| Submit your comments on this article |
| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| Mortality in Gaza: lies and statistics |
| 2024-04-26 |
| [IsraelNationalNews] The UN, UNWRA, WHO, numerous NGOs, senior British and American politicians and all the British mainstream news networks, including their flagship programmes, have all been consistently misleading people about the number of deaths in Gaza. But in the last month a series of articles in various publications have started to question this consensus. It is not clear why it has taken so long for this fightback, but what is clear is that the tide is turning. One of the first major articles questioning the anti-Israel consensus was by Abrahm Wyner, an American mathematical statistician, and Professor of Statistics and Data Science at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Published in the American magazine Tablet on 7 March, his piece was called, "How the Gaza Ministry of Health Fakes Casualty Numbers". As Professor Wyner points out, "The main source for the data [about civilian deaths in Gaza] has been the Hamas-controlled Gaza Health Ministry, which now claims more than 30,000 dead, the majority of which it says are children and women." He begins by showing how influential the data from the Palestinian Health Authority has been. He quotes leading American politicians who have unquestioningly used these figures: "Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the number was ’over 25,000’..." Wyner writes. "President Biden himself had earlier cited this figure, asserting that ’too many, too many of the over 27,000 Palestinians killed in this conflict have been innocent civilians and children, including thousands of children.’ The White House also explained that the President ’was referring to publicly available data about the total number of casualties.’" But, Wyner argues, "Here’s the problem with this data: The numbers are not real. That much is obvious to anyone who understands how naturally occurring numbers work. The casualties are not overwhelmingly women and children, and the majority may be Hamas fighters." There are a number of things that are odd about the figures from the Palestinian Health Authority, he writes. First, the graph of total deaths has been increasing since October "with almost metronomical linearity." There have been no irregularities or inconsistencies in the figures (see the graph below, taken from Wyner’s article): Or, as Wyner puts it, "The graph reveals an extremely regular increase in casualties over the period. ... This regularity is almost surely not real. One would expect quite a bit of variation day to day. In fact, the daily reported casualty count over this period averages 270, plus or minus about 15%. This is strikingly little variation. There should be days with twice the average or more and others with half or less." Secondly, Wyner writes, "we should see variation in the number of child casualties that tracks the variation in the number of women. This is because the daily variation in death counts is caused by the variation in the number of strikes on residential buildings and tunnels which should result in considerable variability in the totals but less variation in the percentage of deaths across groups. This is a basic statistical fact about chance variability." "Consequently," he continues, "on the days with many women casualties there should be large numbers of children casualties, and on the days when just a few women are reported to have been killed, just a few children should be reported." In other words, "The daily number of children reported to have been killed is totally unrelated [my emphasis] to the number of women reported." Thirdly, "The daily number of women casualties should be highly correlated with the number of non-women and non-children (i.e., men) reported. Again, this is expected because of the nature of battle. The ebbs and flows of the bombings and attacks by Israel should cause the daily count to move together. But that is not what the data show. Not only is there not a positive correlation, there is a strong negative correlation, which makes no sense at all and establishes the third piece of evidence that the numbers are not real." What do these anomalies suggest, asks Wyner? They are "highly suggestive that a process unconnected or loosely connected to reality was used to report the numbers. Most likely, the Hamas ministry settled on a daily total arbitrarily. We know this because the daily totals increase too consistently to be real. Then they assigned about 70% of the total to be women and children, splitting that amount randomly from day to day. Then they in-filled the number of men as set by the predetermined total. This explains all the data observed." |
| Posted by:Grom the Reflective |
| #2 US decides against sanctioning Haredi battalion, report |
| Posted by: Grom the Reflective 2024-04-26 09:56 |
| #1 Reminds me of the Lancet during the Iraq War in 2003 saying there were 600,000 casualties. |
| Posted by: Ulailet+Thud3602 2024-04-26 06:50 |