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[Excerpt:]

"Fred Abrahams’s claim that Human Rights Watch’s critics have not ‘yet stepped forward and said HRW got the facts wrong’ is plainly false (‘The man who bugs Israel and Hamas by unraveling their claims, February 2’). NGO Monitor has documented numerous examples where HRW ‘investigations,’ which often rely on unverified eye witness testimony or unnamed sources, get it wrong. During the 2006 Lebanon War, HRW promoted the myth of the Kana massacre by publishing a death toll of 54, based on the testimony of an alleged ‘survivor.’ HRW was eventually forced to accept the Red Cross’s figure of 28 fatalities. HRW’s major report on the conflict, ‘Fatal Strikes’ (August 2006), claimed the NGO ‘found no cases in which Hizbullah deliberately used civilians’ – i.e., operated from civilian areas. Yet the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies in Israel published a detailed report which described the extensive Hizbullah activity in many of the specific villages where HRW sources claimed it was absent. Indeed, nine out of 21 cases described in ‘Fatal Strikes’ were contradicted by later HRW reports – a remarkable inaccuracy rate of 43% – even before extrinsic checks are made on the evidence. There are many further examples. In the meantime, it would be interesting to hear how Abrahams will avoid repeating past mistakes in his current investigation in Gaza."