Dear Director,
We would like to bring to your kind attention the recent correction by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which has drastically revised downwards its number of victims related to the ongoing conflict in Gaza, reporting a halving, in particular, the estimated number of women and children.
This happened after months of accusations by important world statisticians, according to whom the numbers produced by the Gaza authorities could not be considered realistic, in light of every conflict, which has never reported that constant growth in deaths, nor that mortality ratio among men, women and children.
In this regard, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy released a report in January that showed major discrepancies in casualty reporting. The research concluded that such discrepancies were most likely caused by manipulation. Professor Abraham Wyner also told Tablet Magazine that the death rate published on all news sites is unnatural and increasing too steadily.
In light of the above, we note that your newspaper did not report the news as represented above and that, vice versa, the data that continues to be published and disseminated as truthful concerns the number of victims reported by the “Ministry of Health” , run by Hamas, a terrorist organization for our country, the European Union, the United States and Canada.
Despite this evidence, published and disseminated data continues to report news showing that around 35,000 people have been killed in Gaza, including over 9,500 women and over 14,500 children. The clear intent of the Hamas Ministry of Health is to make people believe that most of the victims are civilian women and children rather than men, potential combatants. The number of fighters killed, in fact, has never been specified. We also remember that Hamas, which governs Gaza and which publishes these data, which you disclosed without more reliable evidence, has been included among the terrorist organizations by the European Union.
Even if the United Nations’ decision to rectify the number of victims comes too late to remedy the very serious damage already caused not only to the State of Israel, illegitimately and unfortunately accused of genocide, but to all the Jews of the world, the object of hatred.
Continuing to spread incorrect information, never corrected in light of the over-represented news, represents in all respects the dissemination of false information and presupposes the failure to verify the truthfulness of the news and the reliability of its source.
We therefore invite your newspaper to correct the information provided and to promptly report the news which is the subject of correct information. With the senses of the warmest consideration.
Solomon Discrimination Observatory
President
Lawyer Barbara Pontecorvo
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The response of the director Andrea Fabozzi
Dear President Pontecorvo, I respond to this letter of yours – which at the same time you sent, and you would like to let us know, also to the Association of Journalists and to a couple of guarantor authorities (the wrong ones) as if alluding to some form of complaint – above all to help the our readers to orient themselves in the confusion of war news, confusion that is very often, as in this case, intentional.
I’m not answering because I hope we can understand each other, that hope collapsed when I read that in your opinion it was the United Nations that caused “very serious damage” to the State of Israel by spreading numbers that you don’t think are correct (but we believe they are, I’ll explain ) which in any case testify to a terrible massacre for which the State of Israel is responsible and this is much more than “very serious damage”. For our readers, therefore, I summarize the facts thanks to the help of Chiara Cruciati and Andrea Capocci who wrote about this with precision and punctuality in the manifesto, which therefore needs absolutely nothing to correct.
1) It is not true that the UN agency OCHA has revised the number of victims in Gaza downwards. Many media outlets, relaunching an article from the Jerusalem Post, spread this news. But the UN itself has denied that there has been a revision of the number of victims.
2) On May 8, the Gaza Ministry of Health provided two numbers regarding victims. One (24 thousand) as of April 30 concerns victims whose identity and date of birth are known. The other concerns the total victims, including those still in the process of being identified (and there are 35 thousand). In addition, another 10,000 people are estimated to be missing, many of whom were probably left under the rubble of the bombings.
3) The OCHA report referenced by the Jerusalem Post does not claim that the number of victims has been reduced, as anyone on the site can verify. In fact, it reports both figures provided by the Ministry of Health, but uses the list with the victims’ personal details and date of birth to establish the proportion between men, women and minors. Therefore, the “new” death toll is not the result of an independent verification, but is also provided by the Gaza health authorities. Therefore, if the total number of victims (35 thousand) is not considered reliable, neither should the “revised downwards” figure of 24 thousand be considered reliable, because it comes from the same source.
4) Obviously it is legitimate to have doubts about the reliability of the numbers provided by the health ministry of a country at war. But so far those who have examined them closely consider them reliable, again for various reasons:
– The figures of the Gaza health authorities have also been questioned in the past. For example, in 2014 the number of victims of the “Protective Edge” military operation conducted by Israel was estimated independently by Israel, the Gaza Ministry of Health and the UN, arriving at very close figures (2,125 for Israel, 2,310 for the ministry, 2,251 for the UN).
– Israeli intelligence sources told the Israeli news site Local Call that Israeli services also consider the numbers provided by the Gaza health ministry to be reliable. In recent months, the Israeli army has confirmed several times that it uses these statistics to evaluate its impact.
– A group of demographers analyzed the data (names, ages, identity document numbers) relating to the first 7 thousand victims of the war in Gaza released by the Ministry of Health, verifying that the identity card numbers have the statistical characteristics expected would be expected from an authentic sample of Gazans, and this makes manipulation of seven thousand names very unlikely. The analysis was published by the authoritative scientific journal Lancet.
– Another research team compared data provided by the Gaza authorities with data on casualties among UNRWA employees, which are independently recorded. The researchers confirmed that the two sources of information are consistent with each other. This analysis was also published in the Lancet.
– The breakdown of statistics on Palestinian casualties in Gaza provided by the Gaza Ministry of Health appears consistent with geospatial data obtained via satellite on buildings damaged by Israeli attacks, a study published in the British Medical Journal Global Health shows.
– The main international health agencies, such as the World Health Organization, and the main NGOs present in the area consider these figures reliable.
