Reuters Headline: "Final Gaza toll shows 960 civilians killed in Israel's offensive: group"

The "final toll" referred to in this article comes courtesy of The Palestinian Center for Human Rights, which according to Camera, has recently listed people as civilians who were identified by Palestinian news agencies as members of terrorist groups (h/t: EOZ). The article presents the following, presumably as some sort of presentation of the Israeli side:

Israel says its forces never deliberately targeted civilians in Gaza and did their utmost to avoid civilian casualties. It says Hamas fighters used ordinary Palestinians as human shields.

Actually, the IDF has offered its own analysis of the identities of the people killed, but the article makes no mention of that. It is always useful to examine the number of women killed in these sorts of statistics since you can fudge the civilian status of a person, but not the person's gender. The article lists 121 women killed among the total number, 1,434. That's about 8.4 percent. On the face of it, that does not sound like the results of an attack that mostly kills civilians. Wouldn't women make up a much larger percentage of the victims? I'm just asking. We are now undoubtedly going to see this "960" number endlessly cited as simply a fact, which the Reuters headline encourages. Note: See this version of the article, for instance, which omits the final word from the Reuters title as it appears at the link I provide above.

Update: More here.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad