The main problem with the United Nations report on Operation Protective Edge is that it artificially tries to create a moral and legal symmetry between the State of Israel and the IDF – and Hamas and the other Palestinian organizations.

The report fails to mention the fact that Hamas is the one which opened fire and initiated the fighting, and it gives no weight to the fact that Israel did everything in its power to reach a ceasefire before moving on to a full-scale counterattack, including a ground offensive in the Strip.

A second fact that the report does not emphasize sufficiently is that Hamas intentionally opened fire in order to harm Israeli civilians, while the IDF hurt those defined as “non-fighters” unintentionally and did everything in its power to minimize the number of civilian casualties.

This fact makes all the difference between Hamas’ intention to target Israeli civilians indiscriminately – children, women, adults and elderly people – and the IDF’s sincere effort to avoid hurting a non-fighting population.

The third main flaw in the report is the attempt to compare Hamas, which intentionally used a non-fighting civilian population as a human shield not only for its fighters but also for its rocket and mortar launchers, to the IDF, which – if it did actually use this measure – did it in few cases and locally, and the matter is now being investigated by military advocate general.

Read the article in full at Ynet.