The media, having long ago agreed to everything in the Goldstone report, has no interest in the accidental revelations which refute its conclusions.
Camera.org recently published news that none other than Hamas itself has revealed an important statistic, previously denied or simply lied about, which shows that Goldstone was a gullible sap who was fed lies from dubious sources and reached conclusions which were foregone before he even started his one-sided investigation.
Hamas Interior Minister Fathi Hamad’s admission that Hamas and affiliated militias lost 600-700 fighters in the Israeli “Cast Lead” military operation undermines the central accusation of the Goldstone Report that the Israeli operation was “premised on a deliberate policy of disproportionate force aimed … [at] the civilian population.” The public, however, is unlikely to know this, because Hamad’s remarks have been largely ignored by major news organizations, like the New York Times and the BBC.
Hamad’s comments were made in an interview published in the London Arabic daily Al Hayat on Nov. 1, 2010 and reported by Agence France Presse, the Jerusalem Post and others. In the interview, he stated that
On the first day of the war, Israel targeted police stations and 250 martyrs who were part of Hamas and the various factions fell.” He added that, “about 200 to 300 were killed from the Qassam Brigades, as well as 150 security personnel.”
Hamad’s figures closely match the Israeli estimate of 709 combatant fatalities and indicate that combatants comprised around half of the Palestinian fatalities in the time period of Dec. 27, 2008 through Jan. 18, 2009, far more than the 17 percent claimed by Palestinian groups. The increased ratio of combatants to non-combatants is inconsistent with Goldstone’s most serious charge that Israeli forces systematically targeted civilians.
The importance of the last sentence cannot be underestimated. The accusation of deliberately targeting civilians was the direct opposite of the truth, as Col Richard Kemp told the UN Human Rights Council last year https://www.raymondcook.net/blog/index.php/2009/10/19/colonel-richard-kemp-and-the-truth-about-operation-cast-lead
In the rush to judgement, or directly to condemnation, the picture of Israel as a bloodthirsty, murderous regime, which its enemies are so keen to promote, was given validation by Goldstone.
Considering the conditions in Gaza – the use of public buildings, the network of residential homes used and the firing from or near UN buildings – the ratio of combatants to civilians killed is low and completely disproves the demonising conclusion of Goldstone.