Israel-Gaza conflict: What has Israel achieved in 26 bloody days?

[OriZ 3,157]

Using artillery against civilian centres, knowing that civilians are there?

The thing is everyone can find justifications for one side or the other. I'm only concerned about the civilian deaths and the fact that neither Israel or some posters here are prepared to admit and kind of responsibility. It's all the other sides fault.

Bs.

He's like the red cross rep in the forum, but at least he's not a Hamas rep like some people here are. He just doesn't want to see any civilians killed. Noble cause, but unfortunately it's not always a realistic possibility in the world we live in.

[OriZ 3,157]

War zones are not easy places to collect statistics.

In the Gaza conflict, most news organisations have been quoting from the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which leads a group of humanitarian organisations known as the Protection Cluster.

Its recent report said that as of 6 August, 1,843 Palestinians had been killed and 66 Israelis and one Thai national since Israel launched Operation Protective Edge on 8 July.

Of those Palestinians, the status of 279 could not be identified, at least 1,354 were civilians, including 415 children and 214 women, the UN body reported.

So there were 216 members of armed groups killed, and another 725 men who were civilians. Among civilians, more than three times as many men were killed as women, while three times as many civilian men were killed as fighters.

The UN report carries a caveat with its figures: "Data on fatalities and destruction of property is consolidated by the Protection and Shelter clusters based on preliminary information, and is subject to change based on further verifications."

There has been some research suggesting that men in general are more likely to die in conflict than women, although no typical ratio is given.

Nonetheless, if the Israeli attacks have been "indiscriminate", as the UN Human Rights Council says, it is hard to work out why they have killed so many more civilian men than women.

Matthias Behnk, from OHCHR, told BBC News that the organisation would not want to speculate about why there had been so many adult male casualties, adding that because they were having to deal with a lot of casualties in a short time, they had "focused primarily on recording the casualties".

"As such, we have not at this stage conducted a detailed analysis of trends of civilian casualties, for example in relation to the reasons why different groups are affected and the types of incidents, but hope to carry this out at some point in the coming future," he said.

"However, even in the compiling of these preliminary figures, we cross-verify between different sources, not only media and several different human rights organisations, but also use other sources, including, for example, names of alleged fighters released by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and notices by armed groups in Gaza claiming someone as a member."

A number of other news organisations have been considering the civilian-to-fighter ratio.

An analysis by the New York Times looked at the names of 1,431 casualties and found that "the population most likely to be militants, men ages 20 to 29, is also the most overrepresented in the death toll. They are 9% of Gaza's 1.7 million residents, but 34% of those killed whose ages were provided."

"At the same time, women and children under 15, the least likely to be legitimate targets, were the most underrepresented, making up 71% of the population and 33% of the known-age casualties."

The list of names and ages of the dead published by al-Jazeera also found men aged between 20 and 29 to be significantly overrepresented.

The IDF say they have killed at least 253 Hamas operatives, 147 Islamic Jihad operatives, 65 "operatives of various organisations" and 603 "operatives whose affiliation is unknown", although they also stress that this is not a final number.

Spokesman Capt Eytan Buchman told BBC News that "the UN numbers being reported are, by and by large, based on the Gaza health ministry, a Hamas-run organisation".

He said that part of the reason for the discrepancy between the figures was "when militants are brought to hospitals, they are brought in civilian clothing, obscuring terrorist affiliations".

"Hamas also has given local residents directives to obscure militant identities," he said.

"It's important to bear in mind that in Operation Cast Lead [the last Israeli ground offensive in December 2008-January 2009], Hamas and Gaza-based organisations claimed that only 50 combatants were killed, admitting years later the number was between 600-700, a figure nearly identical to the figure claimed by the IDF."

In conclusion, we do not yet know for sure how many of the dead in Gaza are civilians and how many were fighters. This is in no sense the fault of the UN employees collecting the figures - their statistics are accompanied by caveats and described as preliminary and subject to to revision.

But it does mean that some of the conclusions being drawn from them may be premature.

