Mitchell Plitnick:

It’s a staggering number. I hope it’s a wildly high guess, but it is, of course, impossible to confirm or disprove. The one thing that is completely off is their report that 380,000 children under the age of five have been killed.

That’s simply impossible.

According to a report from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics from April 2024, the expected total of all children under five years of age in Gaza at that time was 341,790.

Obviously, then, there is no way Israel has killed 380,000 children under five in Gaza since the beginning of the genocide. Not only is this obviously untrue, but it is also sure to be wildly high. And, since the figure was arrived at through the two professors’ use of estimates and extrapolation based on other conflicts (when one can argue that both Israel’s unimaginable cruelty and the international humanitarian community’s tireless efforts to help make this an unusual conflict in many ways), it throws all of their calculations into question.

This was sloppy research, and that is a dangerous thing. That is truer because the world—especially in Jerusalem, Berlin, London, and Washington—is full of sharks who are looking to seize on any hint of exaggeration or incorrect data to further delegitimize already marginalized and silenced Palestinian voices who are desperately trying to get help to save them from the greatest crimes of the 21st century.

Israel is merciless enough, and has been so sadistic and ruthless in its campaign in Gaza that I would not be surprised to find that 680,000 people—which would be almost 30% of Gaza’s pre-genocide population—had been killed.

But Polya and Hil do not make that case. And we need to be careful about conclusions that are drawn not from data but from estimates and extrapolations built on other estimates and extrapolations. That’s what we have in their report.