Just how many civilians died in Gaza???

Meet the man who really goes through the numbers...

Though Shaheen is not a Hamas soldier, he is on the front lines of a different battle: the P.R. war that has erupted since the end of hostilities. As head of the Economic and Social Rights Unit for the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), he is one of the people behind the fatality figures beamed across the world this past winter. On March 12, the PCHR released its most recent statistics: 1,417 dead, including 926 civilians, 255 non-combatant police officers, and 236 fighters. It was PCHR's numbers, particularly the high proportion of civilian casualties, that in large part led to an international outcry against Israel, and "its worst diplomatic crisis in two decades" according to The New York Times. In the weeks since, the European Union has frozen its upgrade of relations with Israel, Norway's chief prosecutor is considering a request to charge Israeli leaders with war crimes in Gaza, and the United Nations is sending a fact-finding team to the region--all arguably based, to a large extent, on Shaheen's numbers.

During the war, Shaheen and a team of about 35 professional and volunteer field researchers braved the crossfire to visit hospitals, interview victims' families, and document the location and circumstances of every single war casualty. "It's a very dangerous job," says the soft-spoken Shaheen, who spent his nights sleeping in his brother's basement, and his days "moving, moving" up and down the Strip for up to 11 hours, all the while fielding hundreds of phone calls from media outlets hungry for numbers of the dead and wounded. "I am so lucky to be alive," he says.

So you can imagine his dismay upon hearing that the IDF is disputing his fatality figures. On March 26, two months after the unilateral cease-fire and two weeks after Shaheen released his stats, the IDF parried with its own fatality count: 1,166 dead, 709 of them Hamas terror operatives, 295 "uninvolved Palestinians" (89 under the age of 16, and 49 of them women). In addition, the IDF identified 162 men whose names had not yet been attributed to any organization.

If the IDF's alternate numbers are accurate, they paint a very different picture in terms of the toll on civilian life. How is there such a big disparity between the two sets of numbers? Though the IDF has refused to elaborate in any detail on how it obtained its figures, insight into its methods can be gained in the cluttered basement home office in Toronto of retired Israeli intelligence officer Jonathan Dahoah Halevi. "PCHR's list is inaccurate," he asserts. "I get the impression they intentionally tried to inflate the civilian numbers."

He begins to rattle off indictments. "Why is Said Siyam"--the de facto defense minister of Hamas--"listed as a civilian?" he asks. "Muhammad Dasouki Dasliye. Do you know who he is?" Halevi says that Dasliye was a Palestinian Resistance Committee operative and suspect in the terrorist attack against three American security guards in Gaza in October 2003. "Nizar Rayan," Halevi chuckles. "He's a civilian?" In fact, news reports describe Rayan as a militant cleric who mentored suicide bombers and sent his own son on a suicide mission in 2001, killing two Israelis.