AP, B'Tselem and Amnesty. Why did you ignore this house destroyed by Israel?

...How many other such houses filled with jihadists from the same family were excluded? All of the other criticisms of these reports still apply, of course, Without these organizations knowing what the targets were, they cannot know whether the IDF commanders who ordered the strikes violated the primciples of distinction and proportionality, and any assumptions of those violations based on the proportion of civilians killed are inherently flawed. But the Al Skafi home proves that the entire purpose of this "research" is not to calculate how effective the IDF was, but rather to cherry-pick the examples that they believe prove their point. It is lying with statistics, and it is reprehensible.

Elder of Ziyon..
15 March '15..

Recently, Richard Behar and Gary Weiss wrote a masterly destruction of an AP investigation showing how many mistakes and violations of journalistic ethics could be found in an article.

"The New York-based news agency examined 247 airstrikes on homes—interviewing witnesses, visiting attack sites and compiling a detailed casualty count. Its probe determined that out of 844 dead from those strikes, 508 (or just over 60 percent) were children, women and older men, 'all presumed to be civilians.'"

This is very similar to an Amnesty report on Israeli airstrikes of houses that I addressed here.

The organization that decided to do this type of analysis originally is B'Tselem, which even during the war started compiling lists of houses that had been hit by Israel and their casualties.

There is an additional problem with all of these "investigations" - they consciously exclude airstrikes on homes that the NGOs know were being used to shield fighters.

If you only count houses that used women and children as human shields, yes, it will appear that Israel showed disregard for the lives women and children (which is not by itself proof of violations of international law, as I have shown in my Amnesty piece.)

B'Tselem has the most comprehensive list of family homes hit by Israel published (AP did not expose its full list.) Yet one obvious family house is not listed: the home of the Al Skafi family of Shujaiyya.

(Continue)

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