Citing new evidence it claims to have collected, the Associated Press recently repeated its charge that during last summer’s war in Gaza, Israeli airstrikes “killed mostly civilians.” Richard Behar argues that these statistics are little more than Hamas propaganda:

The article in AP is focused on “a particular subset of the fatalities—those killed while inside houses ostensibly targeted by the Israelis,” defense analyst [Eado] Hecht told me on Friday. “I write ‘ostensibly’ targeted by Israelis because something in the order of 2,600 Palestinian rockets and mortar bombs were fired deliberately (most of them) or by mistake into Palestinian residential areas. The deliberate fire [was directed at] Israeli soldiers in that area—but without warning local civilians to move out.” . . .

[N]o one knows exactly how many houses were targeted by the Israelis, but UN studies . . . claim severe damage to thousands of buildings (one figure is 20,000 destroyed or severely damaged). The percentage of civilians killed in 247 houses alone [cited by the AP] is only indicative of someone choosing specific houses to count while ignoring other houses that did not suit the specific slant they were trying to give. Especially since the total count of children, women, and elderly men given by the Palestinians themselves is a total of 943. In other words, in just over one percent of a total of some 20,000 buildings destroyed or severely damaged were inflicted 508 of all the 943 [civilian casualties claimed by Palestinian sources].

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.