Data Gathering

The greatest care and effort in carrying out this project has been spent in gathering and evaluating enough information on each fatal incident to enable accurate classification of each claimed fatality. Reliable and detailed data on Israeli casualties of the al-Aqsa conflict has been relatively easy to find, as this information is extensively reported in Israeli and foreign newspapers, as well as various official and unofficial websites. Palestinian Arab fatalities present much greater difficulty, for several reasons:

Arab names are often long and complex; in many cases different sources give different casualty names for the same incident, and it is difficult to ascertain whether the different names in fact refer to the same person.
Detailed reports of Palestinian casualties are generally provided by Palestinian organizations and individuals; in some cases these reports are “slanted” or even fraudulent, due to pressures to paint Israel in as negative a light as possible.
The Israel Defense Forces do not keep a precise record (or at least have not so far provided such a record to us) of every time, place, and circumstance where weapons have been used; thus, certain Palestinian reports of fatalities due to Israeli fire cannot be confirmed or refuted. In many cases, we have given the Palestinian account of events the benefit of the doubt, even though the casualties may have resulted from Palestinian actions, rather than Israeli actions. In cases where the cause of death as reported by Palestinian sources is very much open to question, we have assigned a Low confidence Level to that particular casualty.
We have made extensive use of mainstream media outlets, both in Israel and abroad, for the details of al-Aqsa conflict incidents. Information on Palestinian casualties has been gathered from Arabic-language newspapers, cross-correlated with reports from human-rights organizations in Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Unfortunately, these sources generally disagree on many significant details, including the name, age, and circumstances of death of victims. It should be noted that, since no Israeli official body has been keeping records of Israeli actions and their results, the information reported by the Western media has come almost exclusively from Palestinian sources.