The ceasefire has held, more or less, since October 2025, and at the end of July the next phase was announced. Whatever comes of it, the war is moving out of the field and into the archives. What gets written down now — in UN submissions, in prosecution dossiers, in the academic literature — is largely fixed.

Much of it rests on a single database, and we have spent months discovering that the database cannot bear the weight.

The World Health Organization’s Surveillance System on Attacks on Health Care, launched in 2017, holds 3,229 records for what it classifies as “Occupied Palestinian Territory”. That figure, or numbers derived from it, appears in special rapporteurs’ statements, in NGO submissions to UN bodies, and in the journals now assembling the case against Israel. It is presented as verified. It is treated as a casualty count. It is neither.

Start with the container. The WHO folds East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza into one reporting unit. A checkpoint delay in Jerusalem, an ambulance search near Jenin, and an airstrike in Khan Younis all land in the same bucket and surface as one number. Anyone citing “over three thousand attacks on health care in the Palestinian territories” is describing a war in Gaza using a figure substantially composed of events that happened somewhere else.

How much of it? By our........

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