israelis about their tactics to pipe down and accept the truth about Gaza. As bad as the situation there is, the Israelis have done their best to limit their fire to those shooting at them. As is the case with all wars, including those fought by the United States, sometimes mistakes happen and civilians sometimes do get caught in the crossfire created by terrorists eager to turn their neighbors into “martyrs.”
Anyone who truly cares about Gaza’s civilian population will draw the appropriate conclusions and concentrate their criticisms on the terrorist group whose genocidal ideology impels it to continue their fight their war against Israel’s existence as long as there are Palestinians left to be sacrificed.
Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/08/09/the-truth-about-palestinian-casualties-gaza-israel-hamas-civilians/#gf_18
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