relying on an Italian paper where he clearly got the translation wrong.
You read Italian?
Good, he (and I) provided the link. Translate it for us, show us where he's wrong.
You don't like him as an intermediate source (despite the fact that the root source is a newspaper, and also the source doesn't determine whether something is true) fine here is another
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There was a very interesting article in the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera last week. It suggests that Palestinian hospital administrators and other government officials in the Gaza strip gave greatly exaggerated casualty figures to foreign reporters and aid groups during Israel's just-ended Operation Cast Lead.
The number that has come to be seen as "official" -- only because of repetition -- is 1,200 to 1,300. But reporter Lorenzo Cremonesi spoke to a Gazan doctor who told him, "The number of deaths was between 500-600...Most were young men between 17 and 23 who were recruited into the ranks of Hamas, which sent them to be slaughtered...It was strange that the non-governmental organizations, including Western ones, repeated the high number without checking, but the truth will come to light in the end."
"It's like what happened in Jenin in 2002," the doctor said, referring to a UN investigation which contradicted media claims of a Israeli Defense Force "massacre" in the West Bank and set the number of Palestinian dead at about 45. "At the beginning they spoke of 500 dead; afterwards it was clear there were only 54 dead, at least 45 of them fighters."
"It is sufficient to visit several hospitals [in the Gaza Strip] to understand that the numbers don't add up." Cremonesi wrote. He also noted that in nearly all of Gaza's major hospitals, and especially those in major conflict zones, he found most beds empty.
Cremonesi also wrote that Gazans he interviewed confirmed Israeli accusations of Hamas war crimes, especially the deliberate use of the civilian population as human shields. When local Gazans demanded that Hamas and its allies not take up positions near them, one interviewee said the terrorists responded:
blogs.telegraph.co.uk
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In response to your earlier assertion that UN officals on the ground determined the death toll themselves -
"During the fighting, the main source for the number of Palestinian casualties came from the Ministry of Health in Gaza.
It said 1,314 Palestinians were killed in the conflict, 412 of them children.
These numbers are being used by international organisations, like the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).
However, with very few international workers and journalists allowed in Gaza during much of the conflict, it has been difficult to verify the figures independently."
news.bbc.co.uk
We have two figures. One is Hamas's propaganda figure. The other is from an independent source. If you reject that source, than your down to having no reliable data, and nothing to back up claims of large numbers of civilian deaths. |
