David Adesnik @adesnik Twitter profile

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David Adesnik

4 months

I'd call this a stunning admission from the @AP that they naively treated casualty data from the Gaza Ministry of Health as trustworthy. Let me explain with (a 🧵): 1/

Women and children of Gaza are killed less frequently as war’s toll rises, AP data analysis finds

The trend is significant because the death rate for women and children is the best available proxy for civilian casualties.

apnews.com

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

17 days

You know this is a UN tweet because it pretends Hezbollah doesn’t exist.

António Guterres

@antonioguterres

17 days

I’m deeply alarmed by reports that a large number of communication devices exploded across Lebanon & Syria, killing at least 11 people, including children, and injuring thousands. All actors must exercise maximum restraint to avert any further escalation.

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

3 months

For months, we heard famine in Gaza was "imminent." But there has been no famine. The same UN-backed experts who predicted the famine have confirmed it did not materialize. But the headlines, citing their reports, still say Gaza is starving. What is going on? (A long 🧵) 1/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

8 years

Trying to remember what you call someone who thinks people's flaws are related to the color of their skin.

Donald J. Trump

@realDonaldTrump

10 years

Sadly, because president Obama has done such a poor job as president, you won't see another black president for generations!

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

This is an important point, so I'd like to address it in detail. What does it mean that the UN switched from reporting >14,500 children and >9,500 women killed in Gaza, to reporting only 7,797 "identified" children and 4,959 "identified" women? Yes, this is going to be a 🧵 1/

Tal Hagin

@talhagin

5 months

Update: A similar issue has arisen with an incorrect assessment of the recent Gaza casualty figures as reported by @ochaopt . OCHA didn't report a dramatic decrease in the casualty figures of women and children, it just now only reports identified victims. Explanation:

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

It's time for another 🧵-- yesterday, the UN tried to explain why it reduced its estimate of the number of women and children killed in Gaza by more than 11,000. But the explanation was misleading in several key respects. 1/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

3 months

Have you heard that the real death toll in Gaza may be 186,000? It's the latest and wildest attempt to inflate the casualty numbers, courtesy of @thelancet , a medical journal with a habit of spreading propaganda that suits its political agenda. Let me explain (a long 🧵) 1/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

This is a short 🧵about @gcaw 's excellent article in @TheAtlantic that looks at the UN casualty data from Gaza. I want to highlight @gcaw 's work both because it's so good, and because @TheAtlantic 's audience is very different from ours at @FDD . 1/

The UN’s Gaza Statistics Make No Sense

The actual death toll matters—first, because of the dignity of those killed or still living.

www.theatlantic.com

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

My latest: Gaza Health Ministry Cannot Provide Names for More Than 10,000 It Says Have Died @

Gaza Health Ministry Cannot Provide Names for More Than 10,000 It Says Have Died

The Gaza Ministry of Health cannot provide names of more than 10,000 of the 34,000 individuals it says have died during the war between Israel and Hamas. While the Health Ministry conceded earlier...

www.fdd.org

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 years

Here's what jumps out at me: 1) After the call, White House lawyers allegedly discussed its legal implications 2) There is a word-for-word transcript of the call 3) Senior White House officials allegedly moved to lock down all records of the call

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

@SHeydemann Hey Steve. Glad you're reading. Every civilian death is a tragedy, but if the death toll has been severely exaggerated, then those who suggest Israeli has waged war indiscriminately ought to reconsider their position.

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

6 years

FDR: Hirohito denial very strong. Uncertain who attacked Pearl Harbor. G. Washington: I don't see any reason Benedict would betray us. JFK: No clear evidence of missiles in Cuba. W. Wilson: Impossible to say who sunk Lusitania. #HelsinkiHistory #TrumpPutinSummit (1/2)

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

6 years

#Misspoke #HelsinkiSummit #TrumpPutin #StarWars

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 years

I dunno. I’m just glad the people who develop and test vaccines mostly got there by doing their homework, taking tests and getting good grades.

Shane Safir

@ShaneSafir

4 years

What if we blew it all up? - grades - homework - report cards - tests - subject areas - sorting & ranking What would an antiracist system built from the CHILD up (not the policy room down) and around our most marginalized learners look like? @DenaSimmons @chrisemdin

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 years

Finally, a hospital in the Levant the Russians won’t bomb.

