What the mainstream media got wrong about Gaza

By Qossay Alsattari

“I don’t want to die. Don’t leave me.”

These were the last words of Anas “Bader” Qdeih, a 7-year-old Palestinian from Gaza who was killed by an Israeli mortar shell as he played in front of his house. His story is one of many that were documented in a recent report issued by the United Nations Human Rights Council on the 2014 Gaza war, which Israel called “Operation: Protective Edge.”

The report holds fighters from both camps accountable for violations of international law during the conflict, leading some media outlets to suggest that the investigators had somehow equated the actions of Palestinian and Israeli forces. Headlines in the New York Times,Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Boston Globe, for example, all focused on the findings that “both sides” had been held liable. But the real substance of the report concerns the imbalance of the violations between the two sides.

In short, while the Israeli military and Palestinian armed groups each committed abuses, there’s simply no comparison when it comes to the scale of the violations - or the body count.

All Out of Proportion Most striking was the disproportionality of the casualties. According to the investigators, the war killed 2,251 Palestinians, including 1,462 civilians - over half of them women and children. By contrast, six Israeli civilians and 67 soldiers were killed.

Part of what made the civilian toll so heavy was what the report characterized as “patterns of strikes by Israeli forces on residential buildings” in Gaza. That is, instead of targeting military installations, Israeli bombers purposefully and systematically attacked private homes.

Most of the strikes came when families were breaking their Ramadan fasts or sleeping. “The timing of the attacks,” the investigators observed, “increased the likelihood that many people, often entire families, would be at home.” They added that the residential strikes “rendered women particularly vulnerable to death and injury,” accounting in part for the hundreds of civilian women who perished in the war.

Often these bombings were preceded only by a “roof-knock” - a small shot fired before a full-scale bombing, putatively intended to give the residents of a targeted building a moment to evacuate.

– Third World Network Features.