Let’s Evaluate Some Sources!
The Gaza Ministry of Health:
Administered by Hamas, a Hamas-led agency. The UN, WHO, and Human Rights Watch has traditionally considered total numbers from the organization reliable, but the US has doubted the information. The United Nations has a strong anti-Israel bias (each color indicates a different source) and the US has a strong pro-Israel bias. The WHO is administered by the United Nations, and is this subject to the same bias the UN holds. Aside from the fact that Hamas is a terrorist organization that does not care about Palestinian welfare, there are other significant issues with the ministry’s data collection and methodology: namely they do not distinguish between civilian deaths and militant/non-civilian deaths. It also attributes all deaths caused by Hamas misfires to “Israeli aggression.” This is not a small number of deaths that could be attributed incorrectly. Hamas has fired over 7,000 rockets at Israel as of October 28, and that number has only kept growing since. For example, the rocket misfire that destroyed the Al-Ahli hospital alone killed between 100-300 Palestinians. All of those deaths were attributed to Israeli aggression. And that is just one rocket. Due to the way they keep data, it is impossible for anyone to know how many deaths are results of Israeli sources or Hamas sources.
Conclusion: The ministry of health in Gaza is not accurate and should not be trusted for a variety of reasons. While the numbers given by this organization may come somewhat close to capturing the general scale of Palestinian death, it incorrectly places each death at the hands of Israelis. There is no other good source for how many Palestinian deaths there are total, so it is difficult to verify the numbers (although historically, the numbers themselves have done fairly well against scrutiny). But the method of collection, biased source, and other shenanigans about how things are calculated make this source unreliable.
I will be doing more of these fact checks on other sources. This is my first one. I also plan to tackle Al-Jazeera, Haaretz, the IDF, Times of Israel, algeminer, and more. Comment below if you’d like a specific source evaluated, but know that it’s also possible to check a lot of this informations yourself. For more info on how to do this an media literacy in general, please see this post.