Joshua Landis

@joshua_landis

4 years

Russia has opened the first field hospital in Beirut in the sports stadium. Another 4 countries will do so in the coming days. BY @NataliaSancha thread

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

So US policy toward Israel is based on numbers the State Department thinks are credible because international organizations deem them credible. Yet the UN is now backing away from the numbers. Time to reconsider US policy? FIN 31/31

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 years

I see...Americans from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela are acting out their secret racism when they oppose socialism.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

@AOC

4 years

So the whole “progressivism is bad” argument just doesn’t have any compelling evidence that I’ve seen. When it comes to “Defund” & “Socialism” attacks, people need to realize these are racial resentment attacks. You’re not gonna make that go away. You can make it less effective.

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

The UN’s @UNOCHA just removed 6,500 children and 4,500 women from its casualty count in Gaza. No explanation given. Credit to @Jerusalem_Post for catching the quiet change. My take here:

UN Halves Its Estimate of Women and Children Killed in Gaza

The United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) revised its child fatality figure from the Gaza war sharply downward, reporting more than 14,500 deaths...

www.fdd.org

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

So I gave to give the @AP credit for saying it's the one that made this mistake, not just "the media" writ large. But why did it make this mistake? Why were reporters at the world's top wire service so ready to believe information from a source under Hamas control? 5/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

@AP And here's the admission of fault on @AP 's behalf: "the shift went unnoticed for months by the U.N. and much of the media, and the Hamas-linked Health Ministry has made no effort to set the record straight." 3/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

In an editor's note worth reading in full, the @nytimes said its coverage "relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified." 9/

Editors’ Note: Gaza Hospital Coverage

The Times’s initial accounts of the blast attributed the claim of Israeli responsibility to Palestinian officials, and noted that the Israeli military said it was investigating the blast. However,...

www.nytimes.com

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

Here's the @AP lede: "The proportion of Palestinian women and children being killed in the Israel-Hamas war appears to have declined sharply, an Associated Press analysis of Gaza Health Ministry data has found" 2/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

@AP And part deux of the admission: "Throughout the war, the ministry has claimed that roughly two-thirds of the dead were women and children. This figure has been repeated by international organizations and many in the foreign media, including the AP." 4/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

@nytimes Yet somehow the lesson doesn't sink in. There is one side the media wants to believe and one side it wants to discredit. 10/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

Remember the @nytimes admission after it realized that the Gaza Ministry of Health had gulled it (and most of the media) into reporting that Israel had bombed al-Ahli hospital last October? 8/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

FYI, this example is borrowed from this excellent paper by Gabriel Epstein, who was one of the first, if not the first, to spot the problems with both GMO and GMoH data: 13/

How Hamas Manipulates Gaza Fatality Numbers: Examining the Male Undercount and Other Problems

International media and NGOs have repeated the group's figures without caveats, giving credence to suspicions of Israeli misconduct and fueling accusations of war crimes and even genocide.

www.washingtoninstitute.org

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

This is a one-sided failure that benefited Hamas at Israel's expense. And when the @AP and other top media make mistakes, that is the typical pattern. 7/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

For the past two months, @UNOCHA has cited fatality figures from Gaza's (Hamas-run) Government Media Office (GMO). In its May 6 update on the war, OCHA made clear it was citing the GMO figures of >14,500 children and >9,500. 2/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

I'm not a mind-reader, so I have no definitive answer to that question. Reporters for the @AP and others have certainly demonstrated how skeptical they can be of information coming from the US and Israeli governments in this war. So... 6/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

3 months

Conclusions should come last, but here's a preview of one of them: Accusations that Israel is deliberately starving Gaza, perhaps even as part of a genocidal plan, are absurd. 6/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

@UNOCHA should've announced the change clearly and explained the rationale for switching from GMO to GMoH data. Of course, that would've meant fessing up that it had been using deeply flawed data for over two months. 17/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

@UNOCHA Then, in its May 8 update, @UNOCHA provided no source but said there were 7,797 "identified" children 4,959 children. The sudden drop is confusing unless you know that the Gaza Ministry of Health (GMoH) provided exactly those figures its May 2 statistical update. 3/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

Bottom line: Neither GMO, nor GMoH, nor the UN, nor anyone has presented clear evidence substantiating 10,000+ deaths included in the purported total of 34,000+. Are these 10k based on "reliable media sources"? "Incomplete data"? "Unidentified"? 28/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

6 years

Foreign? Yes. Terrorist? Yes. Organized? Yes. Good call. Down with #IRGC .

