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International Defense Experts Back IDF's 2014 Gaza Campaign

(Times of Israel) Judah Ari Gross - Armies of the world would be rendered far less effective if they were forced to operate under the same restrictions as the IDF during Israel's 2014 Gaza campaign, a group of former military and defense leaders from nine countries said in a new report released Friday. The High Level Military Group (HLMG) - made up of retired generals and defense officials from Germany, Colombia, India, Spain, Australia, the U.S., France, the UK and Italy - found that Israel not only abided by the laws of armed conflict, but far surpassed their requirements. The report found that the UN accepted Hamas' figures for combatant vs. civilian casualties, while the HLMG found Hamas' numbers to be rife with inconsistencies, such as the "inclusion of duplicate names, incorrect ages, combat-related deaths caused by Hamas or its affiliate organizations, such as in the case of misfired rockets, and deaths not related to the hostilities but classified as such." Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, said that commissions investigating the conflict should have looked to see that everything feasibly was done to avoid the deaths of non-combatants, and that the standard of zero civilian deaths is an impossible one. The HLMG laid the blame for the vast majority of civilian casualties at the feet of Hamas, which instituted a deliberate policy to cause as many Palestinian civilian deaths as possible in order to wage a PR war against Israel. The report noted that Israel tried multiple times to end the conflict through diplomatic means, only to be rebuffed by Hamas at every turn.
2015-12-14 00:00:00
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