The UN's Office for the Coordination of Human Affairs - Occupied Palestinian Territories recently created an interactive webpage (powered by Microsoft PowerBI) where you can create queries for different statistics on casualties in Israel and the territories since 2008.
Some of the statistics are obviously wrong. For example, if you query Israeli civilians killed from Gaza aggression since 2008, it says there were 8 men killed - no women or children.
Yet Daniel Tregerman, 4, of Kibbutz Nahal Oz, was killed from a mortar attack in 2014. Flora Gez and Shula Karlinsky were killed in a terror attack by Gazans who infiltrated Israel in 2011. Altogether I count 23 civilians killed by Gazans since 2008 - 15 Israeli Jews, 4 Israeli Arabs or Druze, 1 Palestinian Arab, 3 foreign workers. This is significantly higher than OCHA's numbers.
As with Amnesty's "Gaza Platform," sexy analytics are no substitute for accuracy, and in both cases the neat interactive graphics imply that the statistics are accurate - and they are not. Not by a long shot.
There's another problem, even beyond publishing blatantly false statistics.
The UN's OCHA-OPT categorizes three of those eight civilians they count to be "settlers" - even though they were all living within the Green Line:
Here is the UN graphic of all Israeli fatalities since 2008. There are three categories - civilians, "civilian-settler" and security forces:
Looking at Israeli civilian victims of terror within Israel outside Gaza shows 41 killed - but 33 of them are called "settlers":
Of course, of the 65 civilians killed in Judea and Samaria attacks, 64 of them are considered "settlers."
How does the UN categorize some Israeli civilians as "settlers?" And, more importantly - why? By creating this artificial distinction, the UN is giving the impression that murdering civilian "settlers" is somehow more justified that killing plain "civilians." Yet international law makes no distinctions between civilians and "settlers."
So why does the UN?
It is difficult to interpret this in any way other than the UN is saying that Jews who live in Judea and Samaria (or even some Jews living in certain sections of Israel itself) are more deserving of death than "real" civilians.
This also implies that the UN considers some areas of Israel even within the Green Line to be "occupied" and its citizens "settlers." Otherwise these statistics make no sense - none of the victims in the south and few within the Green Line could remotely be considered "settlers" unless the UN is using something like the 1947 partition lines as Israel's borders.
OCHA-OPT ignored my request for clarification of their methodology.