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)

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Amnesty outdoes Hamas in calling Gazans "civilians"

Amnesty International's Gaza Platform allows one to see, quite easily, that its database is worthless.

Here is the sum total of the number of people Amnesty says it has documented as being killed in their "research" and how many of them are civilian.

Amnesty is claiming that they have documentation from PCHR and Al Mezan of 1,991 deaths, of whom 1,667 are civilian - and only 324 militants.

Yet Amnesty knows this is a lie. They themselves tweet the (still wrong) UN figures as authoritative:

That's 205 people that this "research tool" claims as civilian who are actually militants, even according to the UN! 

That is one large discrepancy, made even larger by the fact that Amnesty was only able to document 1991 deaths (although some of them are duplicates). In the end, the UN says that 65% of the casualties were civilian (out of 2251 total) while Amnesty's tool bizarrely claims 84%!

Even more incredible is that Hamas has admitted that 400 of their members were killed. Islamic Jihad admitted 135 more.  That's 200 more militants admitted killed than Amnesty's application confidently reports. (Both those numbers are way too low.)  The Gaza Platform is more biased in its casualty figures than terror groups are.

The reality, as documented by the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, is that (based on their latest figures)  about 51% of those killed were civilian, a spectacularly low number for urban fighting where the terrorists hide in  and fight from civilian houses and mosques and schools.

This is yet more proof, as if more were needed, that the Gaza Platform is based on flawed, biased data.

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Amnesty International and Forensic Architecture Team Members are Biased as Hell

(written by Bob Knot, edited by EoZ)

As we've seen over the past couple of weeks, Amnesty International is at the forefront of a coordinated political warfare against the state of Israel by numerous NGOs who want to see Israel investigated and brought before the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged “war crimes”.

Amnesty’s current campaign started almost as soon as Israel responded to the massive rocket and missile attacks from Gaza with air strikes and ground invasion, accusing Israel of “war crimes” in Gaza during and a short while after last year’s war in Gaza and even calling for UN and international investigation against Israel for violations of international humanitarian law and promoting arms embargo on Israel .

Amnesty teamed up with Forensic Architecture to create what I called the “ bash Israel app ”, recycling provably wrong information by the biased Gaza based Al Mezan and Palestinian Center for Human Rights .

To put it simply, the “Gaza Platform” was created to make up for the lack of credibility on the part of the Arab political NGOs and for the lack of evidence to support the “war crimes” allegations.

That is also the case with the “Forensic” team; there is nothing such as fact-finding methodologies or technical tests in their scope of work, it is just a bombastic name and the end product is just an online data visualization app fed with unreliable data sources.

And that brings us to the Forensic Architecture team members:

Eyal Weizman is the project’s Principal Investigator.

Weizman is a former board member of B’Tselem. His anti-Israel agenda is well documented in a 2013 IsraCampus op-ed and in Goldsmiths College - Eyal Weizman Attacks Israel with 'Forensic Architecture' .

Weizman also signed a petition during Operation Cast Lead (2009), “ calling for the UN Security Council and the EU to impose sanctions on Israel ”. He is a signatory for “ Jews for Justice for Palestinians ” and for a Pro-Hamas Petition in the Jew-hating Counterpunch Magazine as well:

We the undersigned watch with horror yet another ruthless and criminal Israeli assault on the defenceless [Sic] people of the Gaza Strip. The assassination of the Hamas’ military commander, Ahmad al-Jabari, by Israel was intended to disrupt any chance for a permanent cease fire between the two sides and caused the current cycle of violence. For the last five years al-Jabari had been responsible for limiting rocket attacks on Israel.

.
And just in case anyone has doubt about his bias, Weizmann supports the BDS movement as well; Weizman is one of 65 academics, cultural and political figures backing the RIBA’s stance on the motion calling for the suspension of Israeli architects from the International Architects Union (UIA) .

Other examples of his anti-Israel political agenda can be found by his speaking at conferences ":
"Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine" and "The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories."

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Francesco Sebregondi is the Project Coordinator.

