TIMES OF ISRAEL
by Haviv Rettig Gur and Adiv Sterman
August 8, 2014

International media outlets, including The New York Times and the BBC, have raised serious questions regarding Gaza civilian casualty figures as recorded by health officials both in the Strip and abroad. The outlets maintain that the hard data does not support the notion that the Israel Defense Forces is engaged in “indiscriminate” killing of unarmed residents in the Palestinian enclave, as was suggested by several international leaders over the past month.

Citing figures released by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the BBC’s head of statistics Anthony Reuben found that the number of civilian men killed in the fighting outnumbered the number of women by a factor of nearly 3.5:1. According to the UN, 725 men were killed in the conflict as opposed to 214 women. When the 216 confirmed “members of armed groups” were included in the figures, the disparity grew even larger. Israeli military officials said 750-1,000 Hamas and other gunmen had been killed in the fighting as of Tuesday, August 5.

“If the Israeli attacks have been ‘indiscriminate,’ as the UN Human Rights Council says, it is hard to work out why they have killed so many more civilian men than women,” Reuben noted dryly.

The question echoes a New York Times analysis from earlier this week, which showed “that the population most likely to be militants, men ages 20 to 29, is also the most overrepresented in the death toll: They are 9 percent of Gaza’s 1.7 million residents, but 34 percent of those killed whose ages were provided. At the same time, women and children under 15, the least likely to be legitimate targets, were the most underrepresented, making up 71 percent of the population and 33 percent of the known-age casualties.”……

http://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-indiscriminately-killing-in-gaza-data-says-no/