Referring to charges of genocide against Israel leveled by Israel-hating UN official Richard Falk, Ben-Dror Yemini writes for i24 News:
Let us gauge the genocide claim. In 2013, 36 Palestinians were killed, according to the human rights organization B’Tselem. At least 30 of those were either involved in clashes with IDF soldiers or were members of terrorist organizations. Only a few innocents were killed. The death of each one of them is to be deeply regretted. Yet one should add that there isn’t another conflict in the world where the fatality rate among civilians is as low as in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In other conflicts it is estimated that between 60 and 90 percent of fatalities are innocents. In the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, they are a minority.
In fact, the annual fatality count in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is lower than a daily terror casualty toll in Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and other countries, where 1,153 people died as a result of terror attacks. This does not include the daily toll from the massacre perpetrated by the Syrian regime.
Most of the victims are Muslims killed by radical Islamists. In Pakistan in the course of last year alone, 5,366 people were killed in acts of terrorism. Almost 3,000 of them were civilians. In Iraq in 2013 alone, 8,868 were killed in terror acts, including 7,818 civilians. The war on terrorism waged by coalition forces claimed between 227 and 300 thousand lives in Iraq and Afghanistan, most of them innocents.
Even if the number of casualties of Israeli operations was 10 or 20 times higher, this would still not constitute genocide. A broad historical examination supports this view. Since 1967, less than 10,000 Palestinians have been killed. Most of them were terrorists. You can call it many things, but genocide it ain’t.
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