BBC...not known as a very pro israel source.

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28688179

NY times is onto the same thing:

Inside the Health Sciences Library at Al-Shifa Hospital here, a small team spent the war crunching numbers. Stuck to their laptops were a statistician, a graphic designer, a data-entry specialist and an issuer of death certificates, some of whom spent nights sleeping in their straight-backed chairs.

By Tuesday, this is what they had come up with: 1,865 “martyrs” from “Israeli aggression” since July 6: 429 under age 18, 79 over 60, 243 women. The Palestinian Ministry of Health does not categorize victims as civilian or combatant, but others do: The United Nations — which had a lower death toll, 1,814 — said that at least 72 percent were civilians, while two Gaza-based groups put the percentage at 82 (Al Mezan Center for Human Rights) and 84 (the Palestinian Center for Human Rights).

Israel has a very different assessment. The military says it took the lives of 900 “terrorists,” but it did not provide specifics beyond the 368 cases listed in 28 entries on its blog. Politicians have been saying that 47 percent of the dead were fighters, citing a study by an Israeli counterterrorism group that is impressive in its documentation, using photographs and Internet tributes, but analyzes only the first 152 casualties, when the assault was exclusively from the air.

According to data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, 34 percent of those killed in Gaza from July 6-31 were children, women, elderly or female victims of an unknown age. The remaining deaths were a mix of male civilians and combatants, though breakdowns are disputed.

The United Nations has said that civilians make up 72 percent of deaths, and two Gaza-based groups put that number at 82 percent and 84 percent. Israeli politicians, citing early figures, have said that close to half of deaths have been fighters.

Even as the war appears to draw to a close, the battle over casualty statistics rages on. No other number is as contentious as the ratio of civilians to combatants killed, widely viewed, including in Israel, as a measure of whether the commanders in the field acted proportionately to the threat posed by militants — or, in the eyes of Israel’s critics, committed war crimes.

“There are big problems in the numbers because there are such huge numbers,” said Samir Zaqout, who runs a team of 10 Al Mezan field workers who interview relatives, neighbors and doctors to compile dossiers on each attack. “We do our best in this horrible situation to be very clear.”

Palestinians and their supporters contend Israel massacred innocents with indiscriminate assaults with heavy weapons, citing numerous strikes that killed multiple family members in their homes and several that hit schools sheltering those who had sought refuge.

Israel, in turn, says that Hamas, the militant group that dominates Gaza, purposely sacrifices its own citizens by fighting in their midst, in order to raise the world’s ire against Israel. It says that the ratio of combatants killed in a densely populated urban environment supports its assertion that it conducted the attacks as humanely as possible.

To combat the heart-wrenching photographs of dead children, Israel has published extensive video images of warplanes aborting missions to avoid collateral damage, and provided summaries of warnings it gave residents before attacking buildings.

Accurate accounting for this bloody battle is problematic, especially since the fighting just stopped. Mr. Zaqout of Al Mezan expects that scores more bodies will be pulled from the rubble, many of them militants, in places like Shejaiya, Rafah and Beit Hanoun that saw the hottest combat.

An analysis of the statistics provided by both sides suggests that a majority were probably noncombatants. Through last Thursday, according to a New York Times analysis of a list provided by the Health Ministry, more than a third were women, children under 15 or men over 60.

But the difference between roughly half the dead being combatants, in the Israeli version, or barely 10 percent, to use the most stark numbers on the other side, is wide enough to change the characterization of the conflict.

It seems unlikely that there will ever be a definitive breakdown both sides accept: Israel contends that some of the casualties were caused by errant Hamas rockets or mortars. Human rights groups acknowledge that people killed by Hamas as collaborators and people who died naturally, or perhaps through domestic violence, are most likely counted as well.

Then there is the question of who counts as a “combatant.”

There are uniformed men actively firing weapons. But Hamas also has political figures, members of its security service and employees of its ministries. In some eyes, anyone affiliated with the organization, which professes a goal of destroying Israel, is a combatant.

