After more than two years of denying the number of Palestinians it is killing during its campaign in Gaza, the Israeli military decided the death toll estimate kept by the Health Ministry in the Gaza Strip was an accurate count of those killed in the besieged territory.<\/p>\n
The military, which routinely dismissed health ministry figures as Hamas propaganda, is analyzing the data to distinguish how many are combatants and how many are civilians, according to Haaretz. The report confirms past stories from the Israeli website Local Call as well as Vice.<\/p>\n
The ministry is part of a Hamas-controlled government in Gaza, but human rights advocates, a prestigious medical journal, and the United Nations have said for years that its tallies of the dead have been found to be accurate. The ministry also periodically releases names and other identifying information about those killed in Gaza.<\/p>\n
The doubts sewn over the loss of Palestinian life laid the groundwork for shielding Israel from accountability.<\/p>\n
Despite human rights advocates\u2019 reliance on the figures, the White House, members of Congress, pro-Israel pundits, and legacy media institutions have all cast doubt on the running death toll kept by the Palestinian health ministry.<\/p>\n
The doubts sewn over the loss of Palestinian life laid the groundwork for persistent genocide denial that has helped to shield Israel from accountability.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThe Biden administration, Congress, and the U.S. media played along with Israel\u2019s lies and deception about the horrific death toll in Gaza \u2014 over 80 percent civilians; over half, women and children \u2014 so that they could gaslight Americans into continued support for Israel,\u201d said Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of human rights group DAWN. She said that, along with other debunked Israeli claims about the war, the denials of the death toll helped \u201censure Israel can continue its crimes and the U.S. can continue to arm it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hani Almadhoun, co-founder of the Gaza Soup Kitchen, whose brother Mahmoud was killed by an Israeli drone in November 2024, said it was difficult to defend against officials and media outlets dismissing the death tolls as \u201cHamas numbers.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cTo every government spokesperson, every news anchor, and every celebrity who repeated that denial \u2014 I hope you never know what it feels like to lose your family and then be told your loss is \u2018disputed,\u2019\u201d Almadhoun told The Intercept.<\/p>\n
With media and NGO workers barred by Israel from entering the Strip, the Palestinian health ministry\u2019s count has been the only reliable source of the death toll during the genocide.<\/p>\n
The latest health ministry figure estimates at least 71,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel, a number that is still growing while Israel continues to strike the besieged territory at a near-daily rate in violation of the so-called ceasefire.<\/p>\n
Here is a brief accounting of the people and institutions who have denied the Palestinian death tolls in Gaza throughout Israel\u2019s genocide.<\/p>\n
Biden Administration<\/p>\n
About two weeks after October 7, 2023, then-President Joe Biden told reporters that he had \u201cno confidence\u201d in the death tolls kept by the Gaza Health Ministry.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have no confidence in the number that Palestinians are using,\u201d Biden said. At the time, the Gaza Health Ministry death tolls estimated 6,000 Palestinians, including 2,700 children, killed by the Israeli military. Biden\u2019s National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby doubled down and said nothing from the health ministry, which he called \u201ca front for Hamas,\u201d could be taken \u201cat face value.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the Biden administration later shifted toward confidence in the health ministry figures, their initial comments, which were widely reported, left lasting damage on the credibility of the Palestinian death tolls.<\/p>\n
Congress<\/p>\n
In June 2024, a bipartisan group of lawmakers, including Reps. Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla.; Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J.; Joe Wilson, R-S.C.; Mike Lawler, R-N.Y.; and Carol Miller, R-W.Va.,\u00a0helped pass an amendment to a State Department spending bill that blocked the department from citing the Gaza Health Ministry data in its reports.<\/p>\n
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Later that year, Congress passed a defense spending bill that similarly barred the Pentagon from publicly citing the Gaza Health Ministry estimates as \u201cauthoritative.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWill Congress now overturn its own ban on citing the [Gaza Health Ministry] data,\u201d Whitson said, \u201cnow that even the Israeli government has conceded it\u2019s accurate?\u201d<\/p>\n
Rep. Ritchie Torres<\/p>\n
Days before the Senate vote on the defense spending bill, Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., a staunch Israel supporter, circulated a report from a neoconservative U.K.-based think tank, the Henry Jackson Society, that accused the Gaza Health Ministry of inflating its death toll.<\/p>\n
\u201cValidating the public health arm of Hamas is like validating the public health arms of Al Qaeda and ISIS or the public health arms of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan,\u201d Torres said. \u201cIt is morally and intellectually corrupt.\u201d<\/p>\n
Steny Hoyer<\/p>\n
