October 28, 2023
IT'S NOT DISINFORMATION WHEN WE DO IT:
Palestinian Death Statistics, Doubted by the U.S., Remain a Subject of Controversy (Yaroslav Trofimov, Margherita Stancati and Abu Bakr Bashir, Oct. 28, 2023, WSJ)
In the two other large wars since Hamas seized control of Gaza from the Palestinian Authority in 2007, however, the overall numbers of the Ministry of Health largely aligned with statistics compiled by the U.N. and Israel. The Palestinian toll for the 50-day war between Israel and Hamas in 2014 was 2,310 people according to the Ministry of Health, 2,251 people according to the U.N. and 2,125 people according to an Israeli government investigation. The main disagreement was about what proportion of the victims at that time were made up of civilians.Despite Hamas's political control in Gaza, many of the doctors and bureaucrats compiling the statistics are not affiliated with the Islamist movement and the past accuracy of casualty statistics gives credence to current numbers, some officials with the U.N. and with nongovernment organizations operating in Palestinian territories say."We believe that the numbers being reported in Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories, they may not be perfectly accurate on a minute-to-minute basis but they grossly reflect the level of death and injury on both sides of the conflict," Michael Ryan of the World Health Organization's Health Emergencies Program said at a press conference last week.Some 1,400 Israelis, most of them civilians, were killed in the Hamas raid on southern Israel on Oct. 7, and more than 220 others were taken to Gaza as hostages, according to the Israeli authorities. Four hostages, all of them women, have since been released.The Gaza Ministry of Health numbers don't differentiate between civilians and combatants. But the ministry's current statistics indicate a much higher proportion of women and children among the fatalities of the continuing Israeli bombing campaign than in the 2008-2009 and the 2014 wars.While adult males accounted for 62% of the deaths in 2014 and 61% in 2008-2009, according to U.N. data, they make up only 34% of fatalities in the current conflict, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 28, 2023 10:02 AM