Amir Toumaj

@AmirToumaj

6 years

U.S. to Designate Iranian Guard Corps a Foreign Terrorist Organization

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

3 months

Remember, the very first item on the list of crimes the ICC prosecutor has leveled at Netanyahu is "starvation of civilians as a method of warfare." So either the IDF is disobeying orders, or starvation was never the plan. 7/

Statement of ICC Prosecutor Karim A.A. Khan KC: Applications for arrest warrants in the situation...

Today I am filing applications for warrants of arrest before Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court in the Situation in the State of Palestine. Image ICC Prosecutor Khan on applica...

www.icc-cpi.int

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

Basically, GMoH relabeled most of the deaths it discerned from media reports as having incomplete data. Also crucial to remember: When a death is based on a media report there is no body or remains. 7/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

But what does "identified" mean? This requires a bit of backstory. From mid-December thru the end of March, GMoH divided the dead into two categories: those registered in hospitals and those whose deaths were discerned from "reliable media sources". 4/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

This is why the backstory matters. The "unidentified" were originally the deaths based on "reliable media sources" not hospital reporting. This category was relabeled as deaths based on "incomplete data" before being renamed as "unidentified." 10/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

Which is not to say GMoH has sterling credibility. Remember, they insisted an Israeli air strike on al-Ahli Hospital killed 500 civilians in October. Actually, a Palestinian rocket caused the blast, and the number of dead was much lower. 27/ .

New AP analysis of last month's deadly Gaza hospital explosion rules out widely cited video

The Associated Press is publishing an updated visual analysis of the deadly Oct. 17 explosion at Gaza’s Al-Ahli Hospital.

apnews.com

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

Anyhow, at the beginning of April, GMoH changed up its categories. It said there was complete data for most of the deceased, but more than 10,000 records had "incomplete data." How much was missing? It didn't say. 6/

Hamas-Run Gaza Health Ministry Admits to Flaws in Casualty Data

The Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health said on April 6 that it had “incomplete data” for 11,371 of the 33,091 Palestinian fatalities it claims to have documented. In a statistical...

www.fdd.org

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

Btw, you can review the GMoH documents yourself. They're available from it's Telegram account, @MOHmediagaza . Yes, they're in Arabic. I work with native speakers to ensure all translations are 100% correct, but Google Translate does a passable job. 5/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

3 months

The top international authority for famine-monitoring is the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC. It includes the UN, NGOs, and nat'l aid orgs. The IPC has a five-phase scale for measuring the severity of food shortages. See here:

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

3 months

The reason there was no famine is pretty straightforward: There was a surge of humanitarian aid into Gaza. The UN, associated NGOs, and Israeli authorities worked together to make it happen, even though they sort of hate each other's guts. 5/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

But ISIS didn't have 16 years to prep for war by building hundreds of miles of tunnels and caching weapons at countless strong points. With all due respect to the extraordinary achievements of the anti-ISIS coalition, Hamas' use of civilian shields is on another level. 24/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

The crazy thing is, the GMO approach worked. Various media outlets and UN agencies routinely used and reposted GMO numbers. And that is what @UNOCHA did for nearly two months, through May 6. But then on May 8, it switched to GMoH numbers. 16/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

So the problem with the GMO numbers is that GMO, unlike GMoH, hasn't offered even a shred of a justification for its figures. In fact, GMO numbers seemed to routinely include figures that are implausible based on what GMoH has reported. Let me give an example: 12/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

Next, GMoH began to describe deaths based on complete records as "identified" and the rest as "unidentified". I discuss this in additional detail here: 8/

Gaza Health Ministry Cannot Provide Names for More Than 10,000 It Says Have Died

The Gaza Ministry of Health cannot provide names of more than 10,000 of the 34,000 individuals it says have died during the war between Israel and Hamas. While the Health Ministry conceded earlier...