His tweets and re-tweets from organizations such as "Free Gaza Movement", " Al-Haq", “Breaking the Silence”, "Electronic Intifada", "Palestine Solidarity Campaign", "Yesh Din", and "Palestine Legal" demonstrate his heavy bias against Israel. Some examples of the lies that he disseminates on Twitter and the animosity towards Israel that he stirs up include:

Palestine Shrinking Expanding Israel | new interactive visualisation https://t.co/A3y8S1gSqD

— Francesco Sebregondi (@FSBRG) May 15, 2015

Jacob Burns is the Research and Campaign Assistant at @Amnestyonline.

His Twitter profile is at https://twitter.com/JacobTBurns, an Instagram one is at https://instagram.com/jacobtburns. He “supports the Palestinian struggle for justice” as evident from a piece he published on anti-Israel Website Mondoweiss .

Jacob, just like his colleague, tweets and re-tweets the “Palestinian” narrative. Apparently, when it comes to Israel, fact-checking and giving audience to the Israeli side is not needed,

His bias against Israel is manifested in some of the photos he uploaded to Instagram, the captions are telling. To him, Palestinians have houses, Jews have colonies:

Because they are "colonists":

Jerusalem, of course, is not in Israel but in "Palestine" according to this "researcher":

And Jews asking for equal rights are a "source of tension" for this human rights advocate:

Apparently, this “great” researcher never heard of the Cave of the Patriarchs or maybe he believes that Jews have no connection to Hebron and have no right to pray there?

Impartial he is not and he seems to be suffering from an ICC for Israel obsession too. On 4 May 2015, he tweeted tens if not over a hundred “Breaking the Silence” “testimonies”.

I found this tweet of his unintentionally ironic and typical of Burns' bias:

Prompt & transparent investigation needed into killing of #Jenin man. IDF says he was throwing bomb, but initial reports often wrong in past

— Jacob Burns (@JacobTBurns) June 10, 2015

The entire Gaza Platform that he is working on is based on initial reports from biased sources that in many cases have been proven wrong!

These are the people who were behind Amnesty's Gaza Platform. They have an agenda, and it has nothing to do with objectivity.

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I had thought that Forensic Architecture wrote the code for this tool. They didn't - it was written by a group called Tekja Data Visualization. So Amnesty didn't choose Forensics Architecture for its coding skills - they chose Forensic Architecture for their ability to come up with new, innovative ways to demonize Israel.

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Amnesty International: Garbage in, garbage out

We have been discussing Amnesty International's "Gaza Platform," a slick online app that is meant to do only one thing: demonize Israel by using bad data.

Underlying the Gaza Platform is a database. Databases are great, because they allow one to slice and dice data in multiple ways and often reveal surprising patterns. But there is an old computer adage that is as true today as it was when it was coined in 1963: "Garbage in, garbage out."

We have already shown that Amnesty's Gaza Platform relies on the real-time reporting of PCHR and Al Mezan, and we have shown in many cases where people categorized as "civilian" by these biased organizations in the hours after an attack were later proven to be militants.

The Gaza Platform doesn't only use this flawed data as a basis for its individual reports of "civilians" who wear uniforms and shoot guns. It also uses this data to populate its database. Eventually, Amnesty will release reports using statistics that come from this database.

If you look at Amnesty's database fields describing attacks that even PCHR and Al Mezan could not deny were against militants, you find that the creators of this tool added entirely new layers of bias how they populate the database.

Here's an example. Event 3069 says:

At approximately 09:25 (August 2, 2014), an Israeli warplane launched a missile at a house in Jabalya, where members of a Palestinian armed groups were hiding. The house was destroyed and 2 members of the group were killed.

OK, seems a straightforward case of Israel attacking armed militants hiding in a house. But Amnesty has a series of database fields that they created to do further analysis on incidents. Here are the categories and how they are populated for this attack:

children_killed_min	0
total_wounded_min	0
civilian_wounded_min	0
target_type	Residential
mode_of_firing	Air Strike
structural_damage	Destroyed
sources	PCHR
media_available	Report
warning_before_strike	Unknown
knock_on_roof_strike	N
strike_on_first_responders	Unknown
IDF_investigation	Unknown

Amnesty's very choice of categories, and how they choose to fill them out, is biased.

The "Target type" is called "residential." The Structural Damage was called "destroyed." There was no "knock on roof" warning before Israel attacked the terrorists. But when Amnesty compiles the data for the inevitable report that this will create, this incident will be counted as an Israeli attack on a residential house with no warning.

