EIGHT MONTHS after Israel’s military offensive in Gaza, the dispute continues over how many people were killed and how many of the fatalities were civilians.
The Israeli human rights group B’tselem yesterday published a detailed report which put the total number of Palestinians killed during the three-week campaign at 1,387, of whom 773 were noncombatants.
The conclusions are broadly similar to figures reported by Palestinian sources and international human rights groups, but differ sharply from results of an Israeli military investigation which claimed 1,166 Palestinians were killed, of whom 709 were Hamas combatants and only 295 were civilians. The army said it was unable to determine the status of the remaining 162.
The B’tselem report followed months of detailed research. Each casualty was named, death certificates were checked and relatives were interviewed. The report stressed that “behind the dry statistics lie shocking individual stories. Whole families were killed; parents saw their children shot before their very eyes; relatives watched their loved ones bleed to death, and entire neighbourhoods were obliterated”.
The organisation acknowledged the complexity of fighting against armed groups in densely populated areas, and admitted that the casualty figures do not prove Israeli forces violated the laws of war. However, B’tselem concluded that the civilian casualties and damage to property “require serious introspection on the part of Israeli society”.
The Israeli army rejected the B’tselem findings as “not based on facts or on accurate statistics”. Claiming its own figures were more accurate, the army said B’tselem partly based its figures on reports from anti-Israel organisations. It said B‘tselem “does not have the tools, nor the intelligence capabilities with which it can, with a necessary degree of confidence, know the causes of death or the affiliations of these casualties”.
Citing one example, the army noted that Hamas labelled many of those who died “policemen”, implying they were innocent civilians, even though the vast majority of policemen in Gaza were Hamas members who had undergone military training.
Meanwhile, a UN report estimated damages in Gaza caused by the war at $4 billion (€2.75 billion). The UN trade and development agency said 90 per cent of Gazans now live under the poverty line and that the economic situation has deteriorated to levels not seen since the start of the Israeli occupation in 1967.