U.N. Fudges the Data on West Bank Violence
Who's terrorizing whom in the West Bank? President Biden had one answer, backed by United Nations data, and built an unprecedented sanctions regime to address Israeli 'settler violence,' a suddenly ubiquitous term. On Tuesday the U.K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Norway announced sanctions on two Israeli ministers. But the data doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
A new report by Regavim, a right-wing Israeli NGO, takes the trouble of scrutinizing the statistics from the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), on which the Biden case relied. Poring over the U.N.'s list of 6,285 violent incidents by settlers from January 2016 through April 2023, Regavim noticed something: 'The UN database includes thousands of clearly non-violent incidents in its count of violent events.'
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