Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Il concetto di 'good news' secondo israele

Today's Israeli Ha'aretz newspaper brought good news to those disturbed by
the relentless death toll resulting from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; a
headline that stated "IDF: 29 Palestinian civilians killed in W. Bank in
2004".
"The Israel Defense Forces released figures Wednesday showing that since the
beginning of the year," wrote Ha'aretz correspondent Amos Harel, "148
Palestinians have been killed by IDF fire in the West Bank, at least 29 of
them, by army count, innocent bystanders, Israel Radio reported Wednesday."
With the IDF figures showing less than 3 "innocent" West Bank Palestinians
killed each month during the year, one might conclude that Israeli
commanders have been reining in their troops on the ground more effectively
than earlier on in the 4-year-old Intifada which, according to the Palestine
Red Crescent Society, has cost 3,465 Palestinian deaths and 28,230
Palestinian injuries up to midnight on December 7th.
Reading the Ha'aretz article closely, the first clue of statistical
sophistry comes in the second paragraph, where we are told that, once the 29
innocent bystanders are subtracted from the total of 148, "the remaining 119
casualties include armed militants, along with firebomb and rock throwers."
Having personally stood and watched young Palestinian stone throwers gunned
down outside of stone-throwing range - therefore posing no conceivable
threat to Israeli troops - I am left wondering how many of these "included"
in the figure of 119 experienced similar fates?
Israeli human rights organisation B'Tselem, a favourite of American
activists seeking to present "more credible" Israeli statistics to the US
public, is cited later in the article to offer alternative figures, in which
187 (not 148) Palestinians were killed in the West Bank, 111 (not 29) of
these were not involved in any fighting, and notes 13 cases in which the
circumstances of death were unclear.
It is well known among researchers that there is a pattern of
underestimating the numbers of Palestinian casualties. A year after the
September 1996 Clashes, a team including myself, several Birzeit University
staff and students, and a network of contacts around the West Bank and Gaza
embarked on a project to find the stories of the Palestinians killed during
the clashes, reduced to a negating two-digit number in media reports.
We began by visiting two different Palestinian government departments that
keep records of Palestinians killed by Israel. The first item of interest
was that both lists had slightly different totals and names, giving a total
casualty figure in the 70-80 range. This was already higher than the figures
reported in the media and human rights organisations outside the country,
which typically put the Palestinian death toll between 50-65.
Human Rights Watch, for example, cites "at least sixty-two" as the number of
Palestinians killed in its 1997 annual report. On 7 October 2000, Reuters
offered a comparison statistic as background to its Intifada coverage that
put the number of those killed during the September 1996 Clashes at just 60,
61 on its AlertNet country profile for Israel. On 1 October 2000, CNN
reported that the figure was 59.
The confusion is not limited to non-Palestinian sources. In a 30 September
1996 note from Dr. Nasser Al-Kidwa, Permanent Observer of Palestine to the
UN, to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Al-Kidwa wrote, "...on
24 September 1996, the Israeli government opened an entrance to a tunnel in
the vicinity of Al-Aqsa Mosque in occupied East Jerusalem, which led to
tragic events resulting in a high number of casualties among Palestinian
civilians caused by the Israeli army and police including more than 50
killed and over one thousand injured." Similarly, the Palestinian Center for
Human Rights in Gaza wrote "throughout the Occupied Territories a total of
64 Palestinians and 15 Israeli soldiers were killed and an estimated 1,600
wounded."
During the Birzeit University project in 1997, after we checked the two
Palestinian Authority lists and noted the few discrepancies, we deployed
teams of people to literally visit the family of every single person killed
during the September 1996 Clashes. Each team took testimonies from family
members and friends about the lives - not deaths - of those killed, excluded
the name of one man listed who was alive (his brother, not he, had been
killed), tracked down additional martyrs not listed on the official
documents, and corroborated this with newspaper reports and funeral notices
that families had saved. We were ultimately able to determine conclusively
that 88 Palestinians were killed.
The simple fact is that during times of intense conflict, those who are
responsible for logging death in a society, doctors and nurses, are busy
with other considerations. By 10:50PM on 25 September 1996, the first day of
the clashes, the administrative director of Ramallah Hospital told me
hospital records stated 4 Palestinians were killed and 253 injured. Two more
men lay brain dead in the intensive care unit.
The sheer scale of the violence and the desperate attempts of the small
hospital to cope with the numbers of injured - many of whom were victims of
live ammunition - meant that typical hospital maintenance tasks such as
cleaning blood off the floors and walls were deferred to later. In such a
chaotic environment, particularly when periods of clashes and military
occupations roll on for weeks as during the current Intifada, it is easy to
understand how the dead can get lost.
In addition, Muslim burial beliefs pertaining to martyrdom sometimes results
in those killed being taken directly to the graveyard for interment. For a
variety of reasons, some practical and some cultural, conflict zones like
these are not the best environments for sober research.
Why was the Israeli army announcement focused only on the casualty
statistics in the West Bank? The answer was, ironically, nearby. A related
link right next to the Ha'aretz article (see screenshot at top of page)
reads "165 Palestinians, including 50 civilians, killed in October". In one
month, 30.3% of those killed across the whole country were found by Ha'aretz
itself to be civilians, a figure almost double that which the IDF claimed
for the entire year in the West Bank!
The report, by Arnon Regular, begins "The Israel Defense Forces killed 165
Palestinians in the territories in October, including 159 in the Gaza Strip.
October was the deadliest month for the Palestinians since operation
Defensive Shield in April 2002. An inquiry by Ha'aretz found that 50 of
those killed (30.3 percent) were civilians, including women, the elderly,
children and teenage boys under age 16; 115 (69.6 percent) were killed in
the IDF operation launched in the northern Gaza Strip, on the outskirts of
the Jebalya refugee camp and in the town of Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanun; and
39 percent of those killed in the northern Strip (some 45 people) were
civilians."
To further complete the wider, all-important contextual picture, try
browsing the website of Remember These Children - found at
www.rememberthesechildren.org
 - which records 152 Palestinian children and
11 Israeli children killed in 2004, and a total of 652 Palestinian and 117
Israeli children since the beginning of the Intifada. What was that Israel
was saying about the West Bank? It suddenly seems a whole lot less
important.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon
was quoted today in the Jerusalem Post as saying, "IDF soldiers are the most
moral compared to any other military in the world that I know of." In the
same edition, the French ambassador to Israel, Gerard Araud, declared that
Israel "has tried to show the utmost restraint" during the Intifada,
describing Palestinian deaths in "some operations" as "unavoidable".
Israel's public relations problems are considerable and are not going away,
whatever its leaders and international friends may believe. The very notion
of a press conference in which a military official highlights how many
people the army has killed  in a single geographic area - excluding the
remainder of the country that simultaneously saw some of the worst violence
in the history of the conflict - speaks of a deep moral void.
Even if the IDF's laughable statistics were to be accepted at face value,
what state has the Israeli establishment sunk to where it believes an
announcement that 20% of those it kills - one person out of every five -
were "innocent bystanders" is something to make noise about?
K
-- 
Tonibaruch detto il bagarozzo, dopo aver fatto cilecca per l'ennesima volta
si sfogo' su IPI dicendo:
"Ma a voi funziona bene ..." 

 wrote:
No links? Ahiahiahiahi...
Tb


http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article3416.shtml
K