Sources and method
Every page on this site is built from documents published by named bodies. This page sets out which bodies, how a figure is checked before it runs, and the arithmetic the pages refuse to do.
The source hierarchy
Enacted statutes and Basic Laws, recorded Knesset votes, judgments of Israel’s courts, Central Bureau of Statistics series and media releases, State Comptroller audit chapters, government-commissioned reviews and ministry publications. This is the site’s whole subject.
Figures the IDF, COGAT, the Military Advocate General’s Corps and the ministries publish about their own activity. These are labelled as that party’s own count every time they appear, with the threshold or the method that produced them in the same sentence.
Academic and monitoring work is welcome where it adds something the record does not carry, and there is no obligation to reach for it. A page standing entirely on official Israeli sources is complete, not thin.
How a page is built
- A question is chosen, and the bodies that publish on it are identified.
- The record is pulled from the issuing body: the statute, the recorded vote, the judgment, the series, the audit chapter, the ministry or military publication.
- The key-figures table is built first, because its columns force the labelling: the figure, what it counts, who published it, and the period.
- The opening paragraph is written from that table, so the number, the issuing body and the date are in the first sentence.
- The short question-led sections, the note on where the figures come from, the questions and the full source list follow.
The rules a page is checked against
Every figure in an evidence position on this site has been read on the page that published it, with the wording that carries the number recorded alongside it. A figure recalled rather than read does not run, and a claim is never re-attributed from one source to another without opening the second.
Where a body publishes a count of its own activity, the page says so and states the standard that produced the count. The Military Advocate General’s Corps opened 74 criminal investigations into alleged misconduct in Gaza as at 3 August 2024, on its own count, under a reasonable-suspicion standard, and those are investigations opened rather than findings or convictions. The count means nothing without the threshold and a great deal with it.
Two bodies counting different objects on different definitions over different periods do not produce one series. Where two published counts genuinely differ, the difference is the page: what each body counts, on what definition, over what period.
A percentage whose base is unstated is a figure a reader can falsify with one division, so every share on this site names what it is a share of. Where a body publishes a figure as “over” or “about”, the page keeps the hedge and never restates it as an exact number.
The period is the period the data covers, not the year of publication. A 2026 release reporting end-of-2024 data is dated to end-2024 here. Preliminary estimates, projections and revised series are marked as what they are.
An absence recorded plainly is a finding. Some questions get a short page for that reason.
Two conventions worth knowing before reading a figure
The Central Bureau of Statistics counts East Jerusalem residents and West Bank settlers inside Israel’s total. International monitors keep those series apart. Neither convention is a finding about anyone’s status; each is a scope choice, and a figure that does not say which one it uses cannot be placed. Pages here state the scope.
The Bureau’s published population shares are shares of the two named population groups, not of the resident total, because the total also includes foreign residents whom the Bureau counts outside both groups. Pairing a published percentage with the total produces a discrepancy a reader finds in one division, so pages here state the counts, or the percentages with their own base, or all three categories.
Who publishes this site and who funds it is on the About and funding page. If a figure here does not match the document it is attributed to, tell us.