A friend with whom I regularly discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conflict recently told me that The Atlantic is the place to go for “serious news” on the topic. I subscribed through their website, and the first thing that caught my eye was a short piece dated May 17 by Graeme Wood entitled “The U.N.’s Gaza Statistics Make No Sense.”
The article analyzed a recent update by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the occupied Palestinian territory (OCHA oPt) on the death toll during Israel’s assault on Gaza. (The regular updates are published here.) Wood concludes that the office “jeopardized its credibility by repeating dubious numbers, long after the reasons for doubting them had been explained. That credibility is a precious resource.” Wood proposes that Israel embed more reporters with its troops to counteract these fake “statistics from Hamas.”
This news story had been widely reported, and (quite surprisingly) many media outlets accurately reported the basic facts. As an American trauma surgeon who just returned from working in Gaza, who has edited books on the human rights dimension of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the University of California Press and O/R Books in London, and who has a master’s in public health from Harvard, I figured this article would let me assess the credibility of this “serious news” source.
I would encourage Wood to spend five minutes in any hospital in Gaza and then see if he ever repeats such a claim.
I started off skeptical, but I was still shocked to see the sloppiness with which The Atlantic reported this story. Wood claims the “most detailed account of what had happened” came from a right-wing think tank’s Twitter account, but there are much more serious sources. Three days before Wood’s piece was published, Israel’s leading newspaper Haaretz provided a detailed explanation that answered virtually every question Wood raised in his piece. To be sure, the mundane nature of the updates wouldn’t have made for such a salacious article as the one The Atlantic published. Nevertheless, they are a simple matter, the facts of which are widely known.
As Haaretz reported, the previous total count was a combination of media reports collected by the Hamas-run Information (or Media) Office and the Ministry of Health data. “There’s about another 10,000 plus bodies who still have to be fully identified,” stated U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq, “and so then the details of those—which of those are children, which of those are women—that will be re-established once the full identification process is complete.” Wood quotes Mr. Haq, but only to cast doubt and confusion about the updates. Dr. Mark Perlmutter and I described the state of many bodies brought into the hospital morgues of Gaza: “burned until they resembled blistered hotdogs more than human beings, shredded to pieces such that they can only be buried in mass graves.” Is it really such a shock that many such corpses cannot be definitively identified, but nevertheless are a human being who was killed? I would encourage Wood to spend five minutes in any hospital in Gaza and then see if he ever repeats such a claim.
Wood even stated that he doesn’t know why OCHA oPt relied on the Media Office in Gaza instead of the Ministry of Health, but the reason was widely reported:
A Reutersarticle from the same day as the Haaretz piece discussed a World Health Organization briefing on the same changes: “Nothing wrong with the data, the overall data (more than 35,000 dead) are still the same,” said WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier at a press conference in Geneva. Mr. Lindmeier went on to explain that it is normal “for death tolls to shift in conflicts, recalling that Israel had revised down its own death toll from the Octoer 7 Hamas attacks [from 1,400] to 1,200 after checks.”
Even CNN managed to properly convey the basic facts:
In other words if any single piece of information about a corpse is unknown—name, ID number, date of birth, and whatever else the Ministry of Health considers essential to full documentation—then that person is counted in the overall count but not specified in the breakdown of men, women, children, and elderly. “Two officials from the Palestinian Ministry of Health have told CNN that although the ministry keeps a separate death toll for identified and unidentified individuals, the total........