Here's an even worse example, incident #2465:

At approximately 01:30 on Wednesday, 23 July 2014, Israeli warplanes bombarded the vicinity of al-Birk Mosque in Beit Lahia. As a result, 2 members of a Palestinian armed group were killed: Ussama Bahjat Mohammed Rajab, 22; and Mohammed Dawod ‘abdul Latif Hammouda, 23. A third one was also wounded.

How is it categorized?

target_type	Religious
mode_of_firing	Air Strike
structural_damage	Damaged

By consciously categorizing even IDF attacks on known militants as attacks on houses and mosques, Amnesty is lying with statistics. 

Amnesty stacked the deck so that any research done using these figures cannot possibly determine how many IDF attacks were against legitimate targets, because only in rare cases will they admit that the "mosque" or "school" or "refugee camp" that the militants were hiding in was a military target!

The word "rare" is important here as well. On some occasions, Amnesty will admit that the target was "military." This way they are paving the way for how they will lie with statistics.

Since in a tiny minority of cases Amnesty will admit that the target of an airstrike was undoubtedly military, this will allow the forthcoming "research" to say, in a very definitive sounding way, what percentage of attacks were on schools, mosques, farms and, rarely, militant sites.

In fact, here is a detail of the Gaza Platform's chart on the subject of (what they pretend) the "targets" were:

Out of some 2700 attacks in this sham of a database, only about 200 are categorized as "military targets" by Amnesty. The rest are, by implication, attacks on civilians.

These are only some of the outrageous lies that populate the database that powers the "Gaza Platform."

Garbage in, garbage out - yet this garbage will be used as authoritative data since it came from a purportedly saintly human rights NGO.

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Even more bias revealed in Amnesty's "Gaza Platform"

Amnesty continues to tweet about supposed Israeli war crimes that happened last year. And the group continues to show how biased it is.

Its latest tweet is about the Gaza beach incident where four boys unfortunately were killed:

Wounded boy carried as 4 children on Gaza beach killed by Israeli missile: http://t.co/65rNI3jQUD #50Days4Gaza pic.twitter.com/XDGnKYZfzL

— AmnestyInternational (@AmnestyOnline) July 16, 2015

As usual, their link to their Gaza Platform does not go to the specific incident. The platform does not seem to include a way to link to specific events altogether, which is a major shortcoming for something that is meant to be a useful research tool.

In order to preclude the charge of bias, the Gaza Platform includes, in some cases, a link to Israel's investigation of the same incident.

However, the creators of this expensive piece of anti-Israel software apparently never tested that feature. Because every link to an Israeli investigation is broken and causes a nearly incomprehensible error message.

Isn't that interesting? A professional platform, ostensibly for research purposes, with sophisticated features, just happens to break when one attempts to use it to find the other side of the story. The coders didn't bother to test part of their platform that just happens to contradict the entire point of the platform.

But that isn't the only issue. While Amnesty's'platform integrates the words of two biased, anti-Israel sources (Al Mezan and PCHR) directly into the platform, even if the links to the Israeli response worked, they raised the bar considerably for reading them because the platform forces people who want to read the other side of the story to jump through hoops - to download a PDF file and to find the specific incident within that document.

They hand-feed the anti-Israel propaganda, but they make Israel's response difficult or impossible to read.

But it is even worse. Al Mezan and PCHR wrote their reports in real time and could not, even if they wanted to, determine who is a civilian and who is a militant. All of the information available to researchers in the platform was written within a day of the incidents, so any new facts that have been uncovered since then - facts that almost always put the IDF in a better light - are ignored. (Amnesty is not the only organization that did this, of course - the UN did the same.)

There is a year's worth of research, some done by me but most of it formally documented by the Meir Amit ITIC, that is being consciously ignored by Amnesty and the Gaza platform.  The Davis Commission included data from the Meir Amit center in its report - but Amnesty decided that they didn't want the world to see that there was another side to the story.

Moreover, the Israeli Military Advocate General has access to crucial information that is unavailable to Amnesty's chosen sources, information that directly relates to the legal issue of whether war crimes were committed. Amnesty decided first that Israel was guilty of war crimes, and only then created a product that was written specifically to prove it.

