CAMERA Prompts Corrections on Palestinian Refugees

CAMERA staff elicited corrections in the New York Times Saturday and today in the International Herald Tribune concerning the number of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars. The article by Nada Bakri, which appeared in both papers, grossly overstated the number of refugees. The error and corrections follow:

Error (New York Times, 8/18/10; International Herald Tribune, 8/19/10, Nada Bakri): While about 4.7 million refugees from the Arab-Israeli wars of 1948 and 1967 are spread across the region, many of them in the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan and Syria, the estimated 400,000 in Lebanon have endured some of the most wretched conditions.

Correction (8/21/10 in NY Times, 8/24/10 in Tribune): An article on Wednesday/Thursday [CAMERA notes: Wednesday was noted in the Times and Thursday in the IHT] about the passage of a law in Lebanon granting Palestinian refugees the same rights to work as other foreigners referred imprecisely to the refugees. Although the United Nations now registers about 4.7 million Palestinian refugees throughout the region, most are the descendants of the 700,000 who fled the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and the 300,000 who fled in 1967.

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