Sources and method

Everything here comes from a document someone published. These are the bodies we use, and the rules we check a figure against before it goes up.

The source hierarchy

Israeli official and primary records

Laws, Knesset votes, court rulings, Central Bureau of Statistics figures, State Comptroller audits, and what the ministries publish. This is most of what you will read here.

A party’s own published counts

What the IDF, COGAT, the Military Advocate General’s Corps and the ministries say about their own work. We always say when a count is one of these, and we give the test behind it.

Everything else, as context only

Research and monitoring groups, where they add something the official record does not have. A page built only on Israeli sources is finished, not thin.

How we check a page

We check every figure before we publish

We open the source and read the figure there. We never go from memory, and we never move a number from one source to another without checking the second.

We say when a body is counting its own work

We also give the test it used. Without the test, the number means very little. The Military Advocate General’s Corps had opened 74 criminal investigations by 3 August 2024. That is the army counting itself, the bar it used was reasonable suspicion, and those are cases opened, not convictions.

We never add up counts that measure different things

Two bodies often count different things over different years. Add them up and you get a number nobody published. When they disagree, that disagreement is usually the story.

We say what a percentage is a share of

A percentage on its own can be read almost any way, so we give you the number underneath it. And if a source says “over 70,000”, we keep the “over”.

We date every figure

The date we give is the period the figures cover, not the year they were printed. We say when a figure is an early estimate, a forecast, or has been revised since.

We say when there is nothing to report

If Israel’s bodies have published nothing on a question, that is worth knowing. So we say so, and leave the gap open.

Two counting conventions

The Central Bureau of Statistics puts East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers in Israel’s total. Monitors outside Israel count them separately. We always say which of the two a figure uses.
The Bureau’s population percentages do not cover everyone. They are shares of its two main groups. The total also counts foreign residents, who sit outside both. So we give you the counts themselves, or a percentage with the number it came from.

If a figure here does not match the document it is attributed to, tell us.