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Sunday, May 17, 2009

Some research avenues for Gaza "civilians"

Some notes on Gaza alleged victims, if anyone wants to follow these avenues of inquiry, please let me know:

#387, Ayman Yousif Khalil al-Majayda, was apparently a cook for the Al Qassam Brigades. He was killed along with a terrorist at a al-Qassam site in Khan Younis on December 27th, 2008. No one on his memory page calls him anything but a martyr. Are support personnel for military targets legitimate targets themselves under Geneva?

#659, Kamla Ali Mustafa al-‘Attar , an 82-year old woman who died in an alleged Israeli attack in the 'Alatatra area on January 5th. No one else was killed at that time in that area - could she have died from natural causes?

There is a list of 1278 "martyrs" that was widely circulated; one of the Arabic lists can be seen here. In the space of a few weeks the number of "martyrs" that the PCHR said died in Gaza went from roughly 1250 to over 1400. Can anyone try to line up this list with PCHR and see if there are any patterns of the ones who don't match up? If they were mostly males 20-30, it might indicate Hamas trying to hide its casualties; if they are disproportionalty elderly or very young it might indicate that the PCHR was counting natural deaths as victims.

It seems worthwhile to go through the PCHR list based on the location the people were allegedly killed. It can indicate who is a likely militant (if someone was killed at the same time/place as many terrorists) as well as other anomalies, especially people who died in a place/time that no one else died.