How Western officials, media coverage pushed to discredit Gaza death toll

In the first 18 days of Israel’s genocidal war on the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military killed more than 7,000 Palestinians, including nearly 3,000 children, despite growing calls from around the world for a ceasefire.

But in the United States, Israel’s top ally, then-President Joe Biden cast doubt over the suffering and death count of Palestinians, as provided by the Ministry of Health in Gaza, to push back against calls for ending the brutal Israeli assault.

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“What they say to me is I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed. I’m sure innocents have been killed, and it’s the price of waging a war,” Biden said in October 2023.

“But I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using,” he said.

More than two years later, as the Palestinian death toll grew tenfold, the Israeli military acknowledged that it killed more than 70,000 Palestinians, confirming the Health Ministry’s data.

Rights advocates say Western officials and media outlets helped the Israeli denial of the scope of atrocities in Gaza, contributing to the dehumanisation of Palestinians.

Abed Ayoub, executive director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), said the US government attempted to “gaslight” the world and discredit the Health Ministry numbers.

“This government played a role in that, and the Biden administration played a role in that,” he told Al Jazeera.

“They laid the groundwork for the Israeli officials to do the same thing. But ultimately, at the end, you cannot keep lying about what the world has been watching and witnessing with our own eyes,” Ayoub said.

The death toll

Several Israeli media outlets quoted senior military officials last week as saying they accept that the death toll in Gaza is about 70,000.

The Israeli government later tried to walk back that acknowledgement, saying the “details published do not reflect official [military] data”.

As of Sunday, the Palestinian Health Ministry put the death toll since October 7, 2023, at 71,769, including 506 people who were killed after the United States-brokered “ceasefire” came into effect in October last year.

Humanitarian agencies and United Nations officials have repeatedly said the tally presented by health officials in Gaza is accurate.

But some experts say the true death toll – which includes thousands of missing people, unreported deaths and fatalities linked to the Israeli blockade and destruction of the health system – is far higher than reported.

Last year, a study published in The Lancet medical journal estimated that deaths in Gaza are under-reported by 41 percent.

Still, Israel’s supporters in the US and the West have pushed to portray Palestinians as unreliable sources to report on their own suffering, casting doubt over the death toll in Gaza.

In 2024, the US House of Representatives passed a bipartisan bill to ban the Department of State from citing death statistics from the Health Ministry in Gaza.

Pro-Israel commentators, politicians and advocacy groups have argued for more than two years that the Palestinian data should not be trusted.

Hatem Abudayyeh, chair of the US Palestinian Community Network (USPCN), said the world should believe Palestinians when they expose Israeli atrocities in Gaza and beyond.

“It’s time for US and other Western press to do their jobs, to challenge the US and Israeli Zionist narrative, and to print the truth about the genocide, the continued violations of the ‘ceasefire’, and all of Israel’s and the US’s crimes against humanity,” Abudayyeh told Al Jazeera.

‘Hamas-run’ Health Ministry

Throughout the war, many Western media outlets – including most prominently the BBC, AFP, Fox News and CNN – have prefaced any reference to the Health Ministry in Gaza as “Hamas-run” – an editorial policy that critics say attempted to demean Palestinians and dismiss their deaths.

At times, CNN inserted an additional disclaimer in its stories about Gaza, saying it “cannot independently verify the ministry’s figures”.

The New York Times has also previously referred to the Health Ministry as “Hamas-controlled”.

While the Health Ministry is part of the governing structure in Gaza, which was controlled by Hamas, it has been run by public health professionals, and there is no evidence that the Palestinian group interferes in its operations or statistics.

Ironically, even in reporting the Israeli acknowledgement of the Health Ministry’s data, the BBC’s headline on Friday read: “Israeli media cite official accepting Hamas figure of 70,000 war dead”.

The BBC did not respond to Al Jazeera’s request for comment by the time of publication.

Ayoub said many mainstream media outlets unquestionably published Israeli propaganda over the past two years while raising doubt over Palestinian accounts.

“It’s another reason and another example of why there’s been a complete loss of trust and faith in any mainstream media,” he told Al Jazeera. “This genocide has really given room, more so than any event in recent history, to third-party and independent media outlets.”