“Israel has a very liberal definition of who qualifies,” said Sarah Leah Whitson of Human Rights Watch. “Israel’s labeling of certain individuals as ‘terrorists’ does not make them military targets as a matter of law.”

But the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, the Israeli group that analyzed the first Palestinian deaths, accused the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry of “concealment and deception” in order “to create an ostensibly factual infrastructure for a political, propaganda and legal campaign against Israel.”

The Times analysis, looking at 1,431 names, shows that the population most likely to be militants, men ages 20 to 29, is also the most overrepresented in the death toll: They are 9 percent of Gaza’s 1.7 million residents, but 34 percent of those killed whose ages were provided. At the same time, women and children under 15, the least likely to be legitimate targets, were the most underrepresented, making up 71 percent of the population and 33 percent of the known-age casualties.

Continue reading the main story GRAPHIC The Toll in Gaza and Israel, Day by Day

The daily tally of rocket attacks, airstrikes and deaths in the conflict between Israel and Hamas.

OPEN GRAPHIC

The portion that were female rose steadily over that period, to 27 percent July 26-31. There were six infants under age 1 on the list, and 82 children ages 1 to 5. The oldest victim, Muhammad Mazin Faraj Daher, was 99.

Some have not yet been identified, and may never be. “Some of the bodies are just in pieces,” said Julie Webb, 61, a New Zealander who has lived in Gaza for three years and assists the Health Ministry. Others, like Syrian refugees, have not been verified because they are not in the Palestinian population registry.

Though her team in the hospital library is not involved in counting combatants, Ms. Webb doubts that many have been missed. “The resistance factions claim their dead, and they have big funerals,” she said. “They would never hide it, because it’s a thing of pride.”

Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story

News reports generally rely on the United Nations’ estimate of civilians killed. Matthias Behnke, a United Nations official, said those numbers came from cross-referencing research by several human rights groups, though he declined to say how many, which ones or what methods they used.

“Getting information about people who are dead is not that complicated because everybody knows everybody” in Gaza, Mr. Behnke said. “Organizations go out and collect information independent of each other. That is quite a good basis for doing the analysis.

“We are by no means saying these figures are absolute and final,” he added. “They will be subject to verification.”

At Al Mezan’s office here, Mr. Zaqout and his aides were using highlighters to update handwritten logs on Tuesday evening. He said he did not rely on the Health Ministry data, though it had improved since Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9, when telephone, cellular and wireless Internet networks were cut off.

Instead, his 10 field workers collect names directly from Gaza’s 13 hospitals (four have been closed because of bombing) and five morgues, and go to the site of virtually every strike to conduct interviews and fill out detailed questionnaires in support of war-crimes accusations. Surviving children might deny that their father was a fighter, but a medical worker might say he arrived at the emergency room with a weapon in hand.

“Each incident that we have which the Israelis targeted for airstrike, always we have this kind of thinking that maybe there is a fighter,” Mr. Zaqout said. “When we’re talking about the fighters who are fighting on the border or the tunnels, we couldn’t know, because their bodies are not coming to the hospital. I think these numbers will increase in the next days.”

Correction: August 8, 2014

An article on Wednesday about conflicting assessments of civilian casualties in the Gaza Strip from the monthlong war between Hamas and Israel referred imprecisely to the activity on Tuesday evening at the office of Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, one of the Gaza-based groups conducting a count. While Samir Zaqout, an official of the center, and his aides were updating handwritten logs, they were not “issuing small corrections to earlier news releases.” (Earlier, Mr. Zaqout said, he had made a small correction to one news release.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/world/middleeast/civilian-or-not-new-fight-in-tallying-the-dead-from-the-gaza-conflict.html?_r=1

Edited August 8, 2014 by OriZ

[OriZ 3,157]

A notepad found by IDF soldiers during fighting in Gaza details instructions for terrorists to operate from within civilian population centers in Gaza in a bid to force the IDF to harm innocent civilians.

