The first paragraph of HRW's description of the Davis report says:
The commission appropriately highlighted the extensive death and destruction from last year’s fighting, especially in Gaza, where 1,462 Palestinian civilians lost their lives, including 299 women and 551 children.Those figures, that HRW states as fact, came from the UN OCHA-OPT. But the Davis commission in its summary report properly put that in context:
While the casualty figures gathered by the United Nations, Israel, the State of Palestine and non-governmental organizations differ, regardless of the exact proportion of civilians to combatants, the high incidence of loss of human life and injury in Gaza is heartbreaking.Davis admits that the percentage of civilians killed may be much lower than the UN's figures, and given that we have specific names and sources showing that scores of the "civilians" were actually members of terror groups, this is an appropriate caveat. But Human Rights Watch doesn't bother with such subtleties.
HRW also does what it always does when pretending to be even-handed - it only mentions Hamas rockets. The commission also showed lots of evidence that Hamas fired from the vicinity of schools, hospitals and mosques, evidence that HRW does not want people to talk about (my next post shows that the Davis commission still downplayed even that.)