GAZA
CITY — Inside the Health Sciences Library at Al-Shifa Hospital here, a
small team spent the war crunching numbers. Stuck to their laptops were a
statistician, a graphic designer, a data-entry specialist and an issuer
of death certificates, some of whom spent nights sleeping in their
straight-backed chairs.
By
Tuesday, this is what they had come up with: 1,865 “martyrs” from
“Israeli aggression” since July 6: 429 under age 18, 79 over 60, 243
women. The Palestinian Ministry of Health does not categorize victims as
civilian or combatant, but others do: The United Nations — which had a lower death toll, 1,814 — said that at least 72 percent were civilians, while two Gaza-based groups put the percentage at 82 (Al Mezan Center for Human Rights) and 84 (the Palestinian Center for Human Rights).
Even
as the war appears to draw to a close, the battle over casualty
statistics rages on. No other number is as contentious as the ratio of
civilians to combatants killed, widely viewed, including in Israel, as a
measure of whether the commanders in the field acted proportionately to
the threat posed by militants — or, in the eyes of Israel’s critics,
committed war crimes.
“There
are big problems in the numbers because there are such huge numbers,”
said Samir Zaqout, who runs a team of 10 Al Mezan field workers who
interview relatives, neighbors and doctors to compile dossiers on each
attack. “We do our best in this horrible situation to be very clear.”
Palestinians
and their supporters contend Israel massacred innocents with
indiscriminate assaults with heavy weapons, citing numerous strikes that
killed multiple family members in their homes and several that hit schools sheltering those who had sought refuge.
Israel,
in turn, says that Hamas, the militant group that dominates Gaza,
purposely sacrifices its own citizens by fighting in their midst, in
order to raise the world’s ire against Israel. It says that the ratio of
combatants killed in a densely populated urban environment supports its
assertion that it conducted the attacks as humanely as possible.
To
combat the heart-wrenching photographs of dead children, Israel has
published extensive video images of warplanes aborting missions to avoid
collateral damage, and provided summaries of warnings it gave residents
before attacking buildings.
Accurate
accounting for this bloody battle is problematic, especially since the
fighting just stopped. Mr. Zaqout of Al Mezan expects that scores more
bodies will be pulled from the rubble, many of them militants, in places
like Shejaiya, Rafah and Beit Hanoun that saw the hottest combat.
An
analysis of the statistics provided by both sides suggests that a
majority were probably noncombatants. Through last Thursday, according
to a New York Times analysis of a list provided by the Health Ministry,
more than a third were women, children under 15 or men over 60.
But
the difference between roughly half the dead being combatants, in the
Israeli version, or barely 10 percent, to use the most stark numbers on
the other side, is wide enough to change the characterization of the
conflict.
It
seems unlikely that there will ever be a definitive breakdown both
sides accept: Israel contends that some of the casualties were caused by
errant Hamas rockets or mortars. Human rights groups acknowledge that
people killed by Hamas as collaborators and people who died naturally,
or perhaps through domestic violence, are most likely counted as well.
Then there is the question of who counts as a “combatant.”
There
are uniformed men actively firing weapons. But Hamas also has political
figures, members of its security service and employees of its
ministries. In some eyes, anyone affiliated with the organization, which
professes a goal of destroying Israel, is a combatant.
“Israel
has a very liberal definition of who qualifies,” said Sarah Leah
Whitson of Human Rights Watch. “Israel’s labeling of certain individuals
as ‘terrorists’ does not make them military targets as a matter of
law.”
But the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center,
the Israeli group that analyzed the first Palestinian deaths, accused
the Hamas-controlled Health Ministry of “concealment and deception” in
order “to create an ostensibly factual infrastructure for a political,
propaganda and legal campaign against Israel.”
The
Times analysis, looking at 1,431 names, 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.
The
portion that were female rose steadily over that period, to 27 percent
July 26-31. There were six infants under age 1 on the list, and 82
children ages 1 to 5. The oldest victim, Muhammad Mazin Faraj Daher, was
99.
Some
have not yet been identified, and may never be. “Some of the bodies are
just in pieces,” said Julie Webb, 61, a New Zealander who has lived in
Gaza for three years and assists the Health Ministry. Others, like
Syrian refugees, have not been verified because they are not in the
Palestinian population registry.
Though
her team in the hospital library is not involved in counting
combatants, Ms. Webb doubts that many have been missed. “The resistance
factions claim their dead, and they have big funerals,” she said. “They
would never hide it, because it’s a thing of pride.”
News
reports generally rely on the United Nations’ estimate of civilians
killed. Matthias Behnke, a United Nations official, said those numbers
came from cross-referencing research by several human rights groups,
though he declined to say how many, which ones or what methods they
used.
“Getting
information about people who are dead is not that complicated because
everybody knows everybody” in Gaza, Mr. Behnke said. “Organizations go
out and collect information independent of each other. That is quite a
good basis for doing the analysis.
“We are by no means saying these figures are absolute and final,” he added. “They will be subject to verification.”
At
Al Mezan’s office here, Mr. Zaqout and his aides were using
highlighters to update handwritten logs on Tuesday evening and issuing
small corrections to earlier news releases. He said he did not rely on
the Health Ministry data, though it had improved since Israel’s
Operation Cast Lead in 2008-9, when telephone, cellular and wireless
Internet networks were cut off.
Instead,
his 10 field workers collect names directly from Gaza’s 13 hospitals
(four have been closed because of bombing) and five morgues, and go to
the site of virtually every strike to conduct interviews and fill out
detailed questionnaires in support of war-crimes accusations. Surviving
children might deny that their father was a fighter, but a medical
worker might say he arrived at the emergency room with a weapon in hand.
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