www.fdd.org

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

But for all my fellow data-lovers out there, let's dive in to what to what the @AP actually found in its new analysis of the Gaza Ministry of Health (GMoH) data. 11/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

In other words, to make GMO's numbers plausible, you'd have to convert 1,381 of GMoH's bodies from male to female, or adult male to child. Clearly, GMO was not even trying to reconcile its numbers with GMoH, which, for all it flaws, has an actual recording process. 15/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

Those who take issue with my analysis often argue that the meaning of "unidentified" is that there is a body or partial remains, but GMoH does not know the name of the deceased or other key data. In other words, the occurrence of a death is certain. 9/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

Way back on Dec. 11, GMO reported the death of 8,000 children and 6,200 women out of 18,396 total fatalities. Arithmetic shows there were (18,396-8,000-6,200=) 4,196 men. But GMoH reported at the time that hospitals had registered 5,577 male fatalities. 14/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

And if you put the GMoH data into a spreadsheet and sort by age and gender, you will see that the gender balance is almost perfectly even for kids 11 and under, but there's a major surplus of males among those 12-18. 18/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

If the flaws of GMO data had been discovered last week, @UNOCHA could claim it made the change as soon as it knew there was a problem. But the flaws have been evident for months, as Epstein's January paper showed. 18/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

@AP The @AP did something very smart and original for which it deserves credit. At four points during the war, GMoH has released lists that gives the names of thousands of individuals it has reported as dead... 12/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

So while GMO says there are 10k missing or trapped, the latest GMoH report, dated May 3, says 3,715 individuals have been reported missing by their families. Once again, GMO is way out of line with GMoH. 26/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

@UNOCHA Now, I can guess why Haq might prefer not to acknowledge that @UNOCHA ever relied on GMO: The exaggerations in its data have been obvious for months. Gabriel Epstein showed this clearly in his paper from back in January: 9/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

@UNOCHA And I just saw, thanks @lkajomovitz , that the spokesman for the UN Sec Gen is actually claiming the revision to the numbers reflects a good faith effort to provide the best possible information amid the fog of war. 19/

UNRWA, Syria, Haiti, & other topics - Daily Press Briefing (10 May...

Noon briefing by Farhan Haq, Deputy Spokesperson for the Secretary-General.Highlights: -Secretary-General/Kenya-Secretary-General/Trip Announcement-Occupied ...

www.youtube.com

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

For deaths recorded in hospitals and morgues, I think the gender is likely to be correct. The issue with age is that Hamas has long employed numerous teenage fighters, so if you define "child" to be those under 18, so have an issue. 17/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

First, if GMO data isn't reliable with regard to women and children, why is @UNOCHA citing it with regard to the more speculative issue of numbers trapped under the rubble? Also, the GMO figure for missing individuals leapt from 7,000 to 10,000 between April 28 and May 3. 23/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

Frustratingly, GMoH never provides the date of death for any of these individuals, making it nearly impossible to check their list against media reports or social media content. 13/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

3 months

Meanwhile, South Africa asked the ICJ to order a stop to Israel's campaign of "genocidal starvation." 8/

South Africa Asks U.N. Court to Intervene to Avert ‘Genocidal Starvation’ in Gaza

Israel called on the International Court of Justice in The Hague to reject South Africa’s request, which came in a case filed in December charging Israel with genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

www.nytimes.com

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

I hope both journalists and US government officials push Haq to defend these comments, because he either doesn't understand how the ministry counts the "unidentified" or he is deliberately distorting the facts to obscure @UNOCHA 's total failure to conduct due diligence. 26/26 FIN

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

3 months

On June 25, the IPC posted a "snapshot" of its new report, with its main findings. Most importantly, there has been no famine. In fact, there has been substantial improvement since March. 4/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

6 years

Eisenhower: Rosenbergs innocent. Stalin denial strong. Nixon: I'm innocent. Had no reason to erase Oval Office recordings. G.W. Bush: Osama bin who? Reagan: Soviet Union is fine. Soviet Union is fine. J. Madison: White House caught fire on its own. #HelsinkiHistory (2/2)

