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Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Here's an incident that Amnesty won't report in its "Gaza Platform" (update)

As we have seen, Amnesty is slavishly copying every incident mentioned in daily  Al Mezan and PCHR reports from the war last summer, including incorrect snap judgments as to whether victims were civilian, and adding that often wrong information into its database to damn Israel.

In fact, today's tweet, about an incident where they each accused Israel of shooting into a hospital, was counted twice in this database, so the same people were counted as victims more than once in Amnesty's database that they plan to use to prove Israeli "war crimes."  (Event IDs 2422 and 2345.) UPDATE: Also, they fail to mention that the hospital wasn't targeted, but a cache of anti-tank missiles that Hamas had hidden nearby - and which may have been what caused the damage.

What's wrong with a little victim inflation in a research tool, anyway?

But there is one incident that PCHR reported that Amnesty didn't mention, and it shows both PCHR's bias and Amnesty's.

At approximately 16:45 on Monday, 28 July 2014, a projectile landed near a number of Palestinian children were playing and celebrating the Eid al-Futur in the northern part of al-Shati refugee camp, west of Gaza City. As a result, 10 children and a passing old man were killed: Yousef 'Abdul Rahman Hassouna, 11; Mahmoud Hazem Shubair, 12; Ahmed Hazem Shubair, 10; Jamal Saleh 'Olayan, 8; Baraa' Akram Miqdad, 7; Mohammed Nahidh Miqdad, 13; Mohammed Mahmoud Abu Shaqfa, 7; Mohammed 'Emad Baroud, 10; Ahmed Jaberr Wishah, 10; Mansour Rami Hajjaj, 14; and Subhi 'Awadh al-Hilu, 63. A PCHR field worker arrived at the scene 20 minutes following this incidents, while ambulances were completing the evacuation of the wounded persons and the bodies of victims. She reported that the projectile landed on the street near a grocery shop as a number of children were playing in the area. She further reported that the high number of casualties and the extensive destruction in the area are not different from the outcomes of Israeli attacks over the past days.
Of course, this was an Islamic Jihad rocket that killed those kids.

As the Davis Report admitted:

The commission received information from NGO’s who conducted field research and a UN source who collected information indicating that the explosion had been caused by a misfired Palestinian rocket. One of them inspected the site after the attack and concluded that the impact of the explosion on the ground could not have been caused by an Israeli missile or artillery shell; the NGO also indicated that eyewitnesses had reported seeing a rescue team go to the place just after the attack, whose members did not collect the wounded but cleared and collected the remnants of the weapons. In addition, two journalists who spoke to the commission also suggested the attacks had been caused by Palestinian rockets misfiring. One of them said that Hamas members had gone to the site immediately after the events and cleared away the debris. The other said he had been prevented by local authorities from going to the site of the attack.

The commission found there was credible information pointing to the conclusion that a misfired Palestinian rocket was the source of this explosion. Given the gravity of the case, in which 11 children and 2 adults were killed in a place crowded with civilians, and the allegations that local authorities may have attempted to hide evidence of the cause of the incident, all relevant Palestinian authorities should conduct a thorough investigation of the case to determine the origin and circumstances of the attack.

So, naturally, this incident where 11 children were killed in Gaza during the war must be excluded from the Gaza Platform - because their deaths don't further Amnesty's goal of vilifying Israel.

(h/t Bob Knot)