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

Public debate around Gaza fixates on a death toll that is probably half the size of the real number.

Lex Syd, 22 Aug, 25, https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-media-loves-the-experts-until-its-time-to-count-gazas-dead

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.

August 24, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | media