By Ralph Nader
October 10, 2025
Ben Hubbard, the long-time Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, is known for his high standards. So too is Karen DeYoung, the long-time reporter and foreign affairs editor for the Washington Post.
Yet
they, and their editors, share a common, recurring failure by
misleading their readers about the serious undercount of Palestinian
deaths during the Israeli regime’s genocidal destruction of Gaza.
How
so? By repeating in article after article the Hamas claim of 67,000
deaths since October 2023. The real death toll estimate is probably
around 600,000. Unlike Israeli and American cultures, which do not
under-estimate their fatalities in conflicts, Hamas sees the awful death
toll as a reflection of their not protecting their people and a measure
of Israeli military might against Hamas’ limited small arms and
weapons. Both Hubbard and DeYoung, of course, know better. They know the
daily bombardment of tiny Gaza, the geographical size of Philadelphia,
with 2.3 million humans, is without precedent in Israel’s targeting of
civilians and civilian infrastructure. The blockade of “food, water,
medicine, fuel, and electricity,” along with the concentrated
destruction of health care facilities have been condemned by human
rights groups in Israel and International humanitarian organizations.
Reporters and editors are quite aware of more accurate casualty estimates appearing in The Lancet,
the prestigious British medical journal, and estimates provided by
other academic and prominent international relief organizations like
Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, UN World Food Programme and
others experienced in assessing the human toll of military devastations.
Journalists know the estimate last April by
Professor Emeritus Paul Rogers of the University of Bradford in the UK,
an expert in the power of aerial bombs and missiles, who wrote that the
TNT equivalent of six Hiroshima atomic bombs has been delivered to
these totally defenseless Palestinians, almost all of whom are without
housing or air raid shelters.
Netanyahu’s
American-made missiles and bombs continue to produce deadly bloodshed.
The waves of death from starvation, untreated, weaponry-caused
infectious diseases, the cutoff of medicines treating cancer,
respiratory ailments, and diabetes are still mounting.
What
readers do not know is how much of the use of Hamas’s undercount is
mandated by news editors, and why. Because intense Netanyahu propaganda
has declared the estimates of Hamas, based on real names (excluding
many thousands under the rubble and the collateral damage to civilians
that in such conflicts exceed direct fatalities from the bombing by 3 to
13-fold), are an exaggeration, the mainstream media is wary of being
accused of even worse fabrications than those of Hamas.
Speaking
to many reporters and editors about this huge undercount phenomenon,
not prevalent in other violent arenas of war, they all agree that the
real count is much higher, but they do not have a number to use that is
deemed credible. But they do have casualty experts who can be
interviewed, such as the chair of the Global Health Department at
Edinburgh University or a foremost missile technology specialist, MIT
Professor Emeritus Theodore Postol, who said on our radio/podcast
recently, “I would say that 200, 300, or 400,000 people [Palestinian]
are dead easily.”
The
least the journalists could do is say “the real count may be much
higher.” The other alternative is to do their own investigation, piecing
together the empirical and clinical evidence (See, Gaza Healthcare Letter to President Trump,
October 1, 2025) and citing prominent Israelis who have said that the
IDF has always targeted Palestinian civilians from 1948 on. (See my
column March 28, 2025 – The Vast Gaza Death Undercount – Undermines Civic, Diplomatic and Political Pressures.)
The
other alternative is to do a “news analysis,” which allows for
evaluations, short of editorializing. For instance, a “news analysis”
could point out that conveying the impression that the Hamas figures are
the true count means that 97 out of 100 Palestinians in Gaza are still
living. This is not remotely credible. Yet that is essentially what Ben
Hubbard’s October 7th Times article stated, “with more than
67,000 killed, or one in every 34 Gazans, according to local health
officials.” It is more like one in every four Gazans killed.
Nor
is it true that the “local health officials” are confirming this,
because on further inquiry, they admit their definition of the fatality
toll excludes those under the rubble and those who die from the massive
collateral casualty toll. This reality is well known to scores of
American physicians back from Gaza who say that a majority of those
killed are children and women and that the survivors are almost all
injured, sick, or dying.
There are esteemed reporters like Gideon Levy of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz,
who claim that the Hamas figures are horrible enough that they meet the
test of genocide, implying that a higher count would not make any more
of a moral or political difference.
I
disagree. “Horror” does not have finite limits. It makes a difference
in driving the greater intensity of political, diplomatic, and civic
pressures to have a count of 600,000 rather than 67,000 or 200,000
children rather than 20,000 children murdered. Do we need to refer to
other genocides in the 20th century to show how much a difference it
would have made if the official count were one tenth of the real count?
The editors of the Post, especially, and of the Times are
not keeping up with the reporting of DeYoung and Hubbard et al., about
the scenes of death, dying, and horrendous agony in Gaza. The editorial
management of reporters and the editorials fail to hold Netanyahu and
his terroristic mass-slaughtering cabinet accountable. They allow the
publication of realistic reports, features, and sometimes even give
voice to Palestinians, as the Times did with several pages and
pictures recently. But the long-time omnipresent shadow of AIPAC et al.
darkens the editorial and opinion pages more than do the illuminations
of their own reporters.