An Economist article (What is the Palestinian Authority for?) included the following claim:
THE men who patrol the isolated village of Douma after nightfall cannot do much except raise the alarm; they must hope it will be enough to prevent another tragedy. Two Palestinian homes in the village, outside Nablus, were firebombed early on the morning of July 31st, killing an 18-month-old toddler named Ali Dawabsheh, and leaving his parents and young brother severely burned…Such violence is common in the occupied West Bank: the UN recorded 109 attacks on Palestinians by Israeli settlers in the first half of this year; in 2014, there were 331.
However, the figures cited by The Economist, derived from the latest Humanitarian Bulletin of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), inadvertently combined both vandalism against property and violence against persons together. This left the false impression that the figures (331 and 109) represent the total number of violent settler “attacks on Palestinians”.
Here’s OCHA’s graph, where you can see that most ‘incidents’ involved property damage, not violence against persons.
We complained to Economist editors, and they agreed to revise the passage accordingly. It now reads:
Such violence is common in the occupied West Bank: the UN recorded 109 attacks on Palestinian people, land and property* by Israeli settlers in the first half of this year; in 2014, there were 331.
We commend Economist editors for the speedy correction.
