(Sept. 7, 2026 / JNS)
Casualties have been a point of contention and a tool to discredit the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza since October 2023. Civilian deaths are both regrettable and inevitable, and the number is often higher in unconventional wars, when the enemy hides in civilian areas. In this context, it is even more important to distinguish between dead militants and collateral damage, something the press has failed to do in the Gaza Strip and now in Lebanon.
News reports too often casually mention numbers, leaving out that many killed were terrorists. At best, readers are left to investigate that question themselves. At worst, there is an implication that the vast majority are innocent. The “Stop the Genocide” camp cites the casualty numbers as evidence.
Several problems are associated with simply invoking casualties as evidence for a genocide or even excessive force, including that many of them deserve to be dead. The raw number of the dead obscures the fact that many of them are militants and legitimate military targets, not simply collateral damage.
Three stories exemplify the problem.
Reporting on the April ceasefire in Lebanon, a New York Times article stated: “Roughly 2,300 people were killed in Lebanon during the latest war, said the country’s health ministry, warning that the death toll could rise as bodies are recovered from under the rubble.” The article omitted that, by Hezbollah’s admission at the time, approximately 1,000 of the dead were militants.
Likewise, casualty numbers always appear in media and nonprofit reports about the Gaza war. A Washington Post article comes closest to a “fair” report. It mentions that the Hamas government claims that “more than 67,000 Palestinians—or about 3% of Gaza’s population—have been killed in the war, according to the territory’s Health Ministry,” adding:
The ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants but says the majority of casualties are women and children, an assertion supported by health systems experts, data scientists and an independent survey of mortality figures in Gaza cross-checked against the Health Ministry’s numbers.
The Post has stopped using “mostly women and children,” which is untrue, and which CAMERA successfully requested corrections since July.
The Post cited Hamas numbers, but not those of the Israel Defense Forces, which, around the time of the article’s publication, believed that at least 22,000 of the casualties—or about 1% of Gaza’s population—were terrorists.
Even when reporting on specific strikes, reports treat casualties carelessly. An Associated Press wire item reads, “An Israeli strike on the backyard of a house in central Gaza killed one Palestinian and wounded another Saturday, according to health officials at Al-Aqsa Martyrs hospital.” It continues, “Israel’s military said it targeted Sharif al-Hasanat, a Hamas commander who “advanced terror attacks and took part in efforts to restore Hamas’ underground infrastructure.”
The language leaves the audience with the impression that the dead Palestinian’s identity is unknown, while the IDF has confirmed that it was terrorist al-Hasanat, not an innocent civilian.
Nearly all stories about casualties fail to clarify that many of the casualties were legitimate targets. Reports and citations of the IDF’s and Hezbollah’s estimates of killed militants are, at best, scarce in the mainstream press.
Accepting Hezbollah and the IDF numbers for the dead combatants, target-to-collateral ratios in Gaza and Lebanon become one combatant for one civilian in Lebanon and one combatant to two civilians in Gaza. U.S. urban campaigns in Iraq resulted in estimated 1:2 to 1:3 ratios. In comparison, civilian casualties from the Israeli campaigns range from normal to impressively low.
But the constant printing of the casualty numbers itself is curious. The press has shown little interest in the casualties—civilian or militant—from the Ukraine deep strikes inside Russian territories against military installations and military industrial sites. During America’s global war on terror, including “Operation Inherent Resolve” against the Islamic State, the media focused on American casualties, not daily updates from Afghans and Iraqis killed.
It’s fair to ask why journalists only become interested in the toll from Israeli strikes. One could defend reporting casualty numbers, but it is unacceptable that, despite public information, they rarely, if ever, add the necessary context; that up to half of the dead were terrorists; and that the ratio is well within the norms of urban warfare.
Readers can draw their own conclusions about why this is—malice against Israel, incompetent reporting or simple groupthink—but it is bad journalism, nonetheless.
A layperson may be excused for accepting the implication that the vast majority of the dead are innocent civilians. The misreporting discredits the Israeli campaigns in their eyes. Properly informing the layperson is the job of journalism, which has collectively failed to do so for the past three years.