Caution needed with Gaza casualty figures

[King_David]

By Anthony Reuben Head of statistics, BBC News

War zones are not easy places to collect statistics.

In the Gaza conflict, most news organisations have been quoting from the office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), which leads a group of humanitarian organisations known as the Protection Cluster.

Its recent report said that as of 6 August, 1,843 Palestinians had been killed and 66 Israelis and one Thai national since Israel launched Operation Protective Edge on 8 July.

Of those Palestinians, the status of 279 could not be identified, at least 1,354 were civilians, including 415 children and 214 women, the UN body reported.

So there were 216 members of armed groups killed, and another 725 men who were civilians. Among civilians, more than three times as many men were killed as women, while three times as many civilian men were killed as fighters.

The UN report carries a caveat with its figures: "Data on fatalities and destruction of property is consolidated by the Protection and Shelter clusters based on preliminary information, and is subject to change based on further verifications."

There has been some research suggesting that men in general are more likely to die in conflict than women, although no typical ratio is given.


http://m.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-28688179

[sabbat hunter]

1. I get the feeling that

the actual number of terrorists, currently at 216, killed is actually much higher.

This happened during the last conflict between Israel and hamas, and the number of terrorists in Gaza killed ended up being much higher than Hamas originally admitted to.

[King_David]

2. IDF indiscriminately killing in Gaza? Data says no

BBC, NYT and other analyses of civilian death toll reveal fighting-age men vastly overrepresented among the dead

IInternational media outlets, including The New York Times and the BBC, have raised serious questions regarding Gaza civilian casualty figures as recorded by health officials both in the Strip and abroad.

The outlets maintain that the hard data does not support the notion that the Israel Defense Forces is engaged in “indiscriminate” killing of unarmed residents in the Palestinian enclave, as was suggested by several international leaders over the past month.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-indiscriminately-killing-in-gaza-data-says-no/

[FBaggins]

3. Hard to grasp how anyone questions this.

Last edited Fri Aug 8, 2014, 04:31 PM - Edit history (1)

If you just looked at the devastation of entire portions of cities... one would expect tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of deaths.

The only way that didn't happen is because someone went out of their way to get civilians out of there before the bombs struck.

And we know that sure as heck wasn't Hamas.

[King_David]

4. Agreed

[King_David]

5. Much nt

[4now]

6. Maybe Israel only murdered 400 of their neighbors children

instead of 450 innocent children.

448 children killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza, UN says
http://www.democraticunderground.com/113477086

"Today I saw a picture of a weeping Palestinian man holding a plastic carrier bag of meat. It was his son. He’d been shredded (the hospital’s word) by an Israeli missile attack – apparently using their fab new weapon, fléchette bombs. You probably know what those are – hundreds of small steel darts packed around explosive which tear the flesh off humans. The boy was Mohammed Khalaf al-Nawasra. He was four years old.
I suddenly found myself thinking that it could have been one of my kids in that bag, and that thought upset me more than anything has for a long time. "
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10025353523

[King_David]

7. How do you get those figures ?

On what calculations did you use?

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

8. "The boy was Mohammed Khalaf al-Nawasra. He was four years old."

You really are cold. I don't believe that words can actually describe fully just how frigid you really are when it comes to the deaths of innocents.

[4now]

9. The death toll in the Gaza-Israel conflict

From the Washington Post
1396 were Palestinian civilians. Of those, 222 were women and 418 were children.

"Statistics on death tolls during active conflict are often difficult to track accurately. A note on our sourcing:
For death toll numbers from within Gaza, we receive daily or sometimes twice daily updates from the head of the Information Management Unit in the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territories field office in the West Bank. The field office gets updates from multiple sources within Gaza, including U.N. agencies and the Palestinian Medical Authorities. They then create and continually update a spreadsheet of all available data. These numbers are often not complete, but represent the best available data and do tend to clarify over time. Israel disputes the numbers provided by the United Nations, saying that a large number of those killed, particularly males over 18, were armed terrorists and not civilians.

For death toll numbers of Israeli soldiers, we rely on Israel Defense Forces press releases and their Twitter account. For Israeli civilian deaths, we rely on news reports and our reporters in Israel and Gaza. These numbers are similarly tentative initially but clarify over time."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/world/gaza-counter/

There are other organizations counting the casualties in Gaza. You can use any that you think are better.
People can argue about how many of the adult casualties were Hamas or civilian(like the article said) but there is not much argument about how many children Israel killed in Gaza
at least 400 dead Palestinian children.
I wonder what would be an acceptable number of murdered children.