These numbers matter—first, because of the dignity of those killed or still living.
Between May 6 and May 8, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) revised its estimates of how many women and children had died in Gaza. The numbers appeared to drop drastically: first, it reported at least 24,000 dead women and children, and two days later, it reported exactly 12,756 “identified” dead women and children. One could be forgiven for wondering whether the UN had raised about 6,700 Gazan children and 4,500 Gazan women from the dead.
OCHA has provided a running body count since the beginning of the Gaza war, and it currently stands at 34,844. This figure was generated by Hamas and is apparently accepted, give or take a few thousand, by Israelis. On a podcast last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu estimated that Israel had killed roughly 14,000 combatants and said the country regretted the deaths of another 16,000 Palestinian civilians. The apparent downward revision was made without any accompanying statement to explain the change or sudden precision. Israel’s military did not make a big deal about it either, probably because there is no way to sound good when celebrating a reduction in the number of children you have killed.
Many noticed anyway. David Adesnik, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, gave the most detailed account of what had happened. For about two months, OCHA had been repeating numbers from Hamas’s Government Media Office, and on May 8 it switched back to Hamas’s Ministry of Health, its source at the beginning of the war. The Ministry of Health is acknowledged to be the more reliable of the two, and it is unclear why OCHA switched to the worse of the two sources, or switched back. A UN spokesperson, Farhan Haq, later explained that the Ministry of Health was “for whatever reason, given the conditions on the ground, unresponsive.” But the Ministry of Health kept publishing statistics in the interim. OCHA didn’t use them.
Yes it’s difficult to get accurate numbers when a) the aggressor controls the population registry b) the aggressor destroys the records, bombs all the hospitals, and government buildings c) the aggressor repeatedly bombs rescuers on the scene of bombings d) blow up buildings that are still standing which may very well contain more bodies.
Who’d have thunk?! But moreso, who the fuck thinks this is some sort of gotcha.
Don’t forget restricting and killing reporters!
More reporters than in any war ever. All in a few months.
We may never know how many; I suspect more than will be guesstimated.
They killed all the people in Gaza who would be keeping track of this kind of thing, there simply isn’t any infrastructure left. Gazans are eating hand to mouth because that’s all they can do right now (if they’re the lucky ones).
Is israel numbers also confusing and unreliable because they revised down the 7 of october attacks number and the long history of lying? This article seems like a way to downplay the seriousness of the war.
TLDR from the article:
Israel’s count for death toll in Gaza is relatively non-existent, imprecise, and/or not available to the general public for scrutiny.
We may never know how many; I suspect more than will be guesstimated.
Archive link.
Look! More genocide apologia from The Atlantic!
The Atlantic – Bias and Credibility
Bias Rating: Left-Center
Factual Reporting: High
Country: USA
MBFC’s Country Freedom Rank: Mostly Free
Media Type: Magazine
Traffic/Popularity: High Traffic
MBFC Credibility Rating: High Credibility
