Almost three in four Palestinians believe the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas on Israel was correct, and the ensuing Gaza war has lifted support for the Islamist group both there and in the West Bank, a survey from a respected Palestinian polling institute found.

  • 100_percent_a_bot@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    Might be a dumb question but how reliable are polls in non democratic countries engaged in a hot war generally? Personally I’d be scared shitless to state anything than my utmost support for the leadership, anything else could easily get me killed…

    • muelltonne@feddit.de
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      11 months ago

      Yeah, you can’t do a reliable poll in Palestine. Normally polls are done by calling random people and asking them about their opinion, but nobody in Hamas territory would give a random caller the answer that he hates Hamas because it also might be that it is Hamas who is calling. We also know that the phone network in Gaza is currently down, so you can’t even call people.

      Take a look at their method:

      The sample size of this poll is 1231 adults, of whom 750 were interviewed face to face in the West Bank and 481 in the Gaza Strip in 121 randomly selected locations. The sample is representative of the residents of the two areas. Due to the war in the Gaza Strip, we conducted interviews in the central and southern regions inside the selected sample homes, with the exception of one displaced area, where residents were interviewed in the shelter area where they had taken refuge. As for the northern Gaza Strip, residents were interviewed in 24 shelter locations, of which 20 belonged to UNRWA and 4 to governmental institutions. A total of 250 interviews were conducted in these shelters, and another 21 were conducted in the homes of relatives and friends of displaced people from the north. Despite the large representative sample, the margin of error for this poll is +/-4. The increase in the margin of error is due to the lack of precision regarding the number of residents who stayed in their homes, or in shelters, in the northern parts of the Gaza Strip which we did not sample. http://www.pcpsr.org/

      So they have field interviewers doing interviews with random refugees in the gaza strip during a cease fire. I’m not really sure if you could do a poll like that.