Amnesty's claims of being fair and impartial have been torn to shreds by their commitment to this one-sided project and 50 days of demonizing Israel on their social media accounts.

Next week we will look at the people Amnesty chose to write this example of data propaganda masquerading as an unbiased research tool. And you won't be surprised to learn that the people behind it weren't chosen for their technical skills, but for their hate for Israel.

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.@Amnesty researcher loves terrorists

In the Amnesty video advertising its "#50Days4Gaza" and "Gaza Platform" bash-Israel initiative, we see Amnesty researcher Saleh Hijazi:

Gidon Shaviv once mentioned Hijazi in an op-ed published in YNet:

If Amnesty wants to maintain impartiality, it should disqualify Saleh Hijazi from working on Israeli issues. Hijazi, a Palestinian born in Jerusalem and raised in Ramallah, has a clear lack of objectivity in this regard. In 2005, he worked as a Public Relations officer for the Office of the Ministry of Planning in Ramallah and in 2007 he was listed as contact for the NGO “Another Voice” – under the group's signature “Resist! Boycott! We Are Intifada!”

Hijazi has a “special” conflict of interest with regards to administrative detention in particular. On March 9, 2011, while as a researcher for Human Rights Watch, he spoke at a UN conference where he described how his father was supposedly arrested by the Israeli authorities “when the Israeli military could not find an activist neighbor.” How can Hijazi be impartial when he is simultaneously claiming to be a victim of the very same country on which he is reporting?

Hijazi's bias is actually much more clear.

 Once his profile photo on Facebook was Leila Khaled, notorious terrorist and airline hijacker.

More recently Hijazi showed his admiration for Khader Adnan, a hero of Islamic Jihad:

This video shows exactly how much Adnan supports human rights:



Yes, a "human rights" researcher openly admires someone who advocates blowing up Jews.

In any other place or time, this would be enough to get someone fired. But Palestinians who support terrorism and murdering Jews get a free pass - because their cause is perceived as noble by the moral midgets at Amnesty.

Clearly Hijazi is anything but impartial. And clearly Amnesty isn't concerned about it.

Indeed, it might be a job requirement.

(h/t Bob Knot)

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Yet another @Amnesty deception on Twitter

I had tweeted this, but in the interests of completeness... Amnesty tweeted this on Friday:

10 July: #KhanYounis: 8 people killed, including 2 children when Israeli missile hit family home: #50Days4Gaza http://t.co/fekSDdcqtw

— AmnestyInternational (@AmnestyOnline) July 10, 2015

I responded yesterday:

.@AmnestyOnline Umar Mahmoud al Hajj, member of Al Qassam terror group. held his family as human shields in the event you are referring to.

— ElderOfZiyon (@elderofziyon) July 13, 2015

Here he is, based on this video:

I don't know whether Umar was the only intended target. There might have also been a tunnel opening or a command center in that house.

But the point is that Amnesty is using the first anniversary of the Gaza war as an excuse to take specific events, strip them of any context, and present Israel as an out-of-control bully that bombs civilians for no reason. In every single case they have specified, they were found to have engaged in deception or flat out lies.

So far, Amnesty has not brought a single example of an Israeli attack for which I was unable to find a military target, using nothing but Google and known sources like the Meir Amit Center from which I got this information. They have not brought one iota of evidence of Israeli war crimes, which is what they said they would "prove" this month. Their heralded Gaza Platform has been proven to be a tool which regurgitates unreliable data and spits it back out as if it is something brand new.

The only thing being proven during this anniversary of the Gaza war is that Amnesty is not engaged in human rights, but in anti-Israel propaganda. Nobody with a shred of intellectual honesty that has read my series since they started this fiasco can doubt that Amnesty is heavily biased.

Indeed, Amnesty's tweets and articles over the past week makes the UNHRC Davis report look positively Zionist by comparison. The Davis report was careful to get the Israeli response to events when available - but Amnesty doesn't. The Davis report was careful to couch its accusations in language that leaves wiggle room when they say that perhaps Israel engaged in violations of the laws of war based on limited informaiton-- but Amnesty doesn't. Teh Davis report would look up the names of the victims in the Meir Amit database - but Amnesty doesn't.

The very attempt by Amnesty to discredit Israel is discrediting Amensty. Now the question si whether any journalist will double check my facts against Amnesty's factoids and come up with his or her own conclusions.