Justice Minister Tzipi Livni presented on Thursday a document in Arabic which explicitly instructs terrorists to deliberately fire at the Israeli army from within places where civilians are present, and thus harm its image.

Livni met with the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross and presented him with the guidelines, found in the pocket of a terrorist in Saja'iyya.

The page includes clear-cut instructions on how on the proper conduct during battle in order to cause maximum damage to Israel's public image, while using innocent civilians as human shields.

Among the recommendations included in the manual, which admits that "the IDF limits the use of ammunition to avoid harming the civilian population," Hamas officials wrote: "The IDF limits the use of fire against civilian population centers – we recommend to attack from there; shooting from within homes of civilians is in Hamas' interest because it intensifies the hatred against the Israeli army."

Meanwhile, the complex tunnel system operated by Hamas during the fighting has also been exposed: London's Times newspaper interviewed a commander of Hamas' military wing named Abu Laith, who told how Hamas activists spent entire days underground.

He said that Hamas runs a command and control operation that includes 30,000 combatants, and that the majority of its cells work separately. Abu Laith further added that during the fighting, one such cell was trapped underground in Saja'iyya for ten days without food or drink after their tunnel collapsed on both sides.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4556422,00.html

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

This feels like Gary 2.0. Must be a Vermont thing....

[OriZ 3,157]

Smart, knowledgeable, educated people live in Vermont.

And Liberals.

Many Liberals.

It's a trade off.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

Smart, knowledgeable, educated people live in Vermont.

And Liberals.

Many Liberals.

It's a trade off.

I can't help but wonder now. How exactly do you fit in there?

Edited August 9, 2014 by Mr. Big Dog

[OriZ 3,157]

I'm very limited on time, so instead of sitting here all day like some people I just post everything at once. If people actually read/watched it, they might learn something, but they don't want to cause it will burst their little delusional bubble.

I can't help but wonder now. How exactly do you fit in there?

You'd be surprised!

Now, speaking about Gary...where is he? did you guys chase him away again?

[GandD 5,966]

Without knowing what anti semitism means, tricky.

Bazinga!

[Póg mo 1,749]

Without knowing what anti semitism means, tricky.

Indeed!http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_people

[Boiler 45,743]

Antisemitism (also spelled anti-Semitism^[1] or anti-semitism) is prejudice, hatred of, or discrimination against Jews as a national, ethnic, religious or racial group.^[2] A person who holds such positions is called an "antisemite". As Jews are an ethnoreligious group, antisemitism is generally considered a form of racism.

While the conjunction of the units anti, semite and ism indicates antisemitism as being directed against all Semitic people, the term was in fact coined in Germany in 1873 as a scientific-sounding term for Judenhass ("Jew-hatred"),^[3] and that has been its normal use since then.^[4] For the purposes of a 2005 U.S. governmental report, antisemitism was considered "hatred toward Jews—individually and as a group—that can be attributed to the Jewish religion and/or ethnicity."^[5]

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

Now, speaking about Gary...where is he? did you guys chase him away again?

Gary is probably enjoying the sunny beaches of Ankara. Or he's doing dishes wearing high heels. Makes no difference, he seemed to enjoy both equally.

[OriZ 3,157]

Or he's sittin on the beach in high heels? Nevermind, too graphic for me.

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

I'm very limited on time, so instead of sitting here all day like some people I just post everything at once. If people actually read/watched it, they might learn something, but they don't want to cause it will burst their little delusional bubble.

Yes, this sounds much like Gary, too. He was also making a point of talking about how little time he had in between plastering wall of text after wall of text into this forum. Very convincing. If you're from Vermont.

[OriZ 3,157]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Qvqezt7jiY&feature=youtu.be

Dear Members of the Mainstream Media,

You’ve been awesome! Everyone knows that we start unwinnable wars with Israel because the real victory happens when you predictably side with us each time. And you’ve been so supportive of our strategy that we really want to acknowledge your helpfulness. In particular, we thank you for:

- Focusing so much more on our suffering than anyone else’s. Nigerians must die in far greater numbers before you take notice, so we’re glad that you value our lives so much more.

