How significant is this revision from the United Nations?
Well, it's no surprise to me and many other people
who have been expecting a number like this to be
much closer to the truth.
It's surprising in the sense that it they've
essentially admitted that the numbers that they've been putting out
in terms of the breakdown of men,
women and children, which is extremely important,
is has always been incorrect.
Now, I have read some reports that this is,
you know, this happens often when there is quote UN
quote,
the fog of war. Do you buy that explanation?
Well, the fog of war didn't just automatically or recently
descend,
it's been there from the very beginning.
The point is that you can't put out numbers that
you don't have any accuracy about and pretend as if
they're accurate,
which has been happening since the very beginning.
These numbers have been have been broadcast extremely widely and
picked up everywhere and they didn't weren't accompanied with uncertainty
calculations which would be necessary if it's foggy,
which of course it is.
You just can't come out now and say,
oh, I'm sorry we got it all wrong.
And the way they got it all wrong is an
effort to make Israel look like they're not
actually prosecuting a war, but they're committing a war crime.
And these numbers have been abetting that assertion and people
have accepted it without carefully examining it.
You wrote about this all the way back in March.
What made you realize at that point in time something
could be off with the numbers here?
OK, so that was a pretty easy call.
The the the UN numbers were
were breaking down the casualties into men,
women and children in proportions which almost exactly match the
population proportions.
That couldn't happen, couldn't possibly be true if
fighters which are most exclusively men were being killed.
And even Hamas by mid February was admitting thousands of
its fighters had had died and Israel was reporting over
11 or 12,000 of its fighters.
And so you can't have the breakdown as being reported
be true and at the same time have that many
fighters also died.
So that was what led me to actually look more
deeply into the numbers.
The, the UN clarified the number saying it's based on
the women and children identified with thousands of bodies still
left to identify.
What do you make of that clarification?
Well, I mean
it's hard to understand what exactly these things mean.
The bottom line is that they brought the percentage of
men and
of women and children down substantially,
almost by a factor of 2,
which is the kind of numbers that I was actually
predicting in the roughly the range.
And. And that makes sense if Israel is actually targeting
men and the women and children that are dying are
collateral damage as opposed to the other narrative which says
they're just indiscriminately bombing, which would lead to a death
percentages and death rates that match the population.
So what they're putting out now is much more closely
aligned with I think the final numbers will be.
But I will say in previous battles and I heard
you got a quote from someone who said that in
the previous wars with Israel,
their numbers were approximately right.
That's actually not true. Their total counts were approximately right.
But the breakdown into men,
women and fighters has not been right.
In the past, they have consistently underestimated and under reported
the number of their own
soldiers that have been killed.
So what do you think the lessons to be learned
here are for future conflicts when looking at these numbers
in the midst of war?
Well, the right lesson is to establish what we call
a prior a statistical set of beliefs that suggest that
you can't accept without
proof and you're not going to get it until the
war is over.
Numbers that come from Hamas.
Israel doesn't put out numbers until it has
until it knows what they are with uncertainty or with
much more accuracy,
which means they don't put out numbers.
I'm not saying that's actually a good strategy.
It's probably not a good strategy.
But the lesson is to take all of this and
put it aside and wait until the battles are over,
report what's being what's, what's happening.
And but do not put over
too much emphasis on numbers,
particularly when it comes from
a a police state like Hamas,
which very carefully controls information.