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The Media Loves “The Experts,” Until it’s Time to Count Gaza’s Dead [1]

['Lex Syd', 'More Lex Syd', 'Nathan J. Robinson', 'Alex Skopic', 'Etienne C. Toussaint', 'Current Affairs', 'Chance Phillips']

Date: 2025-08

Far from being inflated by sneaky Hamas propagandists, the commonly cited death toll of the war in Gaza is an extreme undercount.

Virtually every news article about the Israel-Hamas war cites the death toll provided by the strip’s Ministry of Health. Currently at 60,900 (and climbing by the day), the MOH toll is widely accepted as an accurate minimum. Still, journalists and political figures aligned with Israel often call it into question in a range of ways, from attaching the label “Hamas-controlled” to the Ministry itself to outright denying its accuracy. In 2023, even former President Joe Biden invoked this idea, saying that he had “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”

Because the Ministry’s death toll has attracted this undeserved controversy, the standard reporting line is to explain why the MOH figures are considered reliable. For example, the Washington Post recently published a detailed accounting of the names, and in some cases the photos, of roughly 18,500 children who are counted among the dead overall.

But in defending and insisting on the MOH figures, media outlets have defended the bare minimum, and the result is a public debate that revolves around an understated count. Hence why New York Times columnist Bret Stephens can write an opinion piece arguing that 60,000 dead is tragic, but small relative to what Israel could do. Those terms of debate are accepted even by his harshest critics.

But the figure everyone knows is not an undercount of a few thousand or even ten thousand. The real toll could well be twice as high. That is according to a growing body of research that is conspicuously absent in news coverage of Gaza—despite the eagerness of newsrooms to emphasize expert opinion on other divisive topics, like COVID-19 policy or climate change.

The standard figure largely counts only those whose bodies reached health workers and those who were killed violently. But in reality, the institutions that count the dead are heavily degraded, thousands remain under rubble, and deaths due to malnutrition or easily preventable diseases are rarely included in MOH totals, if at all.





How Many Gazans Have Died, According to Experts

A reasonable, conservative estimate of the death toll in Gaza is about 100,000. And the figure may well tally to 200,000, if not now, then by the war’s end.

One recent study conducted by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and published in the Lancet estimates there were 64,260 “traumatic injury deaths” by the end of June 2024—at the time, the Ministry of Health’s figure was just under 38,000. In other words, the real number was likely 41 percent higher than the official one. That same 41 percent undercount, if applied to today’s figure of 60,900, would amount to roughly 102,900 deaths. Again, this is only counting those who were killed directly by Israeli bombs or bullets, not those who have starved to death or succumbed to disease.

Another recent study estimated around 84,000 deaths by January 2025. It has yet to pass peer review, but was conducted by reputable researchers from the University of London, Princeton, and Stanford, among other institutions. In January the MOH’s toll was roughly 45,900—so the estimate these scholars reached was nearly twice the standard figure (1.83 times as high, to be specific). If that ratio is applied to today’s toll, the result is over 111,400. This study’s estimate included just a few thousand non-violent, or indirect, deaths, but coauthors noted non-violent deaths may well have increased since the study concluded.

These recent studies are the best outside approximations of Gaza’s death toll made to date, and they have led both The Economist and Haaretz—hardly bastions of Hamas propaganda—to run articles centered on a potential six-figure death toll.

But these recent studies are only the latest in a line of reports and expert commentaries dating back to the war’s opening months—some of which estimate far more excess deaths.

Estimating Starvation Deaths, Before the Last Few Weeks

One letter to the Biden administration, signed by 99 American healthcare workers who volunteered in Gaza, estimated a death toll of 118,900 by the time the letter was sent in October 2024. Brown University’s Costs of War Project believes the figure credible and has cited it in its own report.

As detailed in the letter’s appendix, this includes a conservative count of over 62,000 deaths from starvation, alongside the more than 41,000 killed directly by that time, an additional 10,000 buried under rubble and therefore uncounted, and a few thousand more from those with chronic medical conditions who were cut off from their treatments.

The physicians’ letter essentially calculated the numbers that would be expected from repeated warnings issued by global famine monitors, namely the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, or IPC. Higher classifications of food insecurity are tied to an expected number of deaths as a percentage of the population, so the physicians—who personally witnessed starvation in Gaza—did the math for the various IPC warnings for parts of Gaza throughout the war.

Estimating mass starvation deaths is inherently imprecise. Outright starvation is usually not the main killer in famines—typically diseases deliver the final blow in bodies severely weakened by malnutrition. (This is also why young children make up a disproportionate number of famine deaths.) And even if a death is recorded, its official cause may not be hunger.

