Casualties of the Gaza War (2008–2009)
[17] In 2009, the United Nations Mine Action Centre reported that 12 people have been killed and 27 injured in the Gaza Strip by unexploded ordnance since the ceasefire.
[20] Israeli officials have stated that the Palestinian Ministry of Health (PMoH) significantly inflated the civilian death toll and played down the number of Hamas casualties.
[26] B'Tselem stated that their count was based on testimonies from eye-witnesses and relatives of the dead, cross-checked with investigations carried out by Palestinian and international human rights organizations.
The NGO added that some difficulties in estimating the death toll could be attributed to the IDF's refusal to allow them into the Gaza Strip after the conflict had ended to supplement the work of field-researchers there.
[28] In the article published in SPME, B'Tselem casualties findings were dubbed flawed due to the group's restrictive definitions of combatants, resulting in "misclassification biases".
[31] The NGO also contested the IDF figures, saying that it regarded them as a "deliberate manipulative attempt" to distort the reality of the attacks, and to "disguise Israeli illegal actions".
"[38] The NGO UN Watch stated that the Goldstone Report relies on the testimony of the Gaza police spokesperson Islam Shahwan and accepts the interpretation of his own words "face the enemy" as meaning "distributing food stuffs".
[40] Human Rights Watch stated that police are presumptively civilians but are considered valid targets if formally incorporated into the armed forces of a party to a conflict or directly participate in the hostilities.
[34] The PCHR representative argued however that Israel wrongly classified 255 police officers killed at the outset of the war as militants,[42] explaining that International Law regards policemen who are not engaged in fighting as non-combatants or civilians.
[34] The Israeli Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) compiled a report saying that during Gaza War many supposedly civil policemen were at the same time operatives in Hamas's military wing.
[45] B'Tselem in its fatalities' figures report wrote that it knew many police officers in the Gaza Strip are also members of the military wings of Palestinian armed groups, and might have taken part in hostilities against Israel.
