How this registry works

One entry = one finding, one source, one exact location. Nothing else.

We do not investigate. We do not verify claims. We say who established a finding, in which document, and exactly where to look. The reader checks without believing us — that is the whole design.

What we never do

What we have read, and what we have not

Four numbers, and they do not say the same thing. That is the point of giving four.

These five numbers are counted from the records at build time, not typed in. They were typed in once, and by the time anyone read them they were wrong.

⚠️ Why the third and fourth lines are separate. "This document contains no figure" is a statement about the document. "We only got a landing page" is a statement about us. A register that merged them would be reporting its own failures as the silence of its sources — and we did exactly that until we caught it.

Why 1 documents are out of reach

All of them for the same reason: the publisher's site refuses our requests, and no public copy of the document exists anywhere else. Not one is refused because the publisher forbids us — that is a different thing, and we treat it differently.

⚠️ A site refusing our requests is not the same as a site forbidding us. Where a publisher simply blocks automated traffic, we read the same document in a public copy — the one its own record already pointed to — and the record says where we read it. Where a publisher names us in its rules, we do not go, and we do not go around. Not through an archive, not by any other door.

⚠️ We could get past all of these with an automated browser pretending to be a person. We do not, and we will not. It is the one shortcut that would make every other rule on this page worthless: a register that disguises itself to collect its sources cannot ask anyone to trust what it collected.

🔴 The imbalances, stated because a reader would find them anyway

None of this is a choice of ours. And that is precisely why it is written here: a reader who counts the sources will see the imbalance and assume an intention.

⚠️ One imbalance has closed, and saying so matters as much as stating the others. B'Tselem — the Israeli documentation organisation whose work carries the symmetry this registry depends on — was unreachable when this page was first drafted. It is now read, through public archived copies, like everything else.

Where the figures come from, and why we always say

Most figures about this war are relayed, not established, by the organisation publishing them. A count can pass through three hands before reaching a reader who then attributes it to the last one.

So every entry names the whole chain. For example:

An academic report states that, as of August 2024, OCHA reported figures from the Palestinian Ministry of Health identifying more than 40,000 Palestinians killed.

Three links, three names. The origin is the health authority of one party to the conflict, and the entry says so — not to cast doubt on the figure, but because a reader cannot easily find that out and should not have to.

Government sources, on all sides

Sources belonging to a party to the conflict are admissible and never neutral. They are entered, and they are marked. We apply this to the Palestinian Ministry of Health and to the Israeli State Comptroller alike. Applying it to one side only would ruin the registry, and it would be invisible to anyone but us.

When sources disagree

We publish the disagreement instead of picking the heavier figure. Examples currently in the registry:

• Orphans. A Ministry of Health list gives 15,173 children; an independent demographic estimate built on the same data gives 23,597. The authors call the list a floor. We carry both.
• Food trucks. UNRWA registered 17,032 food-transporting trucks; the Israeli authority COGAT's database holds 17,924 records for the same period. The authors state they do not know whether those records are individual trucks — so the 892 difference cannot be read as a difference in deliveries, and we say so.
• A single bulletin contradicting itself. A Ministry of Health bulletin of 12 October 2023 gives 2,215 killed in its heading and 1,537 in its body. We report both.

Corrections

A published entry is never left wrong.

Once a month we search every source we cite for a published correction, retraction or new version. When one is found, the entry carries a notice immediately — a notice states that a correction exists, which invents nothing. The finding itself does not change without a human reading the correction.

Corrections are logged with their date, their nature and the previous version, and the previous version stays visible. We do not correct silently.

⚠️ We keep the notice even when the correction turns out to change nothing. A registry that erased its notices once reassured would be doing exactly what it reproaches others for.

Translations

Sources that do not publish in English are admissible. When we translate:

• the original sentence is carried verbatim, beside the translation, so the reader can check without believing us;
• the translation is labelled for what it is — machine translation, reviewed by no human;
• a translation note is added wherever a word does not cross intact: a legal term, a word with no equivalent, an ambiguity in the original;
• the exact location refers to the original document, never to the translation.

Charged words are rendered the same way on both sides. The Hebrew word an Israeli organisation uses for 7 October and the Arabic word a Palestinian ministry uses for an Israeli strike are both rendered as the source's own term, and both are marked as such. A registry that rendered one side's charged word and smoothed the other's would have chosen a side in its grammar, without ever writing it down.

One source excluded, and why

ACLED. Its licence forbids automated collection, republication and sub-licensing. Our public exports are CC BY 4.0, which is a sub-licence. This is not a technical obstacle: it is an incompatibility of substance, and it is the only exclusion of its kind in the registry.

Two publishers forbid us by name in their robots.txt — The Lancet and Springer. We never send them a request. We do cite their documents: citing is not crawling, and the address is there for a human reader.

What is not yet published

At the time of writing, 47 entries are drafted and none is published. Entries go online at three to four a week, and no entry is published that a human has not read and approved. Five entries are currently blocked: three rest on machine translations no one has reviewed, and two on a source correction that must be read first.