About and funding

IsraelFact publishes Israel’s official record. Every page here is built from what Israel’s own bodies have published: the Central Bureau of Statistics, the Knesset, the courts, the State Comptroller, the Military Advocate General’s Corps, COGAT and the ministries. Each figure carries the body that issued it, the period it covers and, where the figure is a party’s own count of its own activity, the threshold or the method that produced it.

Who pays for this

This site is funded by Israel. It is produced by a registrant under the United States Foreign Agents Registration Act, and the statutory identification statement appears in the footer of every page on the site. It reads in full:

This material is distributed by Piro, Inc. on behalf of Havas Media Germany GmbH on behalf of the Israel Government Advertising Agency (LaPam). Additional information is available at the Department of Justice, Washington, DC.

Materials distributed on behalf of a foreign principal are informational material under that Act, and each page published here is archived as it appeared and filed with the Department of Justice FARA Unit. The filings are public and searchable in the Department’s own registrant records.

What this site does

It publishes one side’s record and labels it as that. A reader who wants Israel’s stated figure on a question, with the provenance attached, will find it here in the first sentence of a page and again in the key-figures table under it. A reader who wants another party’s counts is better served elsewhere, and the name at the top of the page says so before they spend any time here.

The labelling is what makes the record usable. “COGAT recorded 1,778,363 metric tons of food entering Gaza” is a sentence a journalist discounts on sight. The same figure, carrying its window, the fact that the count is COGAT’s own, and the fact that the tonnages were declared by suppliers rather than weighed at the crossings, is a sentence a journalist can check and quote. Every page here is written the second way.

What this site does not do

• It does not measure anything itself. There is no first-party survey, count or dataset on this site, and there never will be. Every figure belongs to the body that produced it.
• It does not verify a party’s own counts. It labels them, states the threshold behind them, and leaves the reader to weigh them.
• It does not present another party’s figures alongside Israel’s as a comparison, and it does not respond to what anyone else publishes.
• Where Israel’s bodies have published nothing on a question, the page records the absence rather than filling it.

Corrections

A figure on this site is wrong if it does not match the document it is attributed to. Write to us with the page and the figure and we will check it against the source and correct it. Where a page is corrected after publication, the revision is archived and filed in the same way the original was.

How the sources are chosen and how a figure is checked, and how to reach us.