REVIEWER 1 - COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW
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**Review of "WESEEIT,BUT NOONEBELIEVES US": TRUSTWORTHINESS IN COMMUNITY TESTIMONY AND DATA REPORTING DURING GAZA'S 2024–2025 RECONSTRUCTION**

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### **🔍 Step 1. Summary of the Paper**
This manuscript examines the credibility of community-reported infrastructure damage data from Gaza (October 2023–June 2024) using the "Genocide of the Palestinian People" dataset. The authors employ a mixed-methods approach: quantitative analysis of 255 daily records (assessing internal consistency via correlations and temporal trends) and qualitative analysis of 18 simulated interviews with engineers, volunteers, and residents. The paper claims to: (1) validate the statistical coherence of community-generated data, (2) highlight epistemic injustices in institutional reception (e.g., data dismissal or revision without consultation), and (3) propose an integrated framework combining statistical rigor and ethical principles (epistemic justice) to establish trustworthiness in humanitarian data.

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### **🔬 Step 2. Evaluation Criteria**

#### **1. Originality / Novelty**  
**Score: 6/10**  
- **Strengths**: The focus on epistemic justice (Fricker, 2007) in humanitarian data contexts is underexplored, particularly in conflict zones like Gaza. The integration of mixed methods to bridge statistical and ethical dimensions is a moderate contribution.  
- **Weaknesses**: The core premise—community data facing institutional skepticism—is well-documented in participatory GIS and crisis mapping literature (e.g., Onencan et al., 2018; Smit, 2021). The "simulated interviews" approach lacks precedent and risks undermining authenticity.  
- **Verdict**: Incremental rather than field-advancing. The ethical framing is valuable but not transformative.

#### **2. Scientific Rigor / Methodology**  
**Score: 3/10**  
- **Critical Flaws**:  
  - **Simulated Interviews**: The use of "simulated" interviews (Section 4.5) is methodologically unsound. It is unclear whether these are hypothetical, AI-generated, or role-played, raising serious questions about data validity, ethical compliance, and generalizability.  
  - **Data Source**: The Kaggle dataset ("Genocide of the Palestinian People") is cited but not critically evaluated for biases, verification protocols, or potential manipulation. The claim of "zero missing entries" in a conflict zone is extraordinary and requires justification.  
  - **Statistical Analysis**: Correlation analysis (e.g., r=0.967 between educational damage variables) may reflect collinearity or redundant reporting rather than true consistency. No controls for confounding factors (e.g., media attention, access constraints) are mentioned.  
- **Ethical Oversights**: No evidence of IRB approval or informed consent for human participants (Section 4.8 vaguely references compliance but lacks details).  
- **Verdict**: Fundamental methodological flaws compromise the study's validity.

#### **3. Clarity & Presentation**  
**Score: 5/10**  
- **Strengths**: The structure follows conventional sections (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion), and the abstract clearly outlines goals.  
- **Weaknesses**:  
  - **Jargon Overuse**: Terms like "convergent concurrent triangulation" and "epistemic trust" are repeated without sufficient clarity for interdisciplinary readers.  
  - **Ambiguity**: "Simulated interviews" is never defined. The conflation of "moral injury" with data revision is provocative but poorly substantiated.  
  - **Figures/Tables**: Absent. Visualizations of temporal trends or correlation matrices would strengthen quantitative claims.  
- **Verdict**: Readable but obfuscated by undefined terms and missing visuals.

#### **4. Reproducibility & Transparency**  
**Score: 2/10**  
- **Data/Code**: The Kaggle dataset is publicly available, but analysis scripts (Python) are not shared.  
- **Methodological Gaps**: No interview protocols, coding manuals, or raw qualitative data are provided. The "simulated" nature of interviews precludes replication.  
- **Statistical Transparency**: Correlation results are reported without p-values or confidence intervals. The claim that "correlations >0.9 correspond to a 38% increase in moral-trust statements (p<0.05)" lacks a clear statistical model or validation.  
- **Verdict**: Critically deficient. Replication is impossible.

#### **5. Significance & Impact**  
**Score: 4/10**  
- **Potential**: The topic is urgent—community data in Gaza could inform humanitarian response and accountability.  
- **Limitations**: Methodological flaws undermine policy relevance. The proposed "integrated framework" is too abstract for practical implementation.  
- **Audience**: Experts in humanitarian ethics may find the epistemic justice discussion engaging, but data scientists will question the analytical rigor.  
- **Verdict**: Local relevance but unlikely to influence broader field.

#### **6. Ethics & Integrity**  
**Score: 3/10**  
- **Ethical Concerns**:  
  - **Simulated Interviews**: If these involve human participants, the lack of detail on consent and IRB approval is unacceptable. If AI-generated, this must be explicitly stated to avoid misrepresentation.  
  - **Neutrality**: The dataset title ("Genocide of the Palestinian People") and framing assume a contested political stance, risking bias. The paper does not address how this affects objectivity.  
  - **Conflicts of Interest**: No declarations provided.  
- **Verdict**: Ethical and integrity issues are severe and unresolved.

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### **🧪 Step 3. Specific Suggestions for Improvement**

#### **Major Revisions Required**:  
1. **Replace Simulated Interviews**: Conduct real interviews with verified participants, detailing IRB approval and consent procedures. If simulation was used for safety reasons, justify and transparently describe the process (e.g., LLM-generated responses with validation).  
2. **Validate Dataset Credibility**: Include external checks (e.g., satellite imagery correlation) to verify damage reports. Acknowledge potential biases (e.g., under-reporting in northern Gaza).  
3. **Strengthen Statistical Analysis**: Add controls for temporal autocorrelation, report effect sizes and uncertainty metrics, and address collinearity (e.g., variance inflation factors).  
4. **Clarify Ethical Compliance**: Provide IRB approval number and consent forms in supplements.

#### **Minor Revisions**:  
- Define key terms (e.g., "epistemic trust," "moral injury") in the introduction.  
- Add visualizations: time-series plots, correlation matrices, theme frequency charts.  
- Tone down polemical language (e.g., "genocide" in dataset title) or justify its use academically.  
- Fix formatting errors (e.g., inconsistent reference styling, typos like "T RUSTWOR - THINESS").

#### **Additional Experiments/Analyses**:  
- Compare community data with remote sensing estimates (e.g., Holail et al., 2024) to assess convergence.  
- Include gender-disaggregated analysis of interview responses to explore intersectional epistemic injustice.  
- Conduct sensitivity analyses for correlation thresholds (e.g., how results change if r > 0.8 vs. r > 0.9).

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### **📊 Step 4. Final Decision & Justification**

#### **Overall Score: 3/10**  
The paper addresses a timely and morally urgent topic but is marred by fatal methodological flaws. The use of "simulated interviews" without clarification or validation, combined with unverified data sources and inadequate statistical rigor, renders the findings unreliable. While the ethical framing around epistemic justice is commendable, it cannot compensate for foundational weaknesses.

#### **Recommendation: Reject**  
**Justification**:  
- The study fails to meet basic standards of scientific validity and reproducibility.  
- Ethical concerns (e.g., unresolved IRB status, potential misrepresentation of data) are unacceptable for a high-impact journal.  
- The incremental novelty does not outweigh these deficits.  

**If the authors address the major issues above**, a resubmission after rigorous revision and external validation could be considered. However, in its current form, the manuscript is not suitable for publication.

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**Reviewer 01**  
*Expert Peer Reviewer for [Journal Name]*  
*Confidential Comments to Editor*: This manuscript requires substantial ethical and methodological overhaul before it can be taken seriously. The political sensitivity of the topic demands even greater rigor to avoid perceived bias.