Soccer Dad

Human wrongs watch 2

Last week Human Rights Watch issued its third report on Israel's war against Hamas. Dion Nissenbaum reported:

One of the most incendiary charges to emerge from Israel's three week military offensive in Gaza was that Israeli soldiers killed Palestinian women and children carrying white flags.

Today, investigators at Human Rights Watch released a new report that documents seven cases where Palestinians say Israeli soldiers opened fire on groups carrying white flags, killing 11 people, including five women and four children.

"In each of these incidents," the report states, "the evidence strongly indicates that, at the least, Israeli soldiers failed to take feasible precautions to distinguish between civilians and combatants before carrying out the attack. At worst, the soldiers deliberately fired on persons known to be civilians."

To his credit Nissenbaum interviews Amos Guiora, cites Israel's report on the IDF's conduct and includes a video of a member of Hamas hiding among civilians. (Though he qualifies the content of the video in his description.) He also mentions that one of the witnesses against Israel had some credibility problems. Still, Nissenbaum seemed mostly accepting of HRW's charges.

Elder of Ziyon emphasizes the contradictions in the testimony that Nissenbaum cited. Mere Rhetoric demolishes HRW's methodology:

Of course HRW reps - last seen shrieking defensively about the credibility of their anti-Israel canards - wrote into the report that they used "ballistic evidence found at the scene, medical records of victims, and lengthy interviews with multiple witnesses."

Except ballistic evidence and medical records can't establish anything about white flags and by "multiple" they mean "three" and by "witnesses" they mean "embittered friends and relatives who hate Israel." But other than that: solid.

Noah Pollak and Barry Rubin both expose the background of HRW's investigator, Joe Stork, who co-authored the report.

Neither the New York Times nor the Washington Post carried news of this report. Perhaps HRW's declining credibility taught them to stop treating HRW press releases as news. (Or perhaps the declining credibility of all the Israel bashers.)

Still that hasn't stopped some outlets from treating the results of HRW's "investigation" as news.

And it apparently hasn't stopped the UN from adopting HRW's methodology.

Leshno Yaar said Pillay's report was "written by Palestinians in Ramallah" and "screened by Palestinian lawyers in Geneva in order to satisfy Palestinian diplomats on the Human Rights Council."

It was "totally biased" and based on unsubstantiated information, he said. "It ignores the facts and the Israeli positions."

"As far as Israel is concerned, we trust our military, we trust our legal system and we are ignoring this report," Leshno Yaar said.

Crossposted on Yourish.