It is way past time for Amnesty to lose its halo. Its own actions make it imperative.

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.@Amnesty's deception of the day: Excusing Hamas humanitarian law violations

Amnesty keeps on deceiving its readers:

12 July #GazaCity: 17 family members killed when Israeli warplanes bombarded house as worshippers left nearby mosque http://t.co/Fj79TuSY6c

— AmnestyInternational (@AmnestyOnline) July 12, 2015

Amnesty is referring to the bombing of the Al Batsh family home in Shejaiya.

18 members of the family died (one a few weeks later.) But they were not exactly all innocent.

Here are the al-Batsh family members who were also Hamas terrorists from the Al Qassam Brigades:

Nahed Na’im al-Batsh. 41 , Qassam commander (Martyr video here)



Bahaa Majed al-Batsh, 28
Ahmad Nu’man al-Batsh, 27
Jalal Majed al-Batsh, 26

Zakariya Alaa Subhi al-Batsh

Yihya 'Alaa al-Batsh, 18

These six Hamas terrorists were using the rest of their family as human shields. Almost certainly such a house with such dedicated Hamas members was a major command and control center, which is why Israel would not have warned them ahead of time.

The owner of the house,Taysir,  is a Hamas police commissioner as well, although he wasn't killed.

The Batsh children were also being indoctrinated into terror. Here is 10 year old Anas, who was  killed:

Placing military objects in a civilian house is a violation of international law, and that is exactly that Hamas and the al-Batsh family did, using their families as human shields.

If young Anas was being groomed to be a child soldier, that's 'another violation.

But Amnesty has nothing bad to say about Hamas' crimes. And it will never even admit that militants were in the houses that they are portraying as completely civilian.

Context is critical to understanding the truth. Amnesty is purposefully withholding context in order to demonize Israel and only Israel.

It isn't a human rights organization - it is a Hamas propaganda outlet.

Soon we will look at one of the Amnesty researchers involved in these reports and see how biased Amnesty researchers are.

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Today's @Amnesty deceptions and lies

As Amnesty continues to add to the anti-Israel rhetoric accompanying its "50 Days for Gaza" campaign, we will continue to expose their deceptions and lies.

Amnesty tweeted this:

#KhanYounis: 9 Palestinian civilians killed watching World Cup in local café: http://t.co/OPAUqae5zh #50Days4Gaza pic.twitter.com/P2NT3JFkYB

— AmnestyInternational (@AmnestyOnline) July 9, 2015

Here's the event that they are linking to:

At approximately 23:00 on 9 July 2014, 9 Palestinian civilians were killed while they were in a beach coffee shop watching a match of the Football World Cup as Israeli warplanes bombarded the coffee shop. The victims were identified as: Ibrahim and Mohammed Kahlil Qannan, 24 and 26; Suleiman and Ahmed Saleem Mousa al-Astal, 17 and 18; Mousa Mohammed Taher al-Astal, 15; Mohammed Ihsan Farawana, 18; and Hamdi, Ibrahim and Saleem Sawali, 20, 28 and 23.

This is a lie. There were not 9 civilians. The cafe was hosting a gathering of the Fatah Abu Rish Brigades. Two brothers, Mohammed and Ibrahim Qanan, as I documented here.

Three other brothers from the same group listed in this "martyr's" poster, Hamdi, Ibrahim and Saleem Sawali:

And Mohammed Ihsan Farawana has another Fatah martyr's poster:

Civilians?

Amnesty lied again.

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Amnesty silently changed the blood libel video we first reported. They changed the video of a "roof knocking" to a different one, that can be seen here in full from YNet:



While the video does indeed show less than a minute between a small explosion and the one that destroys the house, what Amnesty doesn't tell you is that the target was Hamas rocket unit head Ayman Siam. And Amnesty's own Gaza Platform tells us that there was a much earlier warning that allowed all five families who lived in that house to escape well before either of these explosions. They number this as Incident 1475:

At approximately 10:22 pm on Friday, 11 July 2014, an Israeli warplane fired three missiles at a house belonging to Mohammed Mohammed Abdul Hadi Siyam (70 year old), located next to UNRWA clinic in Al-Shate’ refugee camp, west of Gaza. The attack has completely destroyed the 4 storey house, which was inhabited by 5 families (30 individual), including 15 children. IDF soldiers informed the owner of the house before they attacked targeted the house.[sic]

SOURCE: Al Mezan

(h/t Bob Knot)

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.@Amnesty says this house had no terrorists. Wrong again.

