Rights Group Puts Gaza Death Toll At 1,284

Palestinian Human Rights Organization Still Interviewing Survivors, Still Counting

(CBS/AP)  Sitting on rubble, using his briefcase as a writing table, human rights researcher Yasser Abdel Ghafar interviewed residents of a house shelled by Israel, part of his assignment to compile detailed lists of killed and wounded during Israel's 23-day war on Gaza's Hamas rulers.

His group, the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), released a final tally Wednesday, saying 1,284 Gazans were killed and 4,336 wounded, the majority civilians. Yet Israel, insisting that Hamas is inflating civilian casualties, said it has the names of more than 700 Hamas militants killed in fighting.

The wrangling over the final toll, particularly the ratio of combatants and civilians, is part of the rival Israeli and Palestinian narratives of the Gaza war. Israel portrays it as a justified attempt to finally halt years of indiscriminate Hamas rocket attacks on southern Israel. The Palestinians say it was a brutal onslaught in which troops used disproportionate force in one of the world's most densely populated areas. Some bombings and shellings of homes, even if targeting militants, killed entire families.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Hamas fighters fired rockets from civilian areas and stored explosives in mosques and schools. Yet he acknowledged that troops "moved forward with fire" to prevent Israeli casualties and that "nobody had any illusions that civilians wouldn't be harmed as well."

The growing international outrage over Israel's offensive has been fueled by the scenes of civilian suffering, including bodies of dead women and children in hospital morgues.

The PCHR said 894 of the dead were civilians, including 280 children and minors, age 17 and under, as well as 111 women. Of the remaining 390 dead, 167 were members of Hamas' civil police, many of them killed on the job during Israel's surprise attack on dozens of security compounds on the first day of the war.

The civilians not only included innocent bystanders, but also Hamas members killed in non-combat situations, such as Said Siam and Nizar Rayan, two top Hamas leaders assassinated, along with their relatives, in massive bombings of homes, said Ibtissam Zakout, head of the PCHR's research team.

The rest, or 223, were combatants, she said. That figure is higher than the 158 dead fighters acknowledged by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other militant groups.

"Maybe they (the militants) were interested to show that they have fewer losses and casualties," said Zakout. Others, such as Gaza Health Ministry official Moawiya Hassanain, have raised the possibility that the militant groups buried some of their fighters in secret, without reporting their deaths.

CBS News' George Baghdadi reported from Damascus, Syria that senior Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal claimed a "remarkable victory" over Israel Wednesday, saying the Jewish state's mighty military wasn't able to achieve its goals in the Gaza Strip.

"Hamas, which they wanted to finish, has become more powerful and more popular as it entered every house and became a slogan in Palestine and the rest of Arab nation," Mashaal said in a televised speech.

Zakout said the PCHR count, including the distinction between militants and civilians, is based on cross-checking hospital records and interviews with survivors. The group is affiliated with Geneva-based International Commission of Jurists and has won two European human rights awards.

During the war, 13 Israelis were killed, including three civilians struck by rockets. The other 10 were soldiers.

Israel has not provided its own version of a Palestinian death toll, though Barak said he believes dead militants outnumber dead civilians.

"Many more than 700 Hamas men were killed, many more," he told Israel's Channel 10 TV. "We know their names," while noting that civilians were hit as well.

However, Palestinian medics and human rights researchers say they've become well-versed in counting casualties during previous conflicts, including two uprisings against Israeli military occupation and internal Palestinian fighting.,

A veteran is Hassanain (seen at left), the Health Ministry official who has been recording dead and wounded since the start of the second Palestinian uprising in 2000.

Hassanain's center of operations is a tiny room with furniture he said dates back to pre-1967 Egyptian rule of Gaza. Equipped with just a beeper, a fax, a landline, two mobile phones and a walkie talkie, Hassanain dispatches dozens of ambulances and records the medics' first reports of dead and wounded on loose sheets of paper. In between, he accompanies ambulances taking the most seriously wounded to Israel and Egypt.

Hassanain's handwritten lists, including some stuffed in his jacket pocket, are eventually fed into a clunky old computer by an assistant and transferred to the information center of the Health Ministry.

The ministry, like most Gaza government agencies, is run by Hamas. Israeli warplanes targeted many Hamas ministries during the war, and the Health Ministry moved part of its operations to Gaza's main Shifa Hospital after the start of the offensive.

The ministry's computer center is fed by faxed reports sent by teams deployed at Gaza's 20 hospitals and clinics, said statistics chief Dr. Samir Radi, who did part of his physician's training at an Israeli hospital.

