Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Rep-Fla.) accuses the PA of inflating its population figures to bilk US taxpayers of $3 billion in aid. This came after the House International Relations Subcommittee on the Middle East, which she chairs, heard testimony severely discrediting the demographic data the aid was based on. Ros-Lehtinen now calls for an inquiry into what happened to the extra funds. WorldNetDaily writes:
PA officials reported the Palestinian population for 2004 in West Bank and Gaza totaled 3.8 million. But an in-depth study led by American researchers Bennet Zimmerman, Roberta Seid and Michael Wise puts the current Palestinian-Arab population of the West Bank at 1.4 million and Gaza 1.1 million, for a total of 2.4 million.
“American tax dollars and other international humanitarian aid have been based on inflated population numbers which have been accepted without question by governments and aid agencies. Our researchers pointed out that money has been spent to help Palestinians who were double-counted, never born or not present in the West Bank and Gaza,” Zimmerman told WND.
The study, titled “Arab Population in the West Bank and Gaza,” compared the accepted PA data to Palestinian voting records, birth and death records published annually by the PA’s Health Ministry, immigration and emigration data from Israel’s Border Control, internal migration of Palestinians from the territories into Israel recorded by the Israeli Interior Ministry and others, Israeli Civil Administration population studies, U.N. population surveys, and surveys conducted by the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics and the World Bank.
Zimmerman’s team found extreme faults in the methods used by the PA to determine its population, including counting the 230,000 Arab residents of Jerusalem twice and retroactively raising growth and birth rates, which the study contends have been declining.
We blogged the study last year.
