War crimes?

The level of accusations at Israel for so-called "war crimes" carried out during Operation Cast Lead has risen to a fever pitch, with the Guardian printing several articles day after day. Unfortunately, Israeli journalists, like their Western counterparts, also have their own biases and journalistic lapses. Such is the case of a recent Ha'aretz story alleging "war crimes" and serious ethical failures on the part of the IDF in Gaza. Predictably, many international media outlets, including the New York Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Australian, and Toronto Globe & Mail to name but a few, repeated the allegations without bothering to do any rudimentary checks.
The IDF has categorically rejected these stories, so let's analyze them. First the stories were told to a sympathetic left-wing journalist by someone named Danny Zamir, who had been drafted into the IDF, but had claimed concientious objector status in order to avoid going to fight in Gaza. He was the source of stories supposedly told to him by two cadets at the Rabin pre-military academy that he heads (where did they get these stories and how did he get this job?). So at the base of this story are two unconfirmed stories reported at least second-hand.
The brigade commander's findings were reported in the Israeli newspaper Maariv, in a story entitled "IDF Investigation Refutes the Testimonies About Gaza Killings." According to the story two central incidents that came up in the testimony, which Danny Zamir presented to Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazi, focus on one infantry brigade. Regarding the incident in which it was claimed that a sniper fired at a Palestinian woman and her two daughters, the brigade commander's investigation cites the sniper himself: "I saw the woman and her daughters and I shot warning shots. The section commander came up to the roof and shouted at me, 'Why did you shoot at them?' I explained that I did not shoot at them, but I fired warning shots." Officers from the brigade surmise that fighters that stayed in the bottom floor of the Palestinian house thought that he hit them, and from here the rumor that a sniper killed a mother and her two daughters spread.
The other alleged incident, the killing by a sniper of an elderly woman, also seems not to have taken place. Regarding the second incident, in which it was claimed that soldiers went up to the roof to entertain themselves with firing and killed an elderly Palestinian woman, the brigade commander investigation found that there was no such incident. So both incidents were categorically false!
In addition to these incidents The Guardian devoted a front page article, two inside pages, three separate videos, a commentary by Suemas Milne and an editorial to what it claims is evidence from a special investigation by Clancy Chassay that the IDF committed 'war crimes’ in Gaza in Operation Cast Lead by deliberately targeting civilians, using young boys as human shields and deliberately targeting ambulances and medical personnel and hospitals. Melanie Phillips does a detailed analysis of these charges and shows that they are all also completely false (See http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/3470006/the-guardian-goes-to-pallywood.thtml ). She also points out that there is no criticism of Hamas whatsoever in these extensive articles, notwithstanding clear evidence that they did deliberately use human shields. The extent of anti-Israel bias is such that every convention of journalistic practice is broken and it can only be concluded that The Guardian is carrying out a systematic and malicious demonization of Israel!
Then we have the numbers game. With time, the number of civilians reportedly killed in Gaza from Hamas sources goes up, now reaching over 900, while the number of terrorists (combatants) killed goes down, now down to 58! These numbers are jaw-droppingly false. The IDF carried out its own long careful analysis, and has now released it's numbers, namely there were 1,166 named individuals killed and of them 709 were combatants (mostly young men as Hamas gunmen) and 295 were uninvolved civilians of which 89 were under the age of 16 and 49 were women; the rest (112) cannot be categorized (for details see http://dover.idf.il/IDF/English/News/today/09/03/2602.htm ). This should finally end discussions of the numbers, but it probably won't.
After every war there is a spate of memoirs, that sometimes include confessions of shooting of civilians usually by accident. There was the great book entitled "The Seventh Day" after the Six Day war of 1967, that I highly recommend to all who are interested in the reality and the chaos or "fog" of war. There was the movie "Beaufort" based on the book by Ron Leshem, that characterized Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. There was also recently the artistically animated movie "Waltz with Bashir," by Ari Folman that was a memoir of the 1982 Lebanon War. Naturally, all such memoirs, and there are many, are to a greater or lesser extent anti-war, but that doesn't mean that prior to the war in question their authors did not have a clear idea that it was necessary to fight. All wars that Israel has prosecuted have been fought for survival, and being a democracy, no Government or leaders go to war without very extensive consideration for the consequences. That is our problem, as the only democracy in a region of undemocratic militaristic regimes. The test is that nowhere will you find comparable anti-war memoirs on the Arab side!