Starvation in Gaza is in the spotlight now, partly because hundreds of Palestinians have been shot and killed trying to get aid and partly because it is now reaching an unavoidable level—perhaps best evidenced by the MOH’s July 22 update that 15 died of hunger in a single day. But this is only the latest outbreak of hunger in Gaza, and the MOH’s reporting of hunger-related deaths has been inconsistent (with the Ministry sometimes not reporting such deaths).

Since October 2023, Gaza or parts of Gaza have reached near-famine conditions multiple times. Even absent a formal declaration, thousands can perish. It is even possible for a declared famine to see fewer deaths than an area that failed to meet the famine criteria. For example, about 85,000 children in Yemen were estimated to have died of malnutrition from 2015 to 2018 due to the country’s civil war and the U.S.-Saudi blockade, absent any official famine declaration.

It is for this reason that leading famine expert Alex de Waal wrote earlier this year that the “controversy over whether or not Gaza has crossed the red line into ‘famine’ is a distraction.” In November 2024, De Waal suggested that even absent a famine declaration, Gaza could see deaths at the scale of a famine—a toll of 100,000 being his example.

Reports of extreme hunger emerged as early as December 2023. As one woman told CNN at the time, her family’s children were “screaming all day from hunger.” By January 2024, a UN official was warning that hundreds of thousands of Gazans were “actually in famine.” In February 2024, the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha reported that his family members in Gaza had turned to eating “a mixture of rabbit, donkey, and pigeon feed” out of desperation.

Starvation was also reported by dozens of independent healthcare workers who volunteered to work in Gaza and were interviewed by the New York Times a year into the war. Of 65 healthcare workers, 63 said they observed severe malnutrition, and 25 had witnessed babies die of starvation, dehydration, or infections.

“I worked in a neonatal I.C.U. Several infants died every day due to lack of medical supplies and appropriate nutrition,” a Texas pediatrician told the Times.

An early 2024 study produced by the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine offered mortality projections for different escalation and disease outbreak pathways. A continuation of the status quo of early 2024 was projected to have 66,720 deaths by August 2024—approximately a two-thirds increase over the 40,200 deaths ultimately reported by the MOH for that month. The “escalation” scenario had a projection of 85,750 deaths by August 2024, over twice the MOH figure. (Projections are not predictions, but the discrepancy is telling nonetheless.)

Then there is a famous commentary published last year in the Lancet. Noting that indirect deaths have ranged from three to 15 times higher than direct deaths in recent conflicts, such as in South Sudan and Iraq, it applied a conservative ratio of four indirect deaths for every direct death at the time of calculation (in June 2024) to suggest an overall toll of 186,000. If the figure was not plausible then, it should be by now, more than a year later.

A death toll near 200,000 may sound unrealistic even to fierce critics of Israel. But as the University of Edinburgh’s chair of global public health, Devi Sridhar, wrote for the Guardian last year: “We don’t have a sense of how widespread disease and starvation are.”

This means the death toll may not be much larger than the MOH figures, but it also means it could be far higher. Sridhar’s “crude estimate” is that about half a million deaths may ultimately result from the war.

High estimates of indirect deaths go hand in hand with a long series of observations of severe malnutrition in Gaza. These have been produced not only by the IPC, but also by leading humanitarian and research groups (like Refugees International, the Global Nutrition Cluster, the International Crisis Group, and the Institute of Development Studies) and academics, whose findings have been published Frontiers in Nutrition and the Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition.

To summarize: academic studies, investigative reports by human rights and development organizations, and commentary from career global health experts all point to the same broad picture.

You wouldn’t know it by reading the news.

Not-so-Indirect Deaths

News outlets are correct to be cautious in reporting on conflict death tolls and on indirect deaths. Conflict-associated indirect deaths can be several times higher than the number of direct, violent deaths, but a precise number can be hard to pin down, and responsibility for those indirect deaths sometimes cannot be neatly pinned on a single actor.

But such reasoning falls apart with the war in Gaza, where one party has intentionally and successfully deprived the other of basic goods. Whether one believes it is genocidal or purely tactical, there is no doubt that the destitution of Gaza is part of Israel’s war effort. And therefore there is no reason why Gaza’s deprivation deaths should be considered unintentional—even if counting them is inexact.

Statements by Israeli officials from the beginning of the war to the present day make the intentionality clear. Choice comments from the beginning of the war include those by then-Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (“No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel”); Israel’s Army Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (“...no electricity, no water, just damage”); and defense advisor and former general Giora Eiland (“The people should be told that they have two choices; to stay and to starve, or to leave”).

