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Wednesday, July 24, 2024
Wednesday, July 24, 2024
Elder of Ziyon
As we've mentioned previously, the Lancet in December published a correspondence that claimed to indicate that the Gaza ministry of health statistics were accurate by comparing the death rates per thousand of the ministry's numbers and the presumably accurate UNRWA staff death numbers. It found that the death rate per thousand of UNRWA workers was even higher than what the Hamas health ministry reported, thereby indicating that the ministry numbers were trustworthy.
Here was their chart showing the cumulative death rates for the first four weeks of the war for both sets of reported deaths:
Since then, however, the death rate per thousand of UNRWA workers has been significantly lower than that of all deaths reported by the ministry of health.
Here is that same chart style of cumulative deaths for the eight months starting from the date the previous chart ended in November:
Since November, the death rate of UNRWA workers has consistently been half that reported by the MoH.
That's eight months of data compared to one month of data - yet that single letter is still cited widely by others as proof that the ministry of health is reporting numbers accurately.
This is even more striking knowing that UNRWA has been complaining about Israeli airstrikes on their schools. If Israel has increased the number of strikes on schools, wouldn't we be expecting the number of UNRWA staff killed to be increasing, not decreasing?
Or is Israel simply doing a good job at killing Hamas terrorists in the schools and largely avoiding civilians?
You cannot have it both ways. If the Lancet believes that the first month proves the ministry of health was giving accurate numbers, then it must believe that every month since then it has been consistently exaggerating the number of casualties by a factor of 100%.
I cannot find a single honest researcher who has pointed this out - and I have emailed to some of the authors of this and other articles that reference it. Not one response.
The original Lancet methodology pretending to support MoH statistics is provably, consistently wrong. And the journal is not intellectually honest enough to point this out.
That isn't science. It is propaganda. Any real scientist or mathematician should be offended at how statistics are being twisted to support Hamas lies.
(For the record, I do not believe that UNRWA death rates are a good proxy for total Gaza death rates to begin with. If UNRWA workers are either Hamas members or facilitate Hamas, we would expect a higher UNRWA death rate. Moreover, the underlying assumption in the Lancet article is that Israel is killing indiscriminately, but all UNRWA workers are working-age adults so they are not an accurate demographic sample of Gaza. As we've seen, a disproportionate number of UNRWA workers killed are male compared to their workforce. If anything, the UNRWA statistics prove Israel is not targeting Gazans indiscriminately.)
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