From the Liveblog of
Friday, August 8, 2014
BBC, too, questions conclusion that Israel targets civilians
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleA growing number of international media outlets, including The New York Times and the BBC, have started to question civilian casualty figures from Gaza that purport to show that Israel is targeting civilians in the Strip, an act that would constitute a war crime under both international and Israeli law.
The BBC’s head of statistics Anthony Reuben cites figures published by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, which found the number of civilian men killed in the fighting (725) outnumbered the number of women (214) by a factor of nearly 3.5:1. When the 216 confirmed “members of armed groups” are included, the disparity grows even larger.
“If the Israeli attacks have been ‘indiscriminate,’ as the UN Human Rights Council says, it is hard to work out why they have killed so many more civilian men than women,” Reuben notes.
The question echoes a New York Times analysis earlier this week that “shows that the population most likely to be militants, men ages 20 to 29, is also the most overrepresented in the death toll: They are 9 percent of Gaza’s 1.7 million residents, but 34 percent of those killed whose ages were provided. At the same time, women and children under 15, the least likely to be legitimate targets, were the most underrepresented, making up 71 percent of the population and 33 percent of the known-age casualties.”
These analyses do not mean large numbers of Gazan civilians haven’t suffered and died in the fighting, of course. But they do suggest, in Reuben’s words, “that some of the conclusions being drawn [from death-toll figures] may be premature.”
The death-toll statistics may constitute decisive evidence that, contrary to the claims of organizations such as the UN Human Rights Council, Human Rights Watch, and others, civilians are not the targets of Israel’s strikes.
The Times of Israel Community.