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].
Read more on Algemeiner: http://www.algemeiner.com/2015/02/14/analysis-i-dont-trust-the-aps-report-on-civilian-deaths-in-gaza-and-neither-should-you/