Julie Stahl, CNSNews.com
Tuesday, July 30, 2002

JERUSALEM – Since the outbreak of the Palestinian intifadah (uprising) in September 2000, as many as 1,780 Palestinians and 586 Israelis have been killed - roughly three times as many Palestinians as Israelis - but Israeli researchers say those numbers present a distorted picture of reality.

A study released by a counter-terrorism group said the "fatality scorecard" is much more complicated than the raw numbers indicate.

According to research done by the International Policy Institute on Counter-Terrorism, the Palestinian death toll of 1,780 includes suicide bombers who have killed themselves in the process of killing Israelis; and it also includes Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel. Those collaborators have been killed by their own people, the report said.

"Correcting for such distortions, we can arrive at a figure of 579 Palestinian noncombatants killed by Israel, compared to 433 Israeli noncombatants killed by Palestinians [as of the end of June 2002]," it concludes.

"While Israelis account for a little more than 27 percent of the total fatalities as generally reported, they represent some 43 percent of these noncombatant victims," the report adds.

Don Radlauer, the study's lead researcher, said his team thought it was important to do a statistical analysis of casualties so people won't draw the wrong conclusions.

"The numbers [as presented] were distorting the reality," Radlauer said.

Radlauer and his associates gathered information on everyone who had been killed during in the past two years of conflict. They developed a database, classifying the dead into categories according to whether they were combatants or non-combatants.

Combatants in this study do not include Israeli soldiers killed while riding on a civilian bus, or a tank mechanic standing at a bus stop. However, non-uniformed Palestinians who fire at Israeli soldiers or civilians are classified as combatants.

Children throwing stones at tanks are not considered combatants for purposes of Radlauer's research, which also includes a category for "probable combatants," who died as a result of unexplained or unclear circumstances.

Information on Israeli casualties was readily available from the government and newspaper reports. Information about Palestinian deaths was taken from Palestinian sources, Arabic-language newspapers and human rights groups, and those sources were given the benefit of the doubt in cases where questions arose.

"Unfortunately, these sources generally disagree on many significant details, including the name, age, and circumstances of death of victims," the report says. Researchers said they were not surprised to find that a much higher percentage of Palestinian combatants were killed compared with Israeli combatants. But other statistics did surprise them.

More than 95 percent of all Palestinians killed were males. Even among the non-combatants, 92 percent of those killed were male, while on the Israeli side, 38 percent of those killed were females.

Another demographic surprise, Radlauer said, was that among non-combatants, the age distribution on the Israeli side was "broad and sloppy, consistent with terrorist attacks on civilians," although there were slightly more teens killed in some attacks because of the places targeted.

Among the Palestinian noncombatants, 65 percent of the Palestinians killed were between the ages of 13 and 30, while on the Israeli side only 27 percent fell into that category.

"It means that a very large proportion of the [Palestinian] noncombatant population were not people sitting at home minding their own business," Radlauer said. "The people were persuaded to come out and throw rocks at tanks."

To back this up, Radlauer noted that when Israel strikes civilian areas, as it did last week when it dropped a bomb on a building in a Gaza Strip neighborhood in a targeted killing, there is a much more arbitrary distribution of age and sex among the casualties. Fifteen people were killed in that attack, two of whom were classified as combatants. Nine others were children.

"It shows when Israel attacked a residential area resulting in fatalities, [they were] random - adults, males, females," he said.

Radlauer charged that the numbers show, therefore, that the PA has been sending its people out knowing they would get killed in order to raise the casualty figures and gain international sympathy. He called them "suicide propagandists."

He also pointed to a television commercial in which an actor playing 12-year-old Mohammed Al-Dura beckons other children to follow in his path. Captured on film, Al-Dura's last terrifying moments - as he was caught in Israeli-Palestinian crossfire - raised an international outcry and made him a symbol of sacrifice in the Palestinian uprising.

"He is beckoning to the children to follow him," Radlauer said. "He is not telling them they will be able to kill Israelis [since he is neither armed with a gun nor suicide bomb]," he said. "He is saying, 'go out and get killed.'"

"That means that ... the Palestinian leadership bears an element of responsibility for the large proportion of deaths on their side," he charged. In addition, the international press also bears responsibility for publicizing the statistics in such a way that the Palestinians perceived they had an advantage by raising the numbers, he added.

Another finding of the report was that the 22-month "intifadah" has developed through three separate phases, from a three-month-long popular uprising to a more military conflict.

"We saw the conflict changing to one that was much more military [or] quasi-military, and yet these very simple numbers were used to mask this ... [and] make a very complicated series of events look [simple]," Radlauer said. "It completely masks the changes happening over time, the trends to the conflict."

Radlauer acknowledged that not everyone agrees with the reports definitions or conclusions, but he said his team thoughtfully considers every criticism and comment.

He called the 37-page report, complete with color graphs and charts, a "work in progress." He said it was deliberately published on the Internet as opposed to a paperbound edition because the researchers wanted to be able to revise and update it as the situation develops.