Amnesty International keeps on deceiving its readers to demonize Israel.

From its website pushing its new anti-Israel campaign that includes the Gaza Platform that I have shown to be filled with lies:

It is in big letters so it must be true!

Now, it is true that 25 family members were tragically killed. And I do not know if any of them were terrorists. But to say that the house had nothing to do with the fighting is not quite true.

There is one crucial fact that Amnesty, and Tawfiq Abu Jame, don't want you to know.

The house had a guest at the time of the bombing.

His name was Ahmed Suleiman Mahmoud Sahmoud.

And he was a commander for the Hamas Al Qassam Brigades.

Don't take my word for it. This was documented by B'Tselem.

Here is the "civilian" that Amnesty doesn't want to tell you about. (Full video here.)

Amnesty quotes a survivor as saying that "the house had nothing to do with the fighting" without noting that a Hamas commander (who received a huge funeral commensurate with his position) was positioned in the house, perhaps with the family's blessing or perhaps treating them like human shields.

Either way, Tawfiq wouldn't tell Amnesty the truth. If Sahmoud was invited into the house as a "guest," that means that the family supports Hamas and follows Hamas instructions to lie to NGOs  to demonize Israel. If  Sahmoud forced himself into the house, Tawfiq wouldn't tell the truth because he still lives in Gaza under Hamas rule.

But Amnesty takes him at his word and doesn't bother to fact-check his lies.

It is fair to ask whether the attack that killed 25 family members was proportionate to the presumed target of Ahmad Sahmoud. Israel does not have the right to violate the rules of war. If Israeli intelligence said that there was a command center or tunnel entrance or weapons cache then bombing the family home would not necessarily be a violation of the laws of war. It all depends on the specific circumstances and perceived military advantage. Those are the real laws of war, but Amnesty doesn't want you to know that.

Nevertheless, the IDF  should not act with impunity. The incident should be investigated.

And it is. By Israel.

The UNHRC Davis Report - which despite its bias did not say anything as egregiously false as Amnesty does - notes:

On 6 December 2014, the MAG reported that:

 “In reports received by the MAG Corps, and in correspondence from various NGOs, it was alleged that on 20 July 2014, 27 civilians were killed as a result of an IDF strike on the house of the Abu-Jama family in Khan Yunis. As a result, and in accordance with the MAG's investigation policy, the incident was referred to the FFAM. The factual findings and materials collated by the FFAM and presented to the MAG, indicated the existence of grounds for a reasonable suspicion that the incident involved a deviation from the rules and procedures applicable to IDF forces. As a result, the MAG has ordered a criminal investigation into the incident.”^*                     *  Military Advocate General. Up-date of December 2014 at: http://www.law.idf.il/163-6958-en/Patzar.aspx                 

Israel had a legitimate target. It may have acted against its own rules, however. It is opening a criminal investigation against its own army to determine what happened.

But Amnesty doesn't want you to know that either. They want you to believe that the IDF acts with impunity, that there are no checks and balances, and that its soldiers run wild and gleefully shoot Arabs for no reason without fear of prosecution.

They don't want you to know that the average Israeli commander know the laws of armed conflict better than anyone at Amnesty does.

Why would Amnesty purposefully ignore evidence that mitigates its charges against Israel that was documented by other groups like the UNRHC and B'Tselem?

The answer is in the question. Amnesty will ignore all evidence that exonerates or contextualizes Israel's actions in war or afterwards. It does not care about the truth.

Amnesty International has an agenda, and if the facts contradict that agenda, the facts must be suppressed.

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.@Amnesty's "Gaza health workers" also happened to be terrorists

Amnesty's Gaza Platform says:

Last September I reported that all three people killed were Islamic Jihad terrorists.

Here is the martyr poster for 'Aatef Saleh al-Zameli. Note that he is not wearing scrubs. He's in uniform. 