The Health Ministry's final toll for 23 days of fighting is 1,324 dead and about 5,400 injured - or 40 more dead and about 1,000 more injured than the PCHR.

Radi said names are added to the death toll only after careful consideration, including identification by ID by relatives, particularly if bodies arrive in a dismembered state.

The physician claimed that only about 100 of the dead were combatants, saying he is relying on reports by the militant groups themselves.

Zakout, asked about the discrepancies in casualty tolls, said she believes there has been some inadvertent double counting at the ministry, an outcome of the chaos of the war. Also, the ministry counts psychological trauma cases as war injuries, while PCHR does not, explaining the significant gap in the number of wounded.

The PCHR has been publishing daily updates of the names of the dead on its Web site since the beginning of the war, and expects to present the final list in several days.

Field worker Abdel Ghafar said the hard work is just beginning. In his district, the southern city of Khan Younis, he said he has counted 83 deaths. Initial questioning determined that 61 were civilians, 13 policemen and nine gunmen, he said. Of the militants, five were from Hamas and four from Islamic Jihad.

Since a cease-fire took hold Monday, he has started making the rounds to take affidavits from survivors about the details of attacks.

On Wednesday, he visited the Najar family, whose three-story house close to Israel's border was destroyed by shelling on Jan. 13. Two people, patriarch Khalil Najar, 75, and one of his granddaughters were killed in the attack, according to Abdel Ghafar's initial reports.

Relatives and neighbors sat on plastic chairs in an alley near the ruins. Abdel Ghafar approached the group and asked for a witness.

Najar's nephew, Rami, 28, said he was in the house at the time of the shelling, pointing to an injured right leg. He hobbled with Abdel Ghafar to the ruins, and the pair sat down on a large chunk of concrete. Using his briefcase as a writing table, the researcher took down the survivor's story.

[ajmarine111]

Hamas said this was a great victory. So why aren''''t they celebrating?


Posted by downsteamJm at 07:34 PM : Jan 22, 2009




Hamas still has enough power and influence here that few will criticise the Islamist movement openly.

But when Hamas called for a rally to celebrate what it has been calling a historic victory over the Israelis, the citizens of Gaza voted with their feet - they stayed at home.

In the past Hamas could easily call tens of thousands into the streets, but this time only party stalwarts could look around the devastation and believe this could be victory.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7843633.stm

[trapbreaker]

al qaeda were non of our business. - Posted by Seafang

Where were you on the morning of 9/11?

/

[seafang]

Well now that we are in the era of change we can believe in, perhaps Emperor Obama, will butt out of other country''s affairs, and let the Israelis take care of Gaza by themselves; it ain''t none of our business; just like Afghanistan and Iraq, and al qaeda were non of our business.

[seafang]

""how was the universe created according to you? why is the square root of -1 imaginary? 2 secular questions that need answers?
--------------------------------------
-----------
Posted by rudedogrulz at 02:02 PM : Jan 22, 2009 ""

#1 is easy, some caveman scientist was writing the first dictionary, and he couldn''t think of anything to make use of the word "universe" in his dictionary, so he just decided to use it up to describe all the twinkling lighs outside his cave at night.

#2 is just as easy; before the square root of -1 existed, there were no imaginary numbers so some caveman decided to use up the word imaginary to describe the square root of -1; in other words it is imaginary because it was defined to be that way.

[coppertales]

You notice that these "rights" groups never report on the deaths/injuries on the Israel side of the border.....

[inketolstoy]

"religious - manifesting faithful devotion to an acknowledged ultimate reality"

YOu have no proof for your answers for these two realities, yet you "know" them to be true. That sounds like the above definition to me. Or am I looking in a dictionary that is not "yours".

[inketolstoy]

but we''''re discovering more details all the time and we can answer quite a lot of the specific questions. "However, the real answer is that it has always been, because if there was no universe then there would be no time.
The answer is that all numbers are imaginary. Have you ever held one?"

This "scientific" answer sounds very "religious".

[jankebenz]

The outcome and resulting deaths from this attack is very tragic.Even more tragic is how this all would have been pevented if the hamas had not fired (and kept firing), the rockets in the first place.Goes to show the hamas ideology of reckless, blind hatred for Israel with blatant disregard for even their own women and children.

[trapbreaker]

If I said that my God came to me in a vision and said that you''''re wrong, what would you say? - Posted by hower4

Do what you want, believe what you want. My God is not dead, sorry about yours.

[l00ker1]

Why does a portion of our tax money go to support Israel? - Posted by Centerfall94

A small portion. $2.4 billion to Israel of which 75% is required to be spent back here in military hardware. Jordan and Egypt combined get the same amount, without the 75% provision. Actually 4 of the top 5 U.S. aid countries are Muslim and far exceed what Israel gets.

