The justness of the Palestinian cause has paid a high price because of them, as Israel has exploited the attacks by reducing the nature of the Palestinian struggle to an issue of ‘terrorism and counter-terrorism’. The worldwide condemnation of the Palestinian killing of Israelis is gravely uneven compared with the mild condemnation of similar Israeli killings of Palestinians. The number of Israelis killed by Hamas (and all other Palestinian factions combined) from Hamas’s inception in December 1987 until April 2006 amounted to only a quarter of the number of the Palestinians killed by Israel over the same period of time.
The killing of civilians on both sides is inhumane, and to deal with dead civilians as mere statistics implies a measure of insensitivity. Yet the statistics help to further the understanding of the whole picture. The aggregate figures of the statistics provided by the Israeli human rights organisation Btselem (www.btselem.org) show that 1,426 Israelis, military personnel and civilians, were killed by Palestinian factions, compared with 5,050 Palestinians killed by Israel during those years. Of those casualties, there were 137 Israeli children (or under 18) killed against 998 Palestinian children of the same age group.
When and why has Hamas adopted suicide bombing as a strategy?
