April 17 is "Palestinian Prisoners Day."
For the occasion, PA Commission of Prisoners Affairs and the Palestinian Prisoners Club released a report saying that Israel has arrested about one million Palestinians since 1967.
This was widely reported in Arabic media, even beyond the Arab world to Sky News Arabia and elsewhere.
It is an easily provable lie.
Because the April 2015 report from the same groups said that the number of Palestinians arrested from 1967 to 2015 was 850,000.
150,000 arrests in one year?
In 2014, they said the number was 800,000.
That number had been pretty constant since 2006, when they claimed 700,000.
As I have shown in the past, these numbers are completely made up.
150,000 arrests in a year would mean over 400 a day and nearly 3000 arrests a week.
PCHR actually counts arrests. Last week's report listed about 80 arrests for the week which, annualized, would come to about 4,200 arrests a year.
Their annual reports from 2014 said 4,800 had been arrested that year, which was the year of the Gaza war and saw the highest number of arrests in a while; the previous two years had about 2500 and 1200 arrests respectively. Even Addameer, which also claims inflated numbers of arrests, counts several thousand a year.
That is a far cry from the 50,000-150,000 a year that the Palestinian Authority is now claiming.
These numbers are absurd and completely fictional. Yet previous versions of these lies have been quoted by mainstream media and the UN as if they are based on actual facts.
Because what reporter has the time or incentive to debunk official PA-sanctioned malarkey when it fits in with existing media bias?
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