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

@UNOCHA Unless GMO knew something the hospitals didn't about the gender of the corpses, we can safely assume that GMO was inflating the number of women and children for political reasons. 12/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

So this is tweet #11 in this thread, and all I've done so far is explain the meaning of "identified." So back to the main story -- what does it mean that the UN switched from reporting the higher GMO number to the lower GMOH "identified" number? 11/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

@UNOCHA You can see those numbers on its Telegram account. And the number had stayed at 7,000 for several months. Given GMO's track record, it's hard to believe this sudden upward revision is based on anything but political necessity. I'm curious if @UNOCHA will notice. 24/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

2 years

Shocking -- WHO official who praised Assad regime also turns out to be a crook. WHO appears incapable of reform despite repeated travesties like this in Syria. UN leadership also MIA.

WHO Syria boss accused of corruption, fraud, abuse, AP finds

LONDON (AP) — Staffers at the World Health Organization’s Syrian office have alleged that their boss mismanaged millions of dollars, plied government officials with gifts -- including computers, gold...

apnews.com

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

3 months

In March, the IPC said famine was imminent and would strike northern Gaza (not the entire strip) by end of May. The banner on its website read: "Famine is imminent as 1.1 million people, half of Gaza, experience catastrophic food insecurity" 3/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

But the AP realized it could look at the male:female:child ratio of reported deaths in the intervals brackets by the release of GMoH's four lists. Here's what it found in terms of women and children as a % of all deaths: 14/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

The ministry's figure for "identified" women and children among the dead has been dramatically lower than the UN figure for months. But that did not seem to matter until May 8. We still don't know what prompted the UN to revise its figures. 6/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

Yet the Biden administration considers the Gaza figures credible. Biden himself used the topline figure in his State of the Union address. And the State Department had this to say in its report on the conduct of the Israeli military: 29/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

A more candid answer from Haq would've been that until May 6 the UN, specifically @UNOCHA , employed casualty data from Gaza's Government Media Office (GMO), which is separate from the ministry but also controlled by Hamas. Then, on May 8, the UN switched to ministry data. 7/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

A much harder question to address is the degree to which the Islamic State used the population as a human shield. There's no question that's something they did, and they also built tunnels under Raqqa and Mosul. 23/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 years

The @nytimes keeps promoting its #1619Project on my timeline — better move would be to fix the glaring factual and analytic flaws pointed out by top historians like Gordon Wood. (Funny how the Times ignores expert consensus when it conflicts with pet projects.)

The New York Times

@nytimes

5 years

The New York Times launched the #1619project , a collection of essays, criticism and art about how the America that we know today didn't start in 1776 -- it started in August 1619, when a ship carrying enslaved Africans landed in Virginia.

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

Before I dive in, let me just say thank you to everyone who, read, shared, liked, and quoted my previous threat, which got amazing traction. 2/

David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

This is an important point, so I'd like to address it in detail. What does it mean that the UN switched from reporting >14,500 children and >9,500 women killed in Gaza, to reporting only 7,797 "identified" children and 4,959 "identified" women? Yes, this is going to be a 🧵 1/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

Oct. 7-Oct. 26: 64% of 6,745 reported deaths Oct. 27-Jan. 5: 59% of 7,372 Jan. 6-Mar. 30: 45% of 4,572 Mar. 31-Apr. 30: 36% of 3,102 (No data yet for March) 15/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

"The Hamas-controlled Gaza Ministry of Health is the primary source for these numbers, which international organizations generally deem credible, but do not differentiate between Hamas fighters and civilians." (See p.18) 30/

State Department Submits Key Report to Congress on Israel’s Use of US Weapons

The State Department submitted its NSM-20 report on Israeli assurances that use of U.S. weapons will follow international law.

www.justsecurity.org

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

(Deleted and reposted:) But going back to the @AP 's numbers, the reduction in deaths among women and children -- even in this data set from a Hamas-controlled source -- is striking. Yet one might ask: Is it good enough? Even 38% women and children is a tragedy. 18/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

One could certainly say, hey, the % of women and children was really high during the first phases of the war. Still that depends on us being more confident that the GMoH data is accurate. 16/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

The problem is we don't have good benchmarks for avoiding civilian harm. You may read that the US-led coalition that fought the Islamic State had 1:1 ratio of terrorists-to-civilians they killed. But the data quality there is quite low. 20/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

