‘Palestinian Death Toll Tops 900: Gaza Official,” blared an AP headline on Monday morning. Over at CNN, the headline was “Gaza death toll since airstrikes began is above 500, Palestinian sources say.”
Once again, a high and asymmetric death toll will be invoked to justify a premature end to Israel’s campaign to wipe out arms-smuggling tunnels and otherwise weaken Hamas’s infrastructure. But can we believe the numbers? Who are the sources of these figures? The AP, for instance, continually quotes unspecified “medical officials.” Sometimes reporters offer up hospital administrators in Gazan hospitals, sometimes people like “Bassem Naeem . . . health minister . . . in Gaza,” who “told reporters that 42 percent of those killed were women and children.”
But Israeli officials point out that virtually every public official in the Gaza strip, including hospital administrators, is, in effect, a Hamas appointee. It is, after all, a totalitarian regime that has crushed any remnant of a free press and thrown dissenters off the roofs of buildings. Israel thus “seriously questions Hamas’s figures,” but at this point — obviously — it has no way of doing the kind of intense forensic investigation needed to issue its own more precise estimate.
It’s time to recall another Israeli incursion in which Palestinians used casualty numbers seemingly plucked out of the air to justify its claim that Israel was employing “disproportionate force.” In the spring of 2002, after months of near-daily suicide bombings inside Israel, the IDF decided to make a major incursion into the Jenin refugee camp, which even Al-Fatah documents identified as “the capital of suicide bombing...”
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“All my nine children are buried under the ruins,” a resident of Jenin named Abu Ali told the Le Nouvel Observateur, a French weekly magazine. The weekly apparently did not do any checking; it dutifully reported Ali’s story of losing his children in a piece titled “The Survivors Tell Their Stories.” Newspapers in the U.K. went into a positive frenzy, running pieces like the Independent’s “The Camp that Became a Slaughterhouse.”
Finally, in August 2002, the U.N. sent a team to investigate charges of a massacre. The U.N. — no friend of Israel — found no evidence of a massacre, and it supported IDF claims that about 45 Palestinians had died, mostly men aged 18 to 45. It confirmed only three children and four women. Abu Ali’s nine children were not among them. “Fifty-two Palestinian deaths had been confirmed by the hospital in Jenin by the end of May 2002. . . . A senior Palestinian Authority official alleged in mid-April that some 500 were killed, a figure that has not been substantiated in the light of the evidence that has emerged,” the U.N. report said.
Amnesty International, also no friend of Israel, did its own investigation and came to a similar conclusion. In fact, the PLO itself had already revised its figures. In May 2002, a PLO spokesman named Kadoura Mousa Kadoura, who apparently had decided to “rebrand” the Jenin incursion, produced a list of 56 dead as part of his brief to Paul Martin of the Washington Times that the battle had been “a victory” in which “the Israelis, who tried to break the Palestinian willpower, have been taught a lesson.”
