In the State Department’s annual report on terrorism, issued last week, the section concerning Hamas’s rocket attacks and the IDF’s response cites both Israeli estimates of civilian and military casualties and the now-discredited estimates produced by the UN. Matthew Cella notes that these reports rarely contain such detail, and never mention conflicting estimates of casualties:
Consider the overview in the same State Department report in 2009, the first produced under the Obama administration. That document outlined the beginnings of the 22-day military campaign called Operation Cast Lead . . ., but it did so with far less detail. . . . The next year, the administration in its overview detailed even less about Palestinian casualties in the conflict. . . . Subsequent reports during the Obama administration document the firing of rockets and mortar shells and the subsequent responses with little elaboration.
Tensions have been high in recent months between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over a deal to limit Iran’s nuclear ambitions. An op-ed this week in the Wall Street Journal by the former Israeli ambassador Michael Oren suggested President Obama has made mistakes in the Israeli-U.S. relationship “deliberately,” and that he was responsible for abandoning two core principles of the U.S.-Israel alliance: no public disagreements and no surprises.
Though subtle, [the] State Department report may have been a little bit of both.
Read more on U.S. News: http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/06/19/state-department-terror-report-contains-subtle-shift-on-israel