- Minimizing your coverage, if any, of our attacks that led up to Israel’s military response and generally providing so little context that outsiders think that Israelis kill Palestinians just for fun. We’re especially grateful to the French media for this. Their distortions of the conflict are so one-sided that they incite Muslims across France to attack Jews and synagogues, and that is welcomed by our anti-Semitic worldview (although, unfortunately, such attacks remind everyone why Jews need a state).

- Emphasizing our civilian death toll without explaining that (1) our casualty reports are hasty and inflated, and (2) we maximize that total by using Palestinians to shield our weapons and by urging them to stay in the very areas that the IDF — in its annoying effort to minimize our civilian deaths — warns Gazans to evacuate.

- Never mentioning the fact that if we could kill millions of Israelis, we would (after all, our charter calls for Israel’s destruction). Indeed, we have purposely targeted Israel’s nuclear reactor on several occasions, with that very goal in mind. Fortunately, you never highlight the genocidal intent behind our attacks when mentioning Israel’s “disproportionate” response.

- Never calling us jihadists even though we persecute Christians (like the ISIS, which just compelled Mosul’s Christians to convert to Islam). The forced conversion, expulsion, or murder of Christians and other religious minorities by Islamists has been happening for millennia, as assiduously documented in Crucified Again, a book by Raymond Ibrahim, but such historical context is thankfully absent from your reporting on our conflict with Israel.

- Downplaying how bad we are for Gazans by not reporting on, for example, our attack on the very Israeli power station that provides electricity to 70,000 Gazans. Thankfully, you also ignored how the Israelis — in their stupid display of goodwill — exposed their workers to the perils of our rockets so that they could restore power to Gaza.

- Minimally reporting on our corruption, unfair wealth, or vast expenditures on tunnels to attack Israel while ordinary Palestinians grew poorer.

- Overlooking how, to maximize Palestinian deaths, we store our missiles in an UNWRA-run school and how, when UNWRA finds out, they just hand us back our missiles.

- Disregarding Arabs who have the courage to critique us, such as Dr. Tawfik Hamid, an Islamist-turned-reformer who blames Palestinian suffering entirely on us.

- Ignoring Israelis’ humanitarian folly in providing medical aid to the very terrorists trying to kill them.

- Failing to acknowledge Israel’s immense restraint. Had we been fighting Syria’s Assad regime, by now Gaza would have been flattened and you’d hardly care. But luckily, we’re dealing with Israel — that country that everyone loves to hate — so we can count on your helpful coverage here.

- Omitting how Israel chose to sacrifice dozens of IDF soldiers when destroying our tunnels and weapons in densely populated areas like Shejaiya because doing so with airstrikes (which risks no soldiers) would have killed many thousands of Palestinians. Your friendly omission of such crucial facts reminds us of how wonderfully you covered Jenin in 2002, when you very helpfully and falsely accused Israel of a massacre during another IDF operation to stop Palestinian terrorist attacks on Israeli civilians.

- Not sharing with your English readers what we openly say in Arabic: that we view any truce as just an opportunity to rearm for our next war against Israel (as our spokesman, Musheer Al Masri, recently declared on TV).

- Not underscoring that Israel can do nothing to make peace with us (after all, Israelis ended their occupation of Gaza in 2005 and we’ve been rocketing them ever since). It’s a bit nervy of Israel to use its border controls to limit our ability to rearm and rebuild cross-border attack tunnels, but — with your help — maybe the next cease-fire will remove Israel’s blockade so that we can more easily replenish our weapons and restore our tunnels for our next attack.

- Not reminding readers, when you mention potential truce arrangements, that world powers are no more capable of ensuring a demilitarized Gaza than they were capable of disarming Hezbollah in south Lebanon.

Seriously, you’ve been AMAZING. Please keep it up!

Love,

Hamas

http://unitedwithisrael.org/a-thank-you-letter-from-hamas-to-the-media/

[Mr. Big Dog 10,747]

And another wall of text piece of propaganda. Awesome!