From the leaked press release:
An investigative online tool mapping Israeli attacks in Gaza during the conflict of July and August 2014 has been unveiled by Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture today. Its purpose is to help push for accountability for war crimes and other violations of international humanitarian law.The platform is a map of Gaza where you can graphically zoom in on many Israeli strikes, or search for names or specific types of attacks.
The Gaza Platform enables the user to explore and analyse data about Israel’s 2014 military operation in Gaza. The preliminary data currently plotted on the Platform, which will be updated over the coming months, already highlights a number of patterns in the attacks by Israeli forces that indicate that grave and systemic violations were committed.
“The Gaza Platform is the most comprehensive record of attacks during the 2014 conflict to date. It allows us to piece together more than 2,500 individual attacks, illustrating the vast scale of destruction caused by Israel’s military operations in Gaza during the 50-day war last summer,” said Philip Luther, Director of Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Programme.
“By revealing patterns rather than just presenting a series of individual attacks, the Gaza Platform has the potential to expose the systematic nature of Israeli violations committed during the conflict. Our aim is for it to become an invaluable resource for human rights investigators pushing for accountability for violations committed during the conflict.”
The data comes from PCHR, Al Mezan Center and Amnesty.
We've already documented many cases where all of those groups defined people killed in Gaza last summer as civilians even when terror groups have claimed them as fighters.
Which means that this is putting a pretty face on biased, flawed and often lying data.
But its slick interface means that causal users will not doubt that the actual research behind it is based on lies.
For example, Amnesty says that Israel struck the house of Alaa Barda without saying that he was a Hamas terrorist.And the only purpose for the huge investment by Amnesty into this project is to flatly accuse Israel of war crimes - something that even the biased UNHRC Davis commission was careful not to say:
While a vast amount of multimedia information, including testimony, photos, videos and satellite imagery, is still being processed, the Gaza Platform currently shows that more than 270 Israeli attacks were carried out using artillery fire during the 2014 conflict, killing more than 320 civilians. The repeated use of artillery, an imprecise explosive weapon, in densely populated civilian areas constitutes indiscriminate attacks that should be investigated as war crimes.
The press release also includes this howler:
“We see this project as a first step towards more effective conflict monitoring efforts, supported by collaborative platforms that facilitate the sharing of data between witnesses on the ground, organizations, and citizens worldwide.”Yet Israel is always the first and usually only target of these "innovative" tools. Will Amnesty do the same research into Saudi airstrikes in Yemen? Of course not, because they don't put the same resources into Yemen, and it is more dangerous to be there than it was to be in Gaza last summer.
Unless Amnesty incorporates data that comes from the Meir Amit Terrorism Center and from the IDF that responds to these accusations of indiscriminate attacks, it is nothing bu a propaganda tool. Amnesty is not interested in the truth - all the data comes from biased, anti-Israel sources and there is no mechanism to impartially investigate them. As Amnesty itself says, they have already determined that Israel is guilty, now they are working hard to manufacture slick presentations to fool people into thinking that their Israel bashing is based on real science and statistics and not hate.
One more thing: earlier this year, Amnesty decided that they can't mount a campaign against antisemitism because, well, they don't have the resources to campaign on everything. But they have the money and time to spend on a slick anti-Israel application that is based on data that is inherently and provably biased.
(h/t Daniel)
UPDATE:
Amnesty's tool says:
At approximately 21:00, an Israeli warplane launched a missile at a number of Palestinian civilians in Khuza’a village, east of Khan Yunis, killing 2 of them: Mohammed Barham Abu Draz, 24; and ‘Essam Ibrahim Abu Ismail, 23.
This is Mohammed Barham Abu Draz, a member of the Al Qassam Brigades:
UPDATE 2: Here's Amnesty's video touting the product:
Their assertion that the Gaza Platform "proves' Israeli war crimes is another lie. It adds no new information to what has been known and it parrots flawed information.
The only thing it proves is that Amnesty is knowingly dishonest.