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[Excerpts:]

"As head of the Economic and Social Rights Unit for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), he is one of the people behind the fatality figures beamed across the world this past winter. On March 12, the PCHR released its most recent statistics: 1,417 dead, including 926 civilians, 255 non-combatant police officers, and 236 fighters. It was PCHR’s numbers, particularly the high proportion of civilian casualties, that in large part led to an international outcry against Israel, and "its worst diplomatic crisis in two decades" according to The New York Times. In the weeks since, the European Union has frozen its upgrade of relations with Israel, Norway’s chief prosecutor is considering a request to charge Israeli leaders with war crimes in Gaza, and the United Nations is sending a fact-finding team to the region–all arguably based, to a large extent, on Shaheen’s numbers." "If the IDF’s alternate numbers are accurate, they paint a very different picture in terms of the toll on civilian life. How is there such a big disparity between the two sets of numbers? Though the IDF has refused to elaborate in any detail on how it obtained its figures, insight into its methods can be gained in the cluttered basement home office in Toronto of retired Israeli intelligence officer Jonathan Dahoah Halevi. "PCHR’s list is inaccurate," he asserts. "I get the impression they intentionally tried to inflate the civilian numbers." He begins to rattle off indictments. "Why is Said Siyam"–the de facto defense minister of Hamas–"listed as a civilian?" he asks. "Muhammad Dasouki Dasliye. Do you know who he is?" Halevi says that Dasliye was a Palestinian Resistance Committee operative and suspect in the terrorist attack against three American security guards in Gaza in October 2003. "Nizar Rayan," Halevi chuckles. "He’s a civilian?" In fact, news reports describe Rayan as a militant cleric who mentored suicide bombers and sent his own son on a suicide mission in 2001, killing two Israelis." "As of last month, Halevi has a list of 171 people the PCHR defines as civilians that he claims he can prove are actually combatants affiliated with Hamas or other terrorist groups. His contention is based on a simple principle: When fighters die, they don’t just leave behind a body, a family, and eyewitnesses–they leave a paper trail. Martyrdom posters, photographs of funerals, articles celebrating heroes’ exploits, lists of payments to families–these sources help Halevi disprove that a particular fatality was a civilian as opposed to a fighter."