[Ifroham4]

http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/Art...102602,00.html

This summer marks the five-year anniversary of the Lebanon war between Israel and the Lebanese-Iranian terrorist organization Hezbollah. The Second Lebanon War traumatized Israel politically as well as militarily. Militarily, Israel failed to dislodge the terrorist organization from its southern Lebanese foothold; politically, Israeli leaders found themselves overwhelmed by a flood of false accusations of “war crimes,” “indiscriminate and disproportionate” force, and “violations of international law.”

International non-governmental organizations played a critical role in the political warfare against Israel. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International – ostensibly neutral watchdogs – led the campaign. In 35 days, they issued over 40 press releases, statements and pseudo fact-finding reports, comprising hundreds of pages, largely ignoring the war crimes committed by the terrorist organization and instead focusing overwhelmingly and negatively on alleged Israeli crimes.

The HRW and Amnesty allegations were immediately accepted, at face value, by the world’s media. Politicians and diplomats then echoed the war crimes accusations, without any fact-checking.

We are now completing a multi-year study of all the HRW and Amnesty allegations regarding the 2006 Lebanon war, and the results so far are shocking. In our systematic and detailed research, supported by the Israel Science Foundation, we found major contradictions as well as numerous unsupported charges, double standards and false or invented “evidence.”

In some reports, such as on incidents in the Shiite towns of Srifa and Qana - Hezbollah strongholds from which numerous rocket attacks were launched - the NGOs published wildly inconsistent civilian casualty claims within a few days of each other. Errors were overwhelmingly in one direction; almost without fail, errors consisted of exaggerated Lebanese casualties or unfounded accusations against Israel.

In many incidents, HRW and Amnesty reports initially relied both on Lebanese witnesses and the personal observations of its own “researchers” to deny any Hezbollah military presence in the area of an Israeli strike, while later publications acknowledged that Hezbollah had been present, meaning the witnesses had lied and the NGO researchers were incompetent. Regarding Srifa, even after reducing the number of reported Lebanese casualties from “at least 42” to 26 to 19 before finally settling on 22, HRW found itself forced by critics and the evidence to eventually acknowledge that most of the “civilian” casualties it had “documented” were, in fact, Hezbollah combatants.