…how can you believe them? What is the credibility of their source? What is the credibility of who is reporting them?
Before you answer, please read this excerpt from Ari Blaff’s article at natinalpost.com:
The United Nations has significantly adjusted Palestinian casualty figures for the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip, halving the number of women and children previously reported killed.
While more than 9,500 women and 14,500 children were reported among the fatalities by the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) on May 6, two days later that number was revised significantly downward. Today, under 5,000 women and 8,000 children are now officially listed by the UN as casualties.
David Adesnik, director of research at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), told the National Post he suspects the discrepancy stems from the UN’s decision to quietly stop using figures provided by the Hamas-run Government Media Office (GMO).
“So you see May 6 and before, the GMO (is listed as a source); all of a sudden, May 8, they don’t cite a source,” Adesnik told the Post over the phone on Sunday. He pointed to the similarity between the new figures and those from a May 2 Gaza Health Ministry (GMH) report as a tip-off suggesting the UN had ditched the media office’s figures in favour of those from the health ministry, “even though they don’t say (the Gaza) Health Ministry in the thing.”
The differences between the two datasets was investigated by Gabriel Epstein of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an American think-tank, who found in late March they yielded “wildly different and irreconcilable results, indicating that the media reports methodology is dramatically understating fatalities among adult males, the demographic most likely to be combatants.”
So what do we have here? We have two sets of hamas “data” – hamas being those accuracy-above-all folks who told us Israel bombed and destroyed a hospital, killing 500 people…which turned out to be hamas misfiring a rocket into a hospital parking lot and, other than cosmetic damage to the entrance, leaving the hospital intact.
This is who we are supposed to believe.
Moreover, as the article points out, the “data” provide no indication Israel has taken out hamas fighters. All we see is generic gender and age numbers…again, from a source with absolutely 0% reliability. If you buy what they’re selling, therefore, you might assume that hamas’ fighting force remains 100% intact.
And what entity is collecting and passing along these “data”? Why, the United Nations; an organization which has been giving Israel the back of its hand for decades.
And where is the disclaimer that, since hamas embeds its troops and equipment among the civilian population, the only possible way for Israel to address them is to attack in areas where civilian casualties are impossible to avoid?
Nowhere, that’s where…
…just like where any scintilla of credibility for these data or the UN’s reporting of them is.
