Four counts of one morningFour counts, none matching · October 1990
8 October 1990
Four counts of one morning
Israeli Border Police fired into a crowd at al-Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem on the morning of 8 October 1990. Within three weeks four bodies had counted the dead and filed the figure. No two of them agreed, and they do not disagree in the direction you would guess.
“GRIEVING MOTHER, Mrs. Kefiya Jihad Hamide, 32, weeps with family members at their Jerusalem home today over the death of her son, among 19 Palestinians shot to death by Israeli troops.”
The Associated Press, in a caption, the next morning. The agency put the same figure in a second caption the same day, in a Buffalo paper.
CP-1990-011“the violence which took place on 8 October at the Al Haram Al Shareef and other Holy Places of Jerusalem resulting in over 20 Palestinian deaths and to the injury of more than 150 people”
United Nations Security Council resolution 672, adopted unanimously four days after. Not in this archive: a UN document, S/RES/672 (1990).
“According to Israel Police statistics, 20 people were killed and 53 injured on the Temple Mount.”
The Israeli commission of investigation into the day, summary released by the Government Press Office and filed to the Security Council as S/21919/Add.3. Not in this archive.
“The number of dead was 17, one of whom was a woman. Over 150 were injured.”
Al-Haq, the Palestinian human rights organization in Ramallah, reconstructing the morning from more than 50 interviews taken between 8 and 11 October by 13 fieldworkers. Filed to the Security Council as S/21919/Add.2. Not in this archive.
The highest figure is the police’s own and the lowest is the Palestinian one. Whatever else these numbers do, they do not show either side inflating its own case. The wounded split the other way and split hard: Israel Police counted 53 injured, al-Haq counted over 150, and the Security Council said more than 150.
The two accounts read the same morning in opposite directions. Al-Haq has Border Guards firing on an approaching crowd without a verbal warning or a shot in the air, and an ambulance and the doctor beside it shot at. The Israeli summary has police whose lives were in danger, a barrage of stones and metal, and live ammunition used at their attackers. Both were filed to the same Security Council in the same week. Neither is in this archive, because neither was printed in an American newspaper.
What the papers did with it
This archive holds 12 clippings from that week and the year after it. The number is almost never in a headline.
“Israeli police gas Moslem crowd at Temple Mount”
Kentucky New Era. The verb is gas and nobody dies in the sentence. The grieving mother and her 19 ran in the same edition, under a photograph.
CP-1990-012“Israeli police close holy site, fire tear gas at Muslims”
The Atlanta Journal, across the top of the page. A site is closed and tear gas is fired. The people fired at are named by religion.
CP-1990-013“Temple Mount inquiry continues · New evidence counters Israel’s claim that shootings were justified”
The News & Observer, six months on. The headline is a process continuing; the line under it is the news.
CP-1991-002“Members of the ‘Temple Mount Faithful’ march to protest the shootings in October of 17 Palestinians by Israeli police”
The Associated Press again, a year later, in the same Vermont paper. Its own captions that week said 19, twice. No correction appears anywhere in this archive.
CP-1991-005Two people left the American count between October 1990 and October 1991, and nobody told the reader. The figure that survived is the Palestinian one, arrived at by an organization no American paper here cites.
Four institutions counted the same morning: 17, 19, 20, over 20. Three of them wrote down how they counted, and those three documents are public and free. The next time a number reaches you attached to a killing, look for the sentence that says who did the counting and on what day.