Along with Torres and a host of other lawmakers, Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., accused the Gaza Health Ministry of inflating the death tolls.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe must treat their claims with the same skepticism we would those made by al Qaeda or ISIS.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey inflate casualty numbers and make false accusations to smear Israel\u2019s reputation,\u201d Hoyer said in October 2023. \u201cWe must treat their claims with the same skepticism we would those made by al Qaeda or ISIS.\u201d<\/p>\n
Since its military accepted the Gaza Health Ministry numbers, neither Torres nor Hoyer have accused Israel of doing something similar to validating the Islamic State or Nazi Germany.<\/p>\n
Anti-Defamation League<\/p>\n
The Anti-Defamation League was one of a host of influential pro-Israel figures and organizations that sought to discredit the Gaza Health Ministry\u2019s death toll.<\/p>\n
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The group released a list of news outlets that did not mention Hamas when reporting on the health ministry death estimates and called on outlets to \u201cproperly caveat data and information cited from the Gaza Health Ministry with clear mention that it is controlled by Hamas and that it has shared false and misleading information in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n
AIPAC<\/p>\n
Another powerful pro-Israel lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee called the Palestinian death tolls a \u201cmyth\u201d that \u201ccannot be trusted\u201d because it is controlled by Hamas.<\/p>\n
Elliott Abrams<\/p>\n
Figures at major think tanks also joined the denialism. From his perch at the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, Elliott Abrams, a longtime Washington neoconservative, was among them. Abrams \u2014 who pleaded guilty in 1991 to counts related to the cover-up of the Iran\u2013Contra affair \u2014 called the Gaza Health Ministry data \u201cnot credible\u201d and \u201cHamas propaganda,\u201d citing a United Nations death toll revision that listed fewer women and children killed in Gaza. The shifting number was due to achange in the U.N.\u2019s methodology \u2014 to an MO that now relies solely on the Gaza Health Ministry for data.<\/p>\n
Washington Institute for Near East Policy<\/p>\n
Another think tank, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, an organization formed with the support of AIPAC and its donors, also used the U.N. revision as evidence of apparent misinformation, citing the shift as evidence that the figures \u201chave lost any claim to validity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Foundation for Defense of Democracies<\/p>\n
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies said the Gaza Health Ministry is \u201cis scrambling to prevent exposure of its shoddy work\u201d after the ministry acknowledged in a report that it was still working to identify about 11,000 of what at the time was a toll of more than 30,000 Palestinians killed. The foundation suggested the report was a \u201cdeliberate effort to downplay the number of terrorists\u201d killed by Israel.<\/p>\n
Alan Dershowitz<\/p>\n
Former Harvard Law professor, celebrity attorney, and pugnacious pundit Alan Dershowitz has also called the civilian death toll in Gaza \u201camong the lowest in the history of comparable warfare.\u201d He dismissed the health ministry death tolls as \u201cway, way exaggerated \u2014 the number of actually purely innocent civilians that have been killed are a tiny fraction.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eylon Levy<\/p>\n
Among the pundits who went after the Gaza Health Ministry death tolls was former Israeli government spokesperson Eylon Levy. As recently as this month, Levy expended his energies refuting early reports on the Israeli government\u2019s acceptance of the health ministry estimates, calling such reporting \u201cdead in the water.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u201cThis myth exists for one reason: to launder Hamas data to support its war effort,\u201d Levy said.<\/p>\n
Levy has not made any statements on social media since the report that the Israeli military found Gaza Health Ministry data to be accurate. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Abraham Wyner<\/p>\n
A scholar of statistics at the University of Pennsylvania\u2019s Wharton School of Business, Abraham Wyner, took to the pages of the right-leaning pro-Israel site Tablet to denounce the health ministry death toll as \u201cfake\u201d and \u201cnot real.\u201d His evidence? A graph showing the steady increase in the day-to-day numbers of people killed by Israel.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis regularity is almost surely not real,\u201d he said. \u201cOne would expect quite a bit of variation day to day.\u201d<\/p>\n
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In a statement to The Intercept, Wyner said the ministry death toll totals \u201cwere never wildly wrong,\u201d but said Palestinian officials in Gaza had produced \u201cfalse\u201d numbers. He claimed he only disputed the proportion of the numbers that the Gaza health ministry had claimed were women and children.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou must make a clear distinction between [what] was produced early (when the information war was fought) and today (when it has been lost),\u201d Wyner wrote in an email. <\/p>\n
Wyner was the only death-toll denier in this story to offer comment.Update: January 30, 2026, 3:56 p.m. ETThis story was updated with a quote from Hani Almadhoun.
\nThe post Israeli Military Found Gaza Health Ministry Death Toll Was Accurate. Will These Deniers Admit It? appeared first on The Intercept.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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