Every violent death of an innocent is a tragedy, even if the killing was unintentional and within the laws of war. Sadly, there can be little doubt that hundreds of such tragedies have occurred in Gaza during the latest conflict there. Yet analysts differ greatly about how many of the Palestinian casualties were in fact civilians.

These discrepancies are compounded by self-serving sources of information, biased or intimidated reportage, and the usual “fog of war.” For example, it took almost two years after the last major Hamas-Israel military confrontation, in December 2008-January 2009, for Hamas interior minister Fathi Hamad to acknowledge that around half of the approximately 1,200-1,400 Palestinian fatalities in that conflict were combatants. That was completely contrary to earlier Hamas reports and international media claims. Similarly, in the wake of that conflict and Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, the initial civilian fatality counts from the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) were later discredited or even withdrawn, as described in a May 6, 2009, New Republic article by Simona Weinglass.

In the latest round of combat, Hamas information officials gave explicit instructions to call every casualty an “innocent civilian,” regardless of the facts. On July 17, the Hamas Interior Ministry posted a video with the following instructions: “Anyone killed or martyred is to be called a civilian from Gaza or Palestine, before we talk about his status in jihad or his military rank. Don’t forget to always add ‘innocent civilian’ or ‘innocent citizen’ in your description of those killed in Israeli attacks in Gaza” (see the Middle East Media Research Institute’s Special Dispatch No. 5799). And the official Hamas television channel in Gaza, al-Aqsa TV, broadcast this remarkable proclamation on August 10: “Even the jihad fighters in the battleground are actually Palestinian civilians fulfilling their religious and national duty. This is why we…say ‘a civilian car,’ ‘a civilian target,’ and so on, since we have no regular army and no real military targets, as the occupation is trying to claim in its propaganda” (as reported by Palestinian Media Watch).

Such linguistic manipulation recalls a venerable Anglo-American aphorism: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.” Or more dryly, as the head of statistics at BBC News concluded on August 11, “The point is that it is hard to say with certainty at this stage how many of the dead in Gaza were civilians, and how many were fighters.”

Read the article in full at the Washington Institute.