Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Ari's avatar
Aug 10Edited

I've done a decent amount of analysis on the MoH data. As a data nerd it's certainly attractive to do analysis on the data you have - I looked for obvious things like men categorized as women (using LLMs to gender-categorize arabic names) and couldn't find a meaningful amount outside of what one would expect from random errors. At the same time it is quite concerning, to say the least, that we have no way of verifying this information. Adar makes a good point that Israel should be able to verify the info, but given how little effort has gone into any real information war / PR, I am actually skeptical there are people in the (say) IDF spokesman’s office with access to (say) cell phone records who would be able to falsify or validate the data. On the other hand, if it is accurate, I would love to understand how that came to be the case. The single most powerful piece of propoganda in the war is the death toll, and Hamas doesn't realize this? Hamas has nothing to do with the production of this data? They just have such integrity that they leave the MoH alone to do its work? They resist the temptation to delete and add entries, or otherwise change the data? It just makes no sense. That doesn't mean it's definitely false, but it does mean that an argument that relies solely on that data (which Adar's does, other than the one stat on 2500 rifles) is suspect.

Expand full comment
The Haeft's avatar

‘Civilian’

Stats direct from Hamas

I call BS

Expand full comment
88 more comments...

No posts