Making up numbers out of thin air: "Nine out of ten children in Gaza suffer trauma"

This morning, Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch tweeted this:

His source was the ridiculously biased Middle East Monitor which is essentially a Hamas/Muslim Brotherhood mouthpiece.

Middle East Monitor got the statistic from the equally biased Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, which wrote a report about it.

Actually, "report" is way too generous. It was essentially a ten page slideshow with minimal text.

Here is the "source:"

The small print says "Based on a random sample conducted by Euro-Med Monitor."

A random sample of whom?

There is no methodology described. Did they interview children? Parents? Doctors? How did they randomize the people they sampled? Who diagnosed them with trauma - psychiatrists or parents? What was the exact question asked?

We don't know.

What we do know is that the Euro Med Monitor has, in the past, has shown it is pro-terror and regularly lies about Gaza deaths. In fact, their most recent report on Gaza shows that the pattern continues. For example, it counts Bashar Ahmed Ibrahim Samour as an innocent child when Fatah refers to him as a "hero martyr."  It says

Killing four civilians in Nuseirat

On May 12, an Israeli aircraft bombed with a single missile a group of civilians in the Nuseirat camp in the central Gaza Strip, killing four of them: Hamza Mahmoud Al-Hor, 25, Muhammad Abdel Moneim Shaheen, 27, and Muhammad Mu›in al-Qarah, 26, Ahmed Walid Al Talaa, 29.

All four of them were Islamic Jihad terrorists. Here are Shaheen and Talaa. 

An NGO with a history of lying makes an unsupported claim based on no written methodology - and gets quoted by a leader of an international human rights group as being accurate.

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