A count, with its limits

Who did it, counted

A hundred and nineteen headlines here report the death of a Palestinian. Sixty-eight of them name somebody doing it. The other fifty-one have a death and nobody causing it.

What that leaves is fifty-one lines in which people are killed by a clash, an incursion, unrest, violence, a tank, a blast, or nothing at all.

How this was counted, and what it will not carry. A headline counts if it names a Palestinian or an Arab and reports a death, and it counts as naming an actor if the same line holds a force or a state. That test is coarse: it takes troops without asking whose, and it misses any sentence that assigns blame without a noun. Treat the figure as a floor. Broken down by decade the slices fall to single digits, too thin to show a trend, so this archive does not publish one.