[HT Insty] Like every time the original news affirms the favored (or dictated) narrative of the presstitutes and mediatamites, the original story is trumpeted (or tromboned? ;)) far and wide on Page A1 , even when absurd and/or libelous on its face — then the correction or rectification gets printed on the new media equivalent of Page B39.
In this case, they have been loudly and uncritically repeating the 30,000+ civilian deaths figure put out by HamaSS. (Some right-leaning papers hedge by pointing out the source and saying this cannot be verified independently.) The United Nebbich too has been taking these figures at face value (at least in public). Useful idiots of radical Islam, judeophobes, and deluded fools keep citing the 30,000+ figure in support of absolutely baseless claims of (a lawyer pointed this out to me) the one crime that they hope they can drag things into the International Clownshow Criminal Court.
Marc Lawrence on Quora mentioned this in passing, so I looked around for a source. Yes, none other than the UN (!) has walked back and revised the statistics downward by 50%:
The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) revised its child fatality figure from the Gaza war sharply downward, reporting more than 14,500 deaths on May 6 but then 7,797 on May 8. OCHA also revised downward its figure for women fatalities from more than 9,500 deaths to 4,959 deaths. The Jerusalem Post first reported the changes on May 11.
The UN attributed its original, higher figures to the Hamas-controlled Government Media Office (GMO) in Gaza, whose figures OCHA has cited continually for the past two months. The UN gave no source for the lower figures in its May 8 update, but the figures precisely match those in a May 2 report from a different Hamas-controlled organization, the Gaza Ministry of Health.
[…]
In early April, the Gaza Ministry of Health admitted it had “incomplete data” to document more than 10,000 of the deaths it had previously reported. Subsequently, the ministry indicated that it did not have names for more than 10,000 of the individuals it claimed to be deceased. As of April 1, the ministry also stopped repeating the claim it made since the first weeks of the war that 70 percent of the dead were women and children, even suggesting the media invented this number. Meanwhile, the GMO continues to promote the 70 percent figure while revising its own numbers upwards, to remain consistent with that claim.
Read the whole thing. The revised numbers are roughly in the same ballpark as unofficial Israeli estimates, by the way. Which in fact, given that some 9,000+ HamaSS Einsatzkommandos “combatants” have been killed, implies an impressively low civilian:combatant kill ratio for asymmetric warfare[*] in dense urban environments. |