The
Palestinian Ministry of Education and Higher Education issued an infographic that claims that some 12,700 students have been killed in Gaza.
Their source? They don't say.
The latest Gaza health ministry list of "martyrs" from September counts about 7,150 children between ages of 6-17 out of the total of 34,000 they counted at the time. That's about 21%.
If we are to believe the PA education ministry, of the deaths not counted between that report and now, about 11,000 people have been killed - of whom about 4,700, or 43% are school aged children, more than double the rate of the only list of names of the dead.
Which is statistically highly improbable.
We've already seen that the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics publishes, as factual, Hamas statistics that contradict the health ministry numbers. The PCBS is part of the Palestinian Authority, not Hamas, but they happily use Hamas numbers because they are more anti-Israel.
It looks like the education ministry is not basing its count on the list of names, but rather on the same Hamas lies that the PCBS parrots. Hamas claims that some 17,581 children have been killed in Gaza. Assuming that about 2/3 of them are school aged - which is what the MoH list indicates - one comes up with a number very close to the 11,913 school age children in the MoE poster above.
The Ramallah-based education ministry doesn't have a list of students killed. If it did, it would publish the names. Instead, it takes Hamas statistics and massages them to make it appear like it has very specific fatality numbers.
Keep in mind that the EU pours money into the PA to ensure that it adheres to the highest standards of government responsibility and professionalism. The PCBS itself
brags about how professional its methodology is.
In the case of Gaza statistics, the Palestinian Authority is no better than Hamas.