Palestinian Authority lying statistics (update)

I had missed this from last month:

The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said Tuesday it has recorded a population of 12.1 million people, of whom 4.6 million live in the occupied territories and the remainder abroad.

In a statement, the head of the statistics bureau said that in 1948, "1.4 million Palestinians lived in 1,300 towns and localities in historic Palestine".

After the war that followed Israel's creation, "Israel took control of 774 towns and villages, destroyed 531 and committed 70 killings and massacres in which 15,000 people died", she said.

I can only find one source that claims 15,000 Arab casualties of the war, from a 1995 World Political Almanac quoted in a Wikipedia article. I have no idea if it is referenced correctly.  (UPDATE: Apparently this is accurate according to the World Political Almanac, but I don't know their source.)

Most histories of the War of Independence show perhaps 7,000- 10,000 total Arab losses. Benny Morris quotes the antismeitic known liar, the Mufti of Jerusalem, as claiming that about 12,000 Palestinian Arabs had died.

In short, there is no known reliable source for this statistic, which the PCBS has been pushing for years.

While the PCBS doesn't claim explicitly that Jews massacred 15,000 people, it is broadly implied here, and not mentioning that there was, you know, a war of attempted extermination of Israel. A war that incidentally killed over 6,000 Jews, some 5% of all men, women and children in Israel.

If the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics lies about statistics in 1948, then how reliable is it in reporting statistics today?