Jerusalem - Almost 60 per cent of the nearly 1,400 Palestinians killed in a three-week Israeli offensive in Gaza last winter were civilians, an Israeli human rights group said Wednesday. According to B'Tselem, 1,382 Palestinians died in the Gaza war. Of those, 325 were combatants and 245 were Palestinian police officers - most of whom died in airstrikes on police stations of the radical Islamist Hamas movement ruling Gaza on the first day of the offensive.
The deaths included 109 women and 320 minors, said the Israeli rights group.
B'Tselem said the figures were the result of months of meticulous investigation.
They contradict those published by the Israeli military, which said that at least 60 per cent of those killed were militants - members of Hamas and other armed groups.
According to the Israeli military, 1,166 Palestinians died in the offensive and of those, it has collected the names of 709 militants.
B'Tselem's figures differ only slightly from those of a leading Gaza-based Palestinian rights group, the Palestinian Centre For Human Rights (PCHR), which said that 65 per cent of those killed in the Gaza war were civilians. PCHR earlier this year put the death toll at 1,417 - 926 civilians, 255 non-combatant police officers and 236 fighters.
"The extremely heavy civilian casualties and the massive damage to civilian property require serious introspection on the part of Israeli society," B'Tselem said in a statement.
In response, the Israeli military charged that the B'Tselem report was "not based on facts or on accurate statistics."
In a statement, the military spokesman's office noted that B'Tselem, by its own admission, based its findings on information gleaned from Palestinian human rights groups and various websites and blogs, "including those of the militant wings of terrorist organizations and that of the Palestinian police."
"The discrepancy in the numbers is based on the fact that B'Tselem's sources are organizations with a vested interest, and it does not have the tools, nor the intelligence capabilities with which it can, with a necessary degree of confidence, know the causes of death or the affiliation of the casualties," the statement said.
In its report, B'Tselem said it "did everything within its capability" to verify the data. It said that, in addition to the sources noted in the army's response, it also cross-checked its information with announcements made by the Israeli military and with information included in a report issued by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
It added that it had requested the military's list of fatalities in order to cross-check with its own data, but the request was turned down.
The human rights organization said it recognized "the complexity of combat in a densely populated area."
But it added that "illegal and immoral actions" by Palestinian armed groups attacking from within civilian populations "cannot legitimize such extensive harm to civilians by a state committed to the rule of law."
"Behind the dry statistics lie shocking individual stories; whole families were killed; parents saw their children shot before their very eyes; relatives watched their loved ones bleed to death; and entire neighbourhoods were obliterated," said B'Tselem.
It urged the Israeli government to launch a "credible" investigation into laws of war violations during the Gaza offensive, independent of the Israeli military.
Thirteen Israelis were killed during the air and ground offensive, launched by Israel in a bid to curb incessant rocket attacks from Gaza against its southern towns and villages.
