As we noted in a post last week, an article by the Indy’s new world affairs editor, Sam Kiley, (“US bombing of Syria after Assad shows a real fear of what’s next“, Dec. 10) included the following:
Some 80 per cent of the 43,000 people killed by Israel in Gaza over the last 13 months have been women and children.
As we noted in a complaint to Indy editors, this statistic is wildly inaccurate.
The journalist was likely basing his claim on a UN report which, in addition to containing serious methodological flaws, narrowly relates to the number of “verified” dead in the first six months of fighting between Israel and Hamas. As the UN report only ‘verified’ 8,119 of those allegedly killed during that period (out of a total of 43,000 according to Hamas), this represents a fraction of the overall alleged Gaza death toll over the last 14 months.
Moreover, an AP study demonstrated that the death rate for women and children in Gaza declined dramatically beginning in April – that is, at the end point of the UN’s six month report on verified casualties. It’s therefore almost certain that a proper study of Gaza war deaths in the eight months after April — even one carried out according to the UN’s skewed methodology — would produce a vastly lower ratio of fatalities for women and children.
Further, the UN report claims that women and children represent nearly 70% of the total verified, not 80%, as Kiley claimed.
Editors upheld our complaint and revised the sentence accordingly
Some 43,000 have been people killed by Israel in Gaza over the past 13 months, according to the ministry of health. The United Nations was able to verify more than 8,100 deaths, and said that nearly 70% of those killed were women and children.
This is the second correction we prompted at the Indy regarding the UN report in question. Further, our CAMERA colleague garnered corrections at Voice of America and Deutsche Welle to similar errors pertaining to the report’s findings.
No need to remind everybody – the Indy is a violently antisemitic rag of the same genre as The Grauniad – loved by Jeremy Corbyn, most trade unions and the IPC (aka BBC).
Extraordinary. Even a child would have questions, unasked by the anti-Israel hacks.
1. How do you go from 8000 verified to 43000 total? Where are the 35000 ‘unverified’ and why are they unverified?
2. If under 70% of verified casualties are women and children, what is the proportion of the Gazan population who are women and children? How are ‘children’ defined (anyone under 18?). Women make up 52% of the population of Gaza. If each woman has an average of 2 children, then the combined percentage of the Gazan population who are women (52%) or children (between 35-42%) is around 90%. The remaining 10% are adult males of fighting age.
3. We can therefore conclude that a <70% women & children casualty rate is well below random.
4. Only a completely biased idiot would not ponder whether many of the unverified casualties are adult males, killed in fighting and unverified by the UN because their bodies are hidden or buried by their fellow killers.
5. Or that the 35000 missing ‘unverified’ casualties are a fiction, a propaganda invention. ‘Ghost casualties’
If one defines ‘adult female’ as a female above 16 (therefore of child-bearing age), and estimating a fertility rate of two children for each woman (it’s actually higher at 3.2) then the % of Gazans who are either a woman or a child is over 80%. So even by the the UN’s statistics, women and children are vastly under-represented at c.77% in their so-called casualty figures.
And who on earth or under it are the missing 35000 unverified ‘ghost casualties’.