The numbers
For many months now, it seems the whole world, including the press, has just decided to accept the death toll numbers of Gazans given out by Hamas. As I have written before, that number is questionable ... for one thing, it doesn't differentiate between civilians and combatants. But about a week ago, something changed.
The UN lowered its estimate of the death toll in Gaza. They've come to the conclusion that there are actually about 10,000 fewer deaths in Gaza than they have been telling us ... more like 24,000 than 35,000. Those extra 10,000 dead are hypothetical .... there are no bodies, no identities.
You can read about it in TIME magazine ... What We Know About the Death Toll in Gaza
Here's what Haviv Rettig Gur of The Times of Israel posted on Twitter/X here on May 15 ...
The long and short of the UN's lower Gazan death toll figure is that on May 8 the UN finally stopped relying on made-up Gaza Media Office numbers and started to rely on Gaza Health Ministry figures, which have been dramatically lower for months.
And no, the 10,000 "unidentified" are not existing bodies that have not yet been identified, they're media reports of casualty numbers that no one can actually connect to any bodies or reports of missing persons.
The UN is admitting that the 35,000 figure was pure Hamas propaganda, and that no one at any point in the international institutional pipeline thought that was a problem.
I don't know how much we can trust the Hamas-run Ministry of Health numbers either. But I'm actually surprised at the basic incompetence of UN officials thinking it was a good idea to prefer "media office" numbers to those of health officials.
And those totals include combatants. How many? Is it 6,000, as Hamas once claimed, or 14,000 as Israeli battlefield commanders estimated? Who knows. Certainly not the UN.
And all this comes with the vital and important caveat: We're still talking about many thousands of dead civilians. This isn't a "gotcha" moment that we just get to walk away from. That UN officials, international organizations and western media outlets have been lying, whether willfully or out of raw incompetence, does not exonerate us of responsibility - and a vital strategic necessity - to fight with as little civilian harm as possible.
The UN lowered its estimate of the death toll in Gaza. They've come to the conclusion that there are actually about 10,000 fewer deaths in Gaza than they have been telling us ... more like 24,000 than 35,000. Those extra 10,000 dead are hypothetical .... there are no bodies, no identities.
You can read about it in TIME magazine ... What We Know About the Death Toll in Gaza
Here's what Haviv Rettig Gur of The Times of Israel posted on Twitter/X here on May 15 ...
The long and short of the UN's lower Gazan death toll figure is that on May 8 the UN finally stopped relying on made-up Gaza Media Office numbers and started to rely on Gaza Health Ministry figures, which have been dramatically lower for months.
And no, the 10,000 "unidentified" are not existing bodies that have not yet been identified, they're media reports of casualty numbers that no one can actually connect to any bodies or reports of missing persons.
The UN is admitting that the 35,000 figure was pure Hamas propaganda, and that no one at any point in the international institutional pipeline thought that was a problem.
I don't know how much we can trust the Hamas-run Ministry of Health numbers either. But I'm actually surprised at the basic incompetence of UN officials thinking it was a good idea to prefer "media office" numbers to those of health officials.
And those totals include combatants. How many? Is it 6,000, as Hamas once claimed, or 14,000 as Israeli battlefield commanders estimated? Who knows. Certainly not the UN.
And all this comes with the vital and important caveat: We're still talking about many thousands of dead civilians. This isn't a "gotcha" moment that we just get to walk away from. That UN officials, international organizations and western media outlets have been lying, whether willfully or out of raw incompetence, does not exonerate us of responsibility - and a vital strategic necessity - to fight with as little civilian harm as possible.
posted by crystal | 9:46 PM
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