More recent examples include Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s 2024 comment that starving 2 million people might be “justified and moral” and a more sanitized remark from Defense Minister Israel Katz earlier this year that blocking aid is “one of the main pressure levers” for fighting Hamas.

The sequence of events is also self-explanatory. Israel controlled the amount of food going into Gaza prior to the war, and after Oct. 7, 2023, its officials publicly announced and then proceeded to implement a strict blockade. It also targeted critical infrastructure like croplands, bakeries, and sanitation plants. Literally what else could result?

Three nearly-total blockades have been imposed on Gaza since the war started, each lasting about 90 days and relaxing somewhat just as famine warnings became imminent. These carefully managed cycles, as two contributors put it for the International Crisis Group, form a “starvation experiment.” Alex De Waal, the aforementioned famine expert, has similarly written that Israel’s aid policy appears to be an attempt to engineer a perpetual state of starvation that falls short of the technical threshold of famine.

If the words of Israeli officials and individual development scholars is insufficient, a seemingly endless number of credible observer groups also understand Gaza’s deprivation to be intentional: Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, Doctors Without Borders, Amnesty International, and the International Criminal Court are just a few notable ones.

Counting intentional deprivation deaths is fully consistent with how we tally other infamous death tolls from history. There is no controversy over assertions that the Armenian genocide caused between 1 million and 1.5 million deaths, even though starvation and disease were inextricable from that toll. Nor is it controversial to range the Khmer Rouge’s victims from 1.5 to 3 million people, even though 500,000 to 1.5 million of them died of some combination of starvation, disease, and exhaustion. In fact, two of history’s most infamous dictators owe their death tolls mostly to mass starvation—Mao and Stalin.

An Easy Prescription

Journalists are not scientists, some may argue, and therefore most should not deviate from the most commonly cited death toll until the fog of war dissipates. Parsing studies might be suitable for a long-form article, but not the typical short-form war update, such an argument would go.

These objections are reasonable, but do not excuse the absence of any mention of how much higher Gaza’s death toll might be in news coverage.

This perspective may already be setting in now that Gaza’s starvation is dominating public attention. I have read the Associated Press’ Gaza coverage on a near-daily basis for a year, and it is only now that I am seeing the MOH death toll attached to a qualification that it does not include hunger-related deaths. The group even put out a new explainer about the technical issue around declaring famine in Gaza.

This change, if it is indeed a change, is welcome, but extraordinarily belated and still insufficient. Outlets currently only cite hunger-related deaths reported by the MOH, without noting that such deaths may be much higher than the Ministry reports. In other words, news outlets are identifying Gaza’s deprivation deaths for the first time in nearly two years, but are making the same mistake they have long made—focusing solely on MOH numbers.

Further, as news outlets begin to grapple with the prospect of hunger deaths, some have emphasized internal chaos in Gaza (e.g., by saying food distribution has been “marred by chaotic scenes”). This angle, ostensibly an attempt at neutrality, diminishes the man-made nature of Gaza’s crisis and obscures the fact that chaos in Gaza is also part of the Israeli war campaign, given its continuous targeting of civil authorities.

Ultimately, if evidence for something piles up, it warrants being reported on—even if there is still uncertainty, because dealing with uncertainty is as much a part of journalism as dealing with facts. After all, most news outlets had no issue explaining excess deaths during the COVID pandemic. (For example: this 2021 AP story entitled “India’s pandemic death toll could be in the millions,” or a similar piece on Mexico’s “real” Covid-19 toll.) They also manage just fine today explaining things like the nuances around weight loss drugs like Ozempic, or the relationship between extreme weather events and man-made climate change.

I propose a solution, one so simple that there is no excuse not to use it. Reporters do not need to provide exact figures, or even a rough number. The vaguest of acknowledgments following the citation of Ministry of Health figures should suffice.

Is it so much to ask reporters to write that “Tens of thousands more are believed to have died from malnutrition or disease,” or that “Health experts have estimated thousands more have died from starvation and disease,” or even that “Some experts believe the Ministry of Health’s figures are a significant undercount,” whenever the standard figure is given?

Ultimately, this is an issue of journalistic integrity and accuracy. One need not even be sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians to see the issue. Nor would a tepid hint of the real toll be biased against Israel’s defenders—who in any case seem willing to take any number in stride.

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[1] Url: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-media-loves-the-experts-until-its-time-to-count-gazas-dead

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