Rights Group: Most Gaza War Deaths Were Non-Combatants

September 9, 2009 10:31 p.m. EST

More than half the people killed in Israel's Operation Cast Lead in Gaza earlier this year were not involved in the fighting, an Israeli human-rights organization has said, contradicting previous figures released by the Israeli army.

According to findings published by B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organization, Israeli security forces killed 1,382 Palestinians during the 22-day military operation. Of those, 774 did not take part in the hostilities, including 320 minors and 109 women over the age of 18.

Among the fatalities were 325 Palestinians who took part in the fighting and 245 police officers, most of whom were killed in aerial bombings of police stations on the first day of the operation, B'Tselem said.

The findings were in sharp contrast to statistics presented by the Israeli army, which claimed 1,166 Palestinians had been killed in the course of the Gaza Strip operation. The army claimed the majority of them, 709 people, were terror operatives affiliated with Hamas or other terror organizations.

B'Tselem said it was not possible to explain the discrepancy between its figures and the data released by the army because the army had not provided a name list of the casualties.

"We don't know how the army reached its conclusions," Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for B'Tselem told The Media Line. "We did ask for the army's list and they refused to provide it." "We didn't receive an answer as to the discrepancy," she said. "We passed our list to the IDF spokesman's office with all the data we collected, but the army chose not to react to the findings and rather to undermine B'Tselem's credibility."

"The B'Tselem report is not based on facts or on accurate statistics," the army said in response to the report. "Among its sources, B'Tselem officially states that it based its findings on cross referencing statistics from investigations of Palestinian human-rights groups and various websites and blogs, including those of the militant wings of terror organizations and that of the Palestinian Police."

"The discrepancy in the numbers is based on the fact that B'Tselem's sources are organizations with a vested interest, and it does not have the tools, nor the intelligence capabilities with which it can, within a necessary degree of confidence, know the causes of death or the affiliations of these casualties," the army said.

Michaeli insisted B'Tselem's numbers were reliable and based on field work, using other sources only for cross referencing.

"I fully accept that the figures of casualties in Cast Lead are part of a political struggle between Israel and the Palestinians," she said. "Each side has an interest. B'Tselem took all feasible measures to reach the most accurate list and we're trying to get beyond the Israeli and Palestinian rhetoric and misinformation to try to find out who was killed and whether they were participating in hostilities or not."

Michaeli said the mostly troubling discrepancy was the difference in the civilian casualty numbers in the two accounts.

According to the Israeli army's figures, 295 Palestinians non involved in the fighting were killed during the operation, 89 of them under the age of 16. But B'Tselem says its own data indicated that the number of children under the age of 16 who were killed was 290.

"I'd like answers as to why the army denies there was such a large number of minors killed," Michaeli said.

Another dispute arose regarding B'Tselem's categorization of Palestinian police casualties, amounting to 245.

The army said when Hamas presented its operatives as police officers whose job is to enforce law and order, this was done in order to inflate the number of civilian casualties and decrease the number of combatants in the final death toll.

"B'Tselem has a different analysis," Michaeli said. "We categorize the police in a different category, for a variety of legal and factual reason. We don't include them in the non-combatants but we do include them as a separate category from the combatants."

But the army said there was evidence showing a direct link between Hamas and police officers and refused to count the police in the civilian toll.

The army claimed that its objective during the operation was to target Hamas and not civilians, but this was complicated by the fact that Hamas put civilians at risk by operated from within civilian areas.