Throughout the Israel Defense Forces’ post-Oct 7 war on Gaza, the State of Israel and its collaborators and sympathizers around the world have ridiculed the alarming death toll maintained by Palestinian health authorities, dismissing the count as a gross exaggeration aimed at maliciously demonizing Israel. Now, after more than two years of casting doubts, the IDF has finally admitted its own estimates match the Gaza Health Ministry’s accounting of some 70,000 confirmed dead.
It’s a grand example of Israel’s long-running practice of vehemently denying accusations — and vilifying accusers — before eventually acknowledging their validity. Those acknowledgements usually come after overwhelming evidence has been produced, by which time the denials have provided some degree of protection for Israel’s standing. Where the Gaza death toll is concerned, the IDF’s capitulation seems to some extent preemptive, in anticipation of an eventual opening of Gaza to journalists from around the world. However, the long string of denials helped muddy the waters, giving Israel and its allies a degree of cover as the IDF’s astonishing death-and-destruction blitz was carried out.
The IDF’s admission came in a Thursday briefing given to reporters by a senior military official. Speaking on condition of anonymity, the official said approximately 70,000 people have died in Gaza since the Oct 7, 2023 invasion of Israel by Hamas militants. As of Sunday, Gaza health officials say 71,795 have died.
Importantly, both the IDF official and the Gaza Health Ministry says these numbers do not include bodies yet to be discovered under the incomprehensible volume of rubble across Gaza. The Gaza ministry says its numbers only reflect deaths directly resulting from military fire, excluding those who’ve died from disease and malnutrition.
Neither party has yet broken down the death toll into combatants and civilians. However, leading up to the October ceasefire, the IDF said it had killed at least 22,000 combatants in Gaza