Israel disputes Palestinians' Gaza toll

March 27, 2009|Associated Press

JERUSALEM - The Israeli military yesterday disputed Palestinian assertions that most of the people killed in the recent Gaza Strip war were civilians, saying the "vast majority" of the dead were Hamas militants.

Israel says the three-week offensive was aimed solely at Hamas militants, while Palestinians say hundreds of people were killed by an overwhelming show of force that showed little regard for civilians.

Major Avital Leibovich, an army spokeswoman, said yesterday that the military had completed an investigation and determined that a total of 1,166 Palestinians were killed in the operation. It found that 709 were Hamas militants, while 295 were civilians, including 89 minors and 49 women. It was unclear whether another 162 men who died were militants or civilians.

The figures clashed with numbers released last week by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which said 1,417 people were killed, including more than 900 civilians. Its toll included the names and ages of all of the dead.

The Israeli military said it also had a list of names, but the army did not provide it to reporters.

The Palestinian center yesterday called the Israeli report "a deliberately manipulative attempt to distort the reality of the offensive and to disguise Israel's illegal actions." It said, for instance, that Israel wrongly classified 255 "noncombatant" police officers killed at the outset of the war as militants.

The heavy civilian death toll caused an international outcry.

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