The name of the "nurse" killed was actually Yousef Ahmad Sheikh al-Eid. Here is his Islamic Jihad martyr poster:

The "paramedic" Yousef Jaber Darabih was also a proud member of the jihadist terror group:

If these three terrorists were using an ambulance as a means to protect themselves and weapons from attack - and given that every single one of them is a member of Islamic Jihad, this seems likely - then they were the ones performing war crimes. It also indicates that the Gaza Ministry of Health was not only working closely with the Al Qassam Brigades to use their ambulances to transport terrorists and probably weapons, but they also worked with Islamic Jihad.

I wrote then that neither the UN nor any "human rights" NGO will investigate that war crime. And I was 100% right. 

Amnesty had an entire year to research the people killed like I did in September. But Amnesty is not interested in spending any time or money to exonerate Israel. No, they spent probably hundreds of thousands of dollars building a platform and producing associated materials and videos to blame Israel for crimes that it simply did not commit.

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Another lie by Amnesty International. Why are they respected by anyone?

In the Jerusalem Post, Philip Luther, the director of Amnesty International’s Middle Eastern and North African program, responded to NGO Monitor's criticism of the "Gaza Platform."

"We are not claiming that the Gaza Platform itself, on its own, gives you a conclusion in every case about whether a war crime was committed or not. It is not able to do that; we are not claiming to do that,” Luther says.

Actually, Amnesty does claim that the tool proves Israeli war crimes.

Here are two screenshots from the beginning of the video, made by Amnesty, touting the purpose of their Gaza Platform:

If the tool doesn't prove any individual case is a war crime, how can Amnesty claim that the tool proves Israel committed war crimes? Does Amnesty believe that a bunch of unproven allegations based on lying sources somehow becomes more accurate when you put a pretty face on top of lies?

Yet another lie by Amnesty, and more proof that the platform is meant not to illuminate but to obscure.

All my posts proving Amnesty bias and lies about their Gaza Platform can be seen here.

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Amnesty's blood libel against the IDF (update)

Amnesty International created a publicity film for its newly released"Gaza Platform" which I have proven uses inaccurate data meant to bash Israel. under the pretense of being noble.

The film includes this section that is a complete, provable lie.

:

Watching that video you would think that there was only one minute and nine seconds for the family to flee the house. Amnesty put up a timer and everything! It must be true! There's no way that a family can escape in such a short amount of time; we must have witnessed their deaths.

But if you look at the original video itself things aren't quite so clear. Look at the smoke on the side of the house and listen to the background noises - there is a clear edit at 1:16. (It is more obvious at fullscreen.)



The edit proves that there was more time than 1:09 shown in the Amnesty timer. Making this video a lie.

How much was edited out?

From The Independent, July 13, 2014:

A video has emerged showing the extraordinary “knock on the roof” technique used by the Israeli military to warn Palestinian civilians of an impending missile strike.

The footage was uploaded to YouTube yesterday by the Gaza-based Watania news agency, and shows from extremely close quarters a small missile striking the roof of a house across the street.

According to the caption, around 15 minutes later – though most of this time has been edited out of the final clip itself – two fully-armed missiles from an F16 jet strike one after the other, blasting the front of the house away and sending a cloud of debris and rubble into the air.

When the dust settles, the full extent of the damage is slowly revealed, with only the exposed back half of the home still standing.

The Watania agency reported that the home in this case belonged to Samir Nofal, who was able to get out in time along with his family and neighbours.

The 15-minute gap in the video was also reported by the New York Daily News, The Daily Mail and CNN.

(Watania's description, however, says that Israel called the homeowner first, waited 15 minutes for the "roof knock," and the larger bomb was 5 minutes later after the family was safely out of the house. Only The Telegraph got it right, showing how lazy reporters are in copying others' stories. )

Perhaps, you might say, this is an innocent mistake. Somehow Amnesty saw this video without the explanation that was easily available in major news outlets and in the YouTube video that they edited to create their propaganda film.

Perhaps it is possible, but every one of those stories quoted Philip Luther, Middle East and North Africa Director at Amnesty International, saying how Amnesty is against the "roof knock" procedure. Amnesty, like any large organization, follows its news coverage closely. They read each of these news stories that emphasized that the video edited out several minutes of inactivity.

The only conclusion is that this little propaganda film was knowingly deceptive. Amnesty knows the truth and chose to create a film that strongly implies that Israel cruelly bombed houses that they knew still  had civilians inside scrambling to grab their belongings.