.

Posted by Trapbreaker at 12:37 PM : Jan 22, 2009

Hmm. I say we cut them all off.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Posted by Centerfall94 at 12:42 PM : Jan 22, 2009


Indeed, that money would be of better use in the Native American community, Innuit community, Puerto Rico and the entire Gulf Coast stretching from Alabama through Texas.

[trapbreaker]

why don''''t you try? - Posted by hower4

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

[centerfall94]

hower4 - things discerned by the Holy Spirit seem as foolishness to those who do not have it. It is pointless to argue.
-------------------------------
Poste
d by rsoxfan1123 at 12:36 PM : Jan 22, 2009

In 10 seconds I invented my hamster/tire religion that makes EXACTLY as much sense as your Christian religion does. THAT is why you can''''t argue with me. Go on....... why don''''t you try?

Posted by hower4 at 12:46 PM : Jan 22, 2009

DON''T FEED THE TROLLS.

Especially not the evangelistic ones. It can cause heart attacks, stroke, divine visions and postal worker rampages.

[centerfall94]

Why does a portion of our tax money go to support Israel? - Posted by Centerfall94

A small portion. $2.4 billion to Israel of which 75% is required to be spent back here in military hardware. Jordan and Egypt combined get the same amount, without the 75% provision. Actually 4 of the top 5 U.S. aid countries are Muslim and far exceed what Israel gets.

.

Posted by Trapbreaker at 12:37 PM : Jan 22, 2009

Hmm. I say we cut them all off.

[trapbreaker]

Why does a portion of our tax money go to support Israel? - Posted by Centerfall94

A small portion. $2.4 billion to Israel of which 75% is required to be spent back here in military hardware. Jordan and Egypt combined get the same amount, without the 75% provision. Actually 4 of the top 5 U.S. aid countries are Muslim and far exceed what Israel gets.

.

[rsoxfan1123]

hower4 - things discerned by the Holy Spirit seem as foolishness to those who do not have it. It is pointless to argue.

[centerfall94]

Clearly, Israel has no need of American support. They can slaughter en masse with relatively little effort.

Why does a portion of our tax money go to support Israel?

[trapbreaker]

Fighter Sees His Paradise in Gaza%u2019s Pain

By TAGHREED EL-KHODARY
Published: January 8, 2009

GAZA CITY %u2014 The emergency room in Shifa Hospital is often a place of gore and despair. On Thursday, it was also a lesson in the way ordinary people are squeezed between suicidal fighters and a military behemoth.
Dr. Awni al-Jaru, 37, a surgeon at the hospital, rushed in from his home here, dressed in his scrubs. But he came not to work. His head was bleeding, and his daughter%u2019s jaw was broken.

He said Hamas militants next to his apartment building had fired mortar and rocket rounds. Israel fired back with force, and his apartment was hit. His wife, Albina, originally from Ukraine, and his 1-year-old son were killed.

''''My son has been turned into pieces,'''' he cried. ''''My wife was cut in half. I had to leave her body at home.'''' Because Albina was a foreigner, she could have left Gaza with her children. But, Dr. Jaru lamented, she would not leave him behind...

http://www.nytimes.com/2009
/01/09/world/09fighter.html

..........

Hamas fires rockets from next door then Hamas will point to the civilians killed

[l00ker1]

If Obama fails to hold the Israeli zionist accountable for the level of death and destruction in Gaza, then not only has he no foreign policy credibility in the Middle East and the world, but none here at home as well. This alone will show whether he is an Israeli and American zionist jew stooge or not.

[ici2i]

Obviously your account of Israel is misqued.

Posted by rudedogrulz

There is absolutely nothing obvious about anything regarding Israel. WWII holocaust is not a justification for becoming the oppressor in the guise of self-defense. If anything was obvious, how could there be so many questions? Why do the Muslims wish for the destruction of Israel and the Zionists? Do the Muslims even know why?

[endurorob]

The problem with you endurorob is you put too much stock in this life. The fact is you are looking for an answer otherwise you wouldn''''t be on this blog. After you exhaust all your efforts to fill the spiritual void you have in your life, remember this conversation.

Posted by rudedogrulz at 11:39 AM : Jan 22, 2009

I put all my stock in this life because it is the only one we have. You may believe you have a life after this but there is no supporting facts for that belief. I am not looking for answers just some interesting conversation. I find religiuos conversation just as interesting as the conversation I once had with a young lady who actually believed there are werwolves.