@UNOCHA @lkajomovitz The Cleveland Jewish News ( @The_CJN ) also has an article up with key quotes from the UN press briefing: 20/

UN blames ‘fog of war’ for major overcounting of Gazan child fatalities

“It’s outrageous that only seven months later, the United Nations is questioning the Hamas-supplied casualty numbers,” an HonestReporting board member told JNS.

www.clevelandjewishnews.com

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

But no one applied the scrutiny to Raqqa and Mosul that the war in Gaza faces today. My best guess is the true ratio in Raqqa and Mosul was somewhere between 3:1 fighters-civilians to 1:3 fighters-civilians. 22/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

@UNOCHA The problem is the Health Ministry had already confirmed the death of 5,577 men via hospital reports. GMO's figures for women and children would require more than 1,300 of those men to be recategorized as women or children. 11/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

4 months

I should specify that the purported 1:1 ratio is for urban battles in Raqqa and Mosul, which are roughly analogous to the fighting in Gaza. 21/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

I promise we're getting to the end here... So, @UNOCHA 's May 8 update did not revise downward the total Gaza death toll, which it reports as 34,844, of which 24,686 are "identified". This leaves 10,158 as unidentified. And a little note at the bottom says: 21/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

@UNOCHA At no point in the press briefing does Haq acknowledge that @UNOCHA ever used GMO data. Yet the charts for May 6 and earlier include a note, "(Source: GMO)". Take a look: 8/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

That's partially true at best. The ministry made no significant revisions to its data in the days before the UN cuts its estimate of female and child fatalities. Check the ministry's Telegram feed -- you'll just see standard updates. 5/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

3 months

But instead of getting far worse, things got much better. Here's the same graph from the new IPC report: 11/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

@UNOCHA Despite this kind of obvious manipulation, @UNOCHA relied on GMO data, earning it some very explicit condemnation from Epstein. As he notes, OCHA even admitted that GMO's "methodology is unknown" but kept using GMO data. Inexcusable. 13/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

3 months

As some may know, I've had some pretty sharp words regarding how the Gaza Ministry of Health handles/invents its data: 16/

The Gaza Health Ministry Flimflam

For six months, the Gaza Ministry of Health presented its data as the authoritative source of information about the number of lives lost in Gaza since October 7. Then, in April, it quietly acknow...

www.commentary.org

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

3 months

If Gaza as a whole were in a famine, we'd expect thousands of deaths of every week. If just northern Gaza were enduring a famine, we'd expect hundreds. As of May 3, the Gaza Ministry of Health said it had recorded a total of 31 deaths from malnutrition and dehydration. 15/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

3 months

But in a way, that's precisely the point. If the Hamas-run Health Ministry puts the number at 31 -- and almost all of those cases were in March -- then we don't have evidence of lethal malnutrition right now. And the IPC report says we're not seeing starvation deaths. 17/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

So, why did the UN nearly halve the number of Palestinian women and children it says have died? Haq: "What's changed is the Ministry of Health in Gaza has updated the breakdown of fatalities for whom full details have been documented." 4/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

3 years

.⁦ @nytimes ⁩ tells us about “Hamas — which Israel views as a terrorist group” Any other countries view Hamas that way? Too hard for top correspondents to figure out if Hamas deliberately harms civilians?

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

"Not including more than 10,000 missing or under the rubble (source: GMO and PCD)." I'll have to do a separate on what we know about the number of individuals lost under the rubble, but two points will suffice here: 22/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

3 months

Now back to the IPC. When it forecast famine in March, it listed the percentage of Gaza residents currently in each of the five phases of its famine scale: 9/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

@UNOCHA I don't know if @UNOCHA staff ever read Epstein's work, but the GMO manipulation was so blatant, it doesn't matter. Minimal due diligence should have exposed what GMO was doing. 14/

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 years

Is it “crossfire” when you shoot down a civilian airliner 500 miles from the front lines?

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David Adesnik

@adesnik

5 months

If you know that definition, you know that Haq made a critical error when he said there are 10k+ "bodies" that still need to be identified. The ministry never claimed that hospitals or morgues have or had thousands of unidentified bodies. 17/

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