The Mulish Media and Civilian Casualties in Gaza

Each and every time, without fail, when escalating Palestinian violence provokes a large-scale Israeli response, the media and “human rights” activists portray Israeli military actions as indiscriminate and reckless, mainly harming Palestinian civilians, especially women and children. It is remarkable how intractable the media and its acolytes are in the face of emerging evidence refuting their favored motif that Palestinian civilians account for the bulk of the victims.

During the Cast Lead operation (Dec. 27, 2008 to Jan. 18, 2009) and Protective Edge, the 50 day conflict between Israel and Hamas during the Summer of 2014, the media accepted without hesitation the fatality tallies provided by the U.N., even though the UN relies on the information provided by a terrorist entity, Hamas, that is a party to the conflict and has an obvious interest in misrepresenting the make-up of these fatalities. It is a curious thing, that so much credence is given to figures provided by a terrorist organization with a poor record of accountability, while contradictory figures from Israel, a country with a proven record of conducting independent investigations, are dismissed.

Both in 2009 and 2014, even as hostilities flared, information provided by the Palestinians themselves cast doubt on the claims that civilians made up the vast majority of fatalities. In both cases, independent Israeli organizations conducted investigations of the identities of the listed fatalities by the Palestinians. A study by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center disclosed that more than half of those killed in the 2014 conflict, for whom sufficient information existed to categorize their status, were identifiable as members of terrorist organizations or participants in the hostilities. To avoid the accusation of partisanship, the Center’s report exhaustively catalogs each individual, showing the evidence of their participation in the hostilities and affiliation with terrorist groups.

Yet, on April 28, 2015 when major news organizations carried the story of a released U.N. report investigating the deaths occurring in and around shelters administered by UN agencies, virtually every story cited the UN figure that 70% of the deaths were civilians, or established that civilians made up most of the dead.

The unwillingness of the media to invest the time to scrutinize and incorporate newer information and then self-correct is a persistent problem that underscores CAMERA’s mission to hold it accountable.