Third time around
VERMONT
While I'm at it:
HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH

Human Rights Watch, on Israel's Conduct
After conducting an investigation, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a report on Wednesday accusing Israel of carrying out "unlawful" strikes in Gaza, ones that "either did not attack a legitimate military target or attacked despite the likelihood of civilian casualties being disproportionate to the military gain." It noted that "Such attacks committed deliberately or recklessly constitute war crimes." HRW Middle East Director Sarah Leah Whitson also added that Israel's actions raise "serious questions as to whether these attacks are intended to target civilians or wantonly destroy civilian property."

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The report also said that "Human Rights Watch has documented numerous serious violations of the laws of war by Israeli forces in the past decade, particularly indiscriminate attacks on civilians," and criticized Israel's preposterously inadequate efforts at "warning" civilians of impending strikes. Now, which part of all that fits with "exemplary" efforts at avoiding killing civilians? Still, some may buy into Israel's allegation that Hamas's use of human shields is what's responsible for the high civilian death toll. Let's look at the evidence.
Human Shields
While human rights organizations haven't yet addressed "human shields" allegations in the ongoing round of Israel-Gaza violence, they did after the 2009 round when Israel killed at least773 Palestinian civilians, compared to three Israeli civilian casualties (a ratio of 257:1), and used the same "human shields" argument to deflect responsibility for those deaths. When the dust settled, Amnesty International investigated the matter and concluded that there was "no evidence that [Palestinian] rockets were launched from residential houses or buildings while civilians were in these buildings." More attention-worthy was the report's note that,
in the cases of [Israeli] precision missiles or tank shells which killed [Palestinian] civilians in their homes, no fighters were present in the houses that were struck and Amnesty International delegates found no indication that there had been any armed confrontations or other military activity in the immediate vicinity at the time of the attack.
Israel's Use of Human Shields
By contrast, the same report found that "in several cases Israeli soldiers also used [Palestinian] civilians, including children, as 'human shields'." Going back in time just a little further to put this into context is important: when the Israeli Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that the Israeli military had to stop using Palestinian civilians as human shields, the Israeli "defense" establishmentobjected to the ruling. The appeal against the ruling failed, and the practice remains technically illegal, but Israel implicitly encourages it to continue by offering an "inadequate … slap on the wrist," as Human Rights Watch put it, to Israeli soldiers caught using this reprehensible tactic.
This reveals two important things: the first is the moral hypocrisy and chutzpah on display when Israel ignores its own use of human shields as it accuses its enemies of using them. The second is Israel's self-contradicting logic: If Palestinian militants had such disregard for Palestinian civilian lives, why was the Israeli military so invested in maintaining the ability to use Palestinians as shields? The fact that the Israeli army wants to use Palestinian human shields actually proves that they believe Palestinian militants prefer not to endanger their own civilians.