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[Excerpt:]

"According to Gerald Steinberg, head of the watchdog group NGO Watch, which monitors and rebuts the accusations leveled at Israel by human rights organizations, this is an unprecedented attempt by the military to fight groups such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International on their own turf. These groups ground their frequent allegations of war crimes by referring to the internationally agreed-upon tenets of warfare. Steinberg said it is only now that the military has joined the Foreign Ministry in its attempt to counter these claims by making use of these same tenets. “This is an attempt to take that weapon away from them,” Steinberg said. He added, however, that this was “a very late response” in what he saw as an “ongoing political war.”"