Israeli army says most Gaza fatalities were militants

Mar 27, 2009, 8:15 GMT

Tel Aviv - More than two months after its 22-day offensive in Gaza, Israel and the Palestinians continued Friday to argue over the total number of Palestinian deaths and over civilians killed in the war.

The Israeli military overnight published its own casualty figures of the offensive, saying at least 60 per cent of the total Palestinian dead were militants.

In a statement sent to the media it said that 1,166 Palestinians died in the offensive, adding it had collected their names and that 709 of them were militants.

Most of these militants were members of the radical Islamist Hamas movement ruling Gaza, while a 'small number' were members of other militant factions involved in fighting Israel, such as the Islamic Jihad, a military spokeswoman in Tel Aviv said Friday.

She said the figures are the result of a 'thorough' investigation by the Research Department of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) Intelligence Corps.

But the Gaza-based Palestinian Centre For Human Rights (PCHR), which published its own final death toll last week, accused Israel of trying to 'distort reality.'

According to the PCHR, 1,417 Palestinians died in the offensive, nearly two-third of them civilians. It has published a list with all 1,417 names, detailing their ages, dates of death and other specifics.

It says that of the dead, 236 were fighters and 255 non-combatant police officers, leaving 926 civilians, who include 313 minors and 116 women.

The Israeli military said that of its 1,166 names, 295 civilians were certainly killed, including 89 children under the age of 16 and 49 women.

Another 162 of them men killed 'have not yet been attributed' to any militant organization, meaning they are likely civilians as well. The remaining 709 were identified as members of Hamas or other militant factions, the military said.

It said the IDF figures were based on 'various intelligence sources.'

The names and numbers collected by the IDF were 'investigated in depth and cross-referenced,' said the spokeswoman.

'Our number is serious,' she told the German Press Agency dpa. 'We are standing behind it.'

'If you take into account that fighting took place in an urban area, in densely populated areas, then the number (of civilian deaths) is relatively low and it shows the large effort the IDF made to carry out the activity in a precise manner,' she said.

The statement issued by the military said its objective had been to target Hamas, not civilians. Hamas, it charged, 'placed the primary fighting scene at the heart of civilian neighborhoods as it booby-trapped homes, fired from schools, and used civilians as human shields.'

It insisted it took 'extensive measures' to avoid harming civilians by giving out advance warnings of airstrikes, including in leaflets dropped from aircraft, in the local Palestinian media, and in 'numerous phone calls' placed to homes.

But the PCHR said the Israeli figures were a 'deliberately manipulative attempt to distort the reality of the offensive and to disguise Israel's illegal actions.'

It pointed out that only members of Hamas' armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, could be considerd combatants under international law, while its political leaders and civil police could not.

It said 'the excessively disproportionate civilian death toll' and the conduct of the Israeli military, including its use of white phosphorus smokescreens in populated areas, pointed at war crimes and called for an international investigation that would lead to the prosecution of those found guilty.

Israel launched the offensive in Gaza on December 27 in a bid to curb near-daily rocket and mortar attacks from the coastal salient at its southern towns and villages.