The JCPA Report: Refuting the UN Report on the 2014 Gaza War

The bottom line is that the war was fought to stop the rocket fire on Israel’s south and that if not for the Iron Dome, Israeli casualties would have been immense.

Ambassador Dr. Dore Gold, INN

The Gaza War is a war Israel did not want, but it is also a war that averted disaster for Israel.

However, the truth has been abused again by the one-sided mandate issued by the UN Human Rights Council on July 23, 2014, which calls for an investigation into events surrounding the war in the “Occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem and particularly the occupied Gaza Strip” – blind to the fact that Israel was the target of thousands of rockets and mortar attacks, all against civilian populations, and with some targeted Israeli areas having three times the population density of Gaza.

The UN report written as a result of that mandate is another perversion of the truth.

There is a school of thought that claims Israel wanted this war. The opposite is true. But, though this was a war Israel did not want, it was a war for which it had planned meticulously, thereby denying Hamas its main weapon: victimhood.

The following points are the essential truths of the 2014 Gaza war, truths backed by research, evidence, and accounts of events as they happened. The chapters of JCPA’s full report, a summary of which is below, can leave no doubt as to which party should be in the dock for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

More importantly, however, it rings a bell of warning that if Hamas is allowed to escape its crimes, the seeds of the next conflict will be planted.

Here is a summary of the JCPA Report:

• Though the images of the moment may have reflected massive damage in Gaza during the 2014 war, the Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, announced on Nov. 6, 2014, that Israel had gone to “extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and prevent civilian casualtiesin the Gaza conflict.” An analysis of UN satellite photos taken during the war shows that 72% of all damaged areas in Gaza were “within two miles of the Israeli border.”
• While this was a war Israel did not want, it was a war that inadvertently preempted a terrorist massacre inside Israel’s heartland, principally through a network of sophisticated tunnels built deep under the border, and intended to stream hundreds, if not thousands, of dedicated terrorists, many on suicide missions, in the quiet of night, to destinations where they could kill as many innocent people as possible and leave Israel mauled as never before. This was potentially Hamas’ terrorist version of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Egypt and Syria launched a joint surprise attack on Israeli forces in Sinai and the Golan Heights.
• Israel suffered 74 dead in the war. Had the Iron Dome system not intercepted 735 rockets fired from Gaza, the Israeli casualty count would have been incalculably higher.
• Had Hamas accepted the Egyptian ceasefire proposal of July 15, as did Israel, Palestinian wartime fatalities would have numbered less than 200, as opposed to more than 2,100 who died by the time Hamas agreed to a final ceasefire on Aug. 27. Thus, Hamas was fully responsible for more than 1,800 Palestinian deaths.

• While UN and Palestinian sources claimed that 72-84% of Palestinians in Gaza killed during the war were civilians, there are strong reasons to argue that the percentage of civilian casualties was less than 50%, a low one-to-one combatant-to-civilian ratio that is unprecedented in modern-day warfare.
• In addition, we don’t know how many Palestinians in Gaza died as human shields or of natural causes during the 50 days of war, or how many werecasualties of the 875 Palestinian rockets known to have landed inside Gaza.

• A discerning look at the facts would lead to the conclusion that it is Hamas, not Israel, which should be in the dock for war crimes and crimes against humanity.

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Hirsch Goodman, author, most recently, of “The Anatomy of Israel’s Survival,” and the editor in chief of The Jerusalem Report from 1990 to 2000, co-authored the full JCPA report which can be accessed by clicking here.