Press Coverage of Civilian Casualties:
AP/Yahoo
AP has failed to provide a breakdown of civilian and non-civilian deaths in its latest news on the Lebanon-Israel war, retreating from its common-sense, important-news-oriented approach of yesterday and last Saturday, Sunday, and Monday. I believe AP's figures are the most reliable, since they have relayed official health ministry statistics. The first story quoted below is the `UN negotiations over Lebanon' story on Yahoo's main page; linked from that story is the second, the `Israel prepares major offensive' article.
More than 800 people have died in the monthlong conflict, hundreds of Lebanese civilians and dozens of Israelis.
http://news.yahoo.com/...
More than 800 people in Lebanon and Israel have died since fighting erupted -- 732 on the Lebanese side and 122 on the Israeli side.
http://news.yahoo.com/...
FoxNews/AP
Fox has the same two stories as AP/Yahoo, but both contain the same non-specific wording as the first story above.
More than 800 people have died in the monthlong conflict, hundreds of Lebanese civilians and dozens of Israelis.
http://www.foxnews.com/...
CNN
CNN continues to use Lebanese security forces figures, which apparently do not subdivide the dead into civilians and non-civilians. As I've said, I believe these figures are less reliable than health ministry figures, which are derived from hospital, mortuary, and police statistics, and are the product of a bureaucracy relatively more `routinized' and experienced with this kind of work and, considering the circumstances, more `objective' in going about recording and confirming data.
Thirty-one days of fighting have killed 123 Israelis, including 40 civilians, and 861 Lebanese, mostly civilians, according to authorities in those countries.
http://www.cnn.com/...
Reuters
Reuters continues its long-standing practice of not attributing its Lebanon statistics, which very likely derive from data provided by the Lebanese security forces' casualty reports. I imagine that uncorrected duplication has led to Reuter's unusually high figures for the numbers killed in Lebanon.
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice flew to New York in anticipation of a vote on ending the war, in which at least 1,033 people in Lebanon and 123 Israelis have been killed.
http://today.reuters.com/...
AFP
As with Reuters, I believe the data provided to AFP is coming from a government source relying less certain of its figures than the Lebanese health ministry.
More than 1,000 Lebanese civilians -- some 30 percent children aged under 12 -- have been killed by Israeli attacks. Nearly a million have fled their homes, sparking what relief agencies described as a humanitarian crisis.
A total of 82 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Lebanon since Israel launched its offensive on July 12.
There have also been 38 Israeli civilians killed by Hezbollah rocket fire ...
http://www.afp.com/...
BBC
The latest news from BBC does not provide any casualty figures or estimates.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/...
Please donate to the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, at www.ifrc.org, to assist Lebanon.