#Fakenews: @AFP amplifies the "850,000 detainee " lie, calling them "incarcerated"

From AFP, in its article on the video footage of Marwan Barghouti eating cookies during the hunger strike that he pretends to lead:

Some 850,000 Palestinians have been incarcerated since the Israel's occupation of their territories 50 years ago, Palestinian leaders say.

Palestinian leaders usually say that between 850,000 and 1 million Palestinians have been "detained" or "arrested" since 1967. (Sometimes they slip and say "imprisoned" as well.)

Those numbers are lies. I have never found any actual study that claims to count anything close to that many people arrested; on the contrary, Palestinian NGOs who actually keep track of arrests and detentions count only several thousand a year at most (and some of those are suspect.)

As far as I can tell, the number of pretend arrests has been inflated over the years with the reported total Palestinian population so that the propaganda NGOs can consistently claim that 20% of all Palestinians, and 40% of all Palestinian men, have been arrested. (See Addameer from 2004  2008 and 2015 reporting that exact ratio with numbers of 650,000, 700,000 and 800,000.)

AFP is going further than most of the bogus Palestinian statistics, however. It claims that there have been 850,000 people incarcerated, not just those arrested or "detained" as the lying Palestinian NGOs usually say.

It would be bad enough if AFP just parroted easily debunkable statistics without comment. But in this case they are creating their own!

This is quite literally fake news.

(h/t Yair)

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