New York Times misstates Palestinian death toll, downplays genocide.

As award-winning investigative journalist Laila Al-Arian writes of The New York Times: “They’ll be remembered for minimizing genocide, normalizing Palestinian death and whitewashing Israel’s atrocities.”

Michael F. Brown Media Watch 5 September 2025, https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/michael-f-brown/new-york-times-misstates-palestinian-death-toll-downplays-genocide

Nearly two years into the Gaza genocide, The New York Times is failing to convey to its readers the enormity of what is happening to Palestinians.

On 30 August (the online publication date), in an article about the Venice International Film Festival and organizing there on behalf of Gaza, the newspaper claimed that 39,000 people in Gaza had been killed as of July.

“In July, the enclave’s health ministry said that more than 39,000 people had been killed, a toll that does not distinguish between civilians and combatants. And this month, a group of global experts said that Gaza City and the surrounding territory were officially suffering from famine.”

But that 39,000 figure is from July of 2024.

In fact, according to the health ministry in Gaza, over 63,000 Palestinians had been killed when The New York Times article was published. The official death toll was updated to more than 64,000 a few days later.

I requested a correction on 2 September after I first read the article. Pro-Israel media-monitoring organizations such as CAMERA and HonestReporting did not appear to be seized by the matter with the latter clearly looking past the error on the number of Palestinians killed.

The New York Timesappended this correction to the article the next day: “An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the Gaza health ministry’s death toll. The ministry recently put the figure at more than 60,000 people, not over 39,000.”

The correction run on 4 September on the corrections page reads: “An article on Monday about a pro-Palestinian demonstration that took place during the 82nd Venice International Film Festival on Saturday misstated the death toll cited by the Gaza health ministry. The ministry recently put the figure at more than 60,000 people, not over 39,000.”

Even the correction knowingly erases some 3,000 Palestinians killed. The number slain during the Israeli-administered genocide at the time of original publication was over 63,000.

In the chaos of Gaza as institutions are destroyed and people are buried in the rubble, it is worth noting that some estimates of the casualty figures go far higher.

Genocide

The newspaper of record – as opposed toThe Washington Post – also appeared very reluctant to devote much attention to the resolution passed on 31 August by the International Association of Genocide Scholars that declares Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza.

Just two paragraphs were devoted to the issue on 1 September by The New York Times.

First, the newspaper noted, “On Monday, the International Association of Genocide Scholars, a leading group of academic experts on the topic, declared that Israel’s policies and actions in Gaza met the legal definition of genocide.”

Then, in a longer sentence, the Israeli foreign ministry was given space to rebut the charge.

“A spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry denounced the conclusion as ‘an embarrassment to the legal profession,’ adding in a statement that it was ‘entirely based on Hamas’ campaign of lies and the laundering of those lies by others.’”

Historian Assal Rad noted the shortcomings of the reporting by The New York Times, highlighting the absence of headlines or a dedicated story focusing on the fact Israel is committing genocide.

As award-winning investigative journalist Laila Al-Arian writes of The New York Times: “They’ll be remembered for minimizing genocide, normalizing Palestinian death and whitewashing Israel’s atrocities.”

Further bias can be seen in a New York Times article published shortly before publication of this article.

Liam Stack writes that “the war began after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel, in which roughly 1,200 were killed and 250 more taken hostage.”

Stack employs the term “terror attack,” but at no point references Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide.

He did not immediately respond to a request for comment from The Electronic Intifada regarding bias at the newspaper.

September 12, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment

Israeli Lawmakers Demanded Better PR to Conceal Gaza Famine. Google Obliged.

Exclusive look at Israeli government contracts for online ads claiming that there is no hunger or starvation in Gaza.

Israel’s advertising bureau, which reports to the prime minister’s office, has since embarked on a mass advertising and public messaging effort to conceal the hunger crisis. The push includes the use of American influencers widely reported on last month. It also includes a high-dollar spending spree on paid advertising, yielding tens of millions for Google, YouTube, X, Meta, and other tech platforms.

Lee Fang and Jack Poulson, Sep 04, 2025

Investigation published in partnership with Drop Site News.

On March 2, 2025, hours after the Israeli government announced the blockade of all food, medicine, fuel, and other humanitarian supplies from entering Gaza, lawmakers in Jerusalem demanded answers—not on the devastating human toll of such a decision, but on how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office was preparing to handle the public relations fallout.

“I began with the example of the cessation of humanitarian aid—did you prepare for this thing this morning?” asked Knesset member Moshe Tur-Paz, the chair of a subcommittee on Foreign Affairs in Israel’s parliament.

Avichai Edrei, a spokesperson for the Israel Defense Forces who was asked the same question later in the hearing, assured the legislators work was underway, stating, “We could also decide to launch a digital campaign in this context, to explain that there is no hunger and present the data.”

Publicly available government contracts show that Israel’s advertising bureau, which reports to the prime minister’s office, has since embarked on a mass advertising and public messaging effort to conceal the hunger crisis. The push includes the use of American influencers widely reported on last month. It also includes a high-dollar spending spree on paid advertising, yielding tens of millions for Google, YouTube, X, Meta, and other tech platforms.

“There is food in Gaza. Any other claim is a lie,” asserted a propaganda video published by Israel’s foreign ministry to Google’s YouTube video sharing platform in late August and viewed more than 6 million times.

Much of the video’s reach results from an ad placed during an ongoing and previously unreported $45 million (NIS 150 million) advertising campaign initiated between Google and Netanyahu’s office in late June. The contract—which is with both YouTube and Google’s advertising campaign management platform, Display & Video 360—explicitly characterizes the ad campaign as hasbara, a Hebrew word whose meaning is somewhere between public relations and propaganda.

Records show that the Israeli government similarly spent $3 million (NIS 10 million) for an advertising campaign with X. The French and Israeli advertising platform Outbrain/Teads is also set to receive roughly $2.1 million (NIS 7 million)

The ads have aired in response to increasing global outcry over the deteriorating situation in Gaza. In August, the UN formally declared a famine in Gaza governorate, which includes Gaza City. The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the leading global authority on food security, projected the threshold for famine would be crossed in Deir al-Balah and Khan Younis in the coming weeks, stating “this Famine is entirely man-made, it can be halted and reversed.”

The UN aid coordination office OCHA further warned on Friday of “a descent into a massive famine” in the Gaza Strip.

At least 367 Palestinians, including 131 children, have died as a result of hunger and malnutrition since the war began, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

The existence of an Israeli Google ads campaign to discredit the UN’s primary aid agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, was similarly reported by WIRED last year. Hadas Maimon, head of public awareness for Israel’s diaspora ministry, stated during the March 2 Knesset hearing that, “For almost a year now, we have been leading a major campaign on the issue of UNRWA.”

Other Israeli government ads on Google’s platforms accused the United Nations of “deliberate sabotage” of aid delivery into Gaza and promoted the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, which is backed by Israel, the U.S., and unnamed European countries. One campaign promoted prosecution of the militant group Hamas, which governs the Gaza Strip, for debunked allegations of mass sexual violence as a result of a controversial report published by the Israeli advocacy group Dinah Project.

Despite the denial about the famine, prominent Israeli government voices have championed the effort to cut off food and water to Gazans as a strategy for inducing mass migration out of the territory. “In my opinion, you can besiege them,” said Bezalel Smotrich, the Israeli Finance Ministry and a coalition partner to Netantayu’s government, according to Channel 12. “No water, no electricity, they can die of hunger or surrender,” Smotrich said.

Amichay Eliyahu, the Knesset member who leads the Heritage Ministry in Netanyahu’s government, has similarly called for starving the Palestinian population of Gaza. “There is no nation that feeds its enemies,” Eliyahu said during a radio interview in July. In May, the minister argued the Palestinians “need to starve” and added, “If there are civilians who fear for their lives, they should go through the emigration plan.”…………………………………………………………..(Subscribers only) https://www.leefang.com/p/israeli-lawmakers-demanded-better?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1239256&post_id=172710128&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ln98x&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

September 10, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment

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 | Leave a comment

Atomic Bill and the Payment Due

Karl Grossman, CounterPunch, August 21, 2025

Can a play influence public perception of our shared atomic history enough to shift the conversation away from a presumed nuclear “renaissance” and into a more critical, life-protective examination of what this technology is and could do to us all?

Playwright and podcaster Libbe HaLevy believes it can. She spent 13 years researching and writing that play—Atomic Bill and the Payment Due—which will have its premiere staged reading on September 9^th as a featured presentation of the 50^th anniversary celebration of the establishment of the Peace Resource Center at Wilmington College in Ohio.

For 14 years, HaLevy has hosted the podcast Nuclear Hotseat, aired on 20 Pacifica affiliate radio stations throughout the United States and, as its website (NuclearHotseat.com) says, has been tuned into and downloaded by audiences in over 124 countries around the world.

It was while working on a 2012 episode focusing on the Trinity atomic bomb test in New Mexico that she became aware of journalistic irregularities around that event that piqued her interest.

The play is “a true story about media manipulation at the dawn of the Atomic Age and the New York Times reporter who sold his soul to get the story.”

That reporter is William Laurence, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter at the Times. In 1945, General Leslie Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, arranged with Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger, and Edwin James, its managing editor, to have Laurence secretly inserted into the Manhattan Project. He was the only journalist embedded in the crash program to build the first atomic bombs– a position he relished.

Before World War II broke out and the splitting of the atom first occurred, Laurence wrote in the Times about how atomic energy could for mankind “return the Earth to the Eden he had lost.”  He witnessed the Trinity test in New Mexico in July 1945, and wrote the Manhattan Project press release that was distributed afterwards, which claimed only that an ammunition dump exploded and no one was hurt.  He had arranged a seat on the Enola Gay for its dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, but missed getting on—a bitter disappointment.  But he did fly on an airplane that followed the B-29 that dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki.  When the war ended, he wrote articles in the Times glorifying the Manhattan Project and for many years promoted nuclear energy in his stories— ignoring the lethal impacts of radioactivity.

HaLevy sensed a play lurking in the story……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/21/atomic-bill-and-the-payment-due/

August 21, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment

YouTube bans prominent Zelensky critic

Former TV host Diana Panchenko had more than 2 million subscribers when her account was deleted.

9 Aug 25, https://www.rt.com/russia/622688-youtube-ban-zelensky-critic/

YouTube has removed the 2-million-subscriber account of exiled Ukrainian Journalist of the Year Diana Panchenko, a fierce critic of Vladimir Zelensky.

In 2023, Kiev imposed personal sanctions on the former TV presenter and started criminal proceedings against her for her alleged anti-Ukrainian reporting.

Panchenko has long criticized Zelensky for rampant corruption in Ukraine, as well as his clampdown on freedom of speech. She has also condemned Kiev’s military actions in Donbass since 2014, and later accused the former actor of dragging the nation into a “forever war.”

“Diana Panchenko @Panchenko_X is one of the most famous women in Ukraine, former Journalist of the Year and opponent of the grossly corrupt Zelensky regime,” Irish journalist Chay Bowes wrote on X on Friday.

“YouTube just banned her and erased her account. She had 2 million followers,” he wrote. “The most dangerous weapon is Truth.”

Panchenko’s YouTube account is deleted as of the time of writing, but an archived snapshot shows that at least 2.09 million people subscribed to her channel as of last month.

Youtube, which is owned by Google, has extensively cracked down on and banned Russian media channels, as well as large pro-Moscow private accounts since the escalation of the Ukraine conflict.

Panchenko has also routinely criticized Kiev’s crackdown on alternative narratives in Ukraine.

Soon after the escalation of the conflict in 2022, Zelensky shut down multiple television channels associated with his political opposition and consolidated some of the country’s largest networks into a single 24/7 broadcast called the United News TV Telemarathon.

August 11, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | media | Leave a comment