by Matt Agorist, The Free Thought Project:
(The Last American Vagabond) Fox News published an article on May 13, which they have failed to retract and that ended up going viral on social media, falsely claiming that the United Nations had decreased its recorded Gaza death tolls by around 50%. Another claim has been that the death toll was revised down by 10,000. Both are blatant lies that have been spread across various corporate media websites.
The two key claims, manufactured by the corporate media and then pushed online by pro-Israeli social media personalities, are that both the Gaza death toll and the number of women and children killed, have been revised down by the United Nations (UN). The implication is that the Gaza Health Ministry’s (GHM) death toll statistics, which have been reviewed by independent human rights organizations, and the UN itself, are not trustworthy and that Hamas is artificially inflating the numbers in order to demonize Israel.
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An Israeli-US Media Conspiracy?
The claim that the United Nations had revised its death toll dramatically went viral after Fox News published a story entitled ‘UN revises Gaza death toll, almost 50% less women and children killed than previously reported’. However, this is not where the story originated.
On May 10, at around 6pm, a piece was ran by The New York Sun, with a headline reading ‘United Nations Reports Lower ‘Identified’ Death Toll Among Palestinian Arabs, Noting Conflicting Numbers From Hamas-Run Health Ministry‘. This piece was written by none other than M. J. Koch, daughter of Julia Koch who is known as one of the richest women alive and of the notorious billionaire Koch family. While the piece falls short of the hyperbolic headlines in later articles contributing to this campaign of disinformation, it does serve as a master class in selective quoting and distortion/misreading of statistics.
The piece, written by M. J. Koch, cites two infographics released on the website of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA); one from May 6 and the other from May 8. The first infographic (May 6) lists the total death toll as 34,735, listing the female death toll as 9,500 and the child toll as 14,500.
The second infographic (May 8) lists the total death toll as 34,844, but in its breakdown of the casualties it uses another statistic, which is where Koch began her misinterpretations.
In the May 8 infographic, its breakdown of casualties is based upon the April 30 statistic of 24,686 Palestinian who have been identified after being discovered versus the 10,158 who had not yet been identified — the confirmed body count is unfortunately the same. The UNOCHA states clearly right above these statistics that the death toll is in fact 34,844. The only thing that changed is that between May 6 and May 8 another distinction within the total was made, namely whether the bodies were able to be identified or not — which sadly implies in some cases they were too mutilated to make an identification, yet the physical body is in their possession and the death is still confirmed by the GHM. The graphic also states below that this total does not include an estimated 10,000 or more buried under rubble, which if added would bring the total to 44,844 or more. While Koch’s article misinterprets or misrepresents these stats to argue there are contradicting death tolls, claiming the number of Palestinians killed is lower than what the GHM says, she also fails to bring up the fact that the 24,686 statistic of those identified also comes from the GHM. This key piece of information alone, which is absent from The New York Sun piece, instantly debunks the arguments being constructed in the piece.
Some three and half hours later, an article is then produced by The Times of Israel, in which it is argued that the UN has revised its women and children death tolls down to reflect a 17% decrease in the total percentage of the deaths recorded, which is false. It cites the two exact same infographics as did M. J. Koch in her piece, without citing her article. The following is the crux of the argument that The Times of Israel made:
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