On May 8, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) posted a set of memes under the headline, “Hostilities in the Gaza Strip and Israel – reported impact | Day 215”
At the top of the screen, OCHA presented the number of “Palestinian fatalities” as standing at 34,844, as of May 8. But if you look more closely, you’ll see that the source of these figures is MoH Gaza, meaning the Hamas health ministry.
This meme comes with an asterisk, and another meme, one screen lower, explains that the 34,844 reported fatalities include 24,686 identified as of April 30.
This is OCHA’s sneaky way of both not lying outright but also not highlighting the fact that the Hamas-provided figures that the UN has been citing are inflated by about 10,200, or more than 30%.
Also, as you can see in the OCHA meme, most of the fatalities are men – 10,006 (40%), and not mostly women and children as previously reported.
Does it matter that we caught the UN agency in a lie?
Of course, it doesn’t, heck, we caught them murdering, raping, and burning Israeli civilians and the UN found a way to shovel it under the rug.