This is a blood libel.

Amnesty's on-screen timer is the exact same kind of deception that the entire Gaza Platform propaganda is. They are overlaying their own spin and lies on top of flawed information and presenting it as if it is more accurate than what had been seen before.

But all that Amnesty has proven is that it has no credibility. To Amnesty, bashing Israel is far more important than little details like truth and accuracy.

The Gaza Platform data also includes in many cases the an insulting term for the IDF - it calls the army the "IOF," or "Israel Occupation forces," a term used up until now exclusively by Arab media and Arab NGOs. Now Amnesty has adopted that derogatory term as its official terminology, further proving that Amnesty is not an unbiased source.

Amnesty has a halo around it as a reliable, major human rights NGO. Any fair observer, looking at only the evidence I have compiled over the past three days, must conclude that it Amnesty is a travesty. 

Every day that they refuse to apologize for and correct this consistent pattern of lies, deception and bias is more proof of that very bias. Newspapers issue corrections, but that is beneath Amnesty.

Amnesty is well aware of my posts which have been tweeted to them hundreds of times, and others including myself have emailed them asking for comment, which they have ignored.

To Amnesty, truth is sometimes just an inconvenience that gets in the way of a good story.

Their donors might be interested in knowing this.

If I am wrong in a single one of my accusations, I invite Amnesty to respond,. I promise to print their response in full.

UPDATE: Amnesty replaced the video with another. Details on their new deceptions here.

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Amnesty's true colors revealed with fake civilians, even fake children, in their "Gaza Platform" tool

Yesterday I reported that Amnesty International is releasing today an online application, The Gaza Platform,  to do graphical analysis on Israeli attacks in Gaza.

And that Amnesty's partners in gathering data were, to be blunt, liars.

The official release of the Gaza Platform is today, with a free event at Amnesty UK this evening.

Perhaps no example shows how unreliable this tools isi than the incident recorded by the tool here:

At around 1:50 am on Saturday, 19 July 2014, Israeli warplanes targeted a group of civilians sitting in front of their houses in Al Ladadwa Street in Khan Younis city. Nine people, including three children, were killed and another two were moderately injured. Three of those who were killed were brothers; Mohammed Reda Salhiyya, 22; Mustafa Reda Salhiyya, and 21, and Wasseem Reda Salhiyya, 15. Another two brotherswere killed: Yahya Al Surry, 20, and his brother Mohammed, 17. The other four were residents of the area and were identified as: Mohammed Mostafa Salhiyya, 32; Ibrahim Jamal Nasser, 13; MohammedAwad Nasser, 25, and Rushdy Nasser, 25.
SOURCE:
Al Mezan

PCHR has the same description of victims as civilians with similar ages within the application.

Only one problem: every victim was a terrorist..

Here is a martyr poster for every victim.

According to this poster, every single one of these people were members of the Abu Rish Brigades. Including the 15-year old boy and 17-year old boy.

What about the 13-year old Ibrahim Jamal Nasser? Well, he wasn't really 13:

I reported on all of these last August. But Amnesty apparently spent much more time and money to create an application to bash Israel than to Google the names of the "civilians" - a simple exercise that would prove that the Al Mezan Center and PCHR are completely unreliable when they claim that dead Gazans are civilians.

The identification of victims as civilians is the key for Amnesty's stated use of this tool as a means to prove that Israel engaged in war crimes. As I have just again proven, the application is based on completely unreliable data where the number of civilians and children were inflated by these "human rights organizations" for their own political purposes.

Every reporter that parrots Amnesty's press release should be emailed and tweeted with this post as well as my post from yesterday to show Amnesty's true colors. 

There are scores of people I documented as being members of terror groups that PCHR and Al Mezan called "civilian." The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center has done a much more rigorous job documenting how many of these supposed civilians were really members of terror groups.

Amnesty ignores any evidence that contradicts its pre-determined verdict. Amnesty's release of the Gaza Platform is proof that Amnesty's goal is pure anti-Israel propaganda, and truth is the victim.

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Bashing Israel? Amnesty has an app for that (update x2)

Tomorrow, Amnesty plans to officially release a graphical tool that has no purpose except to bash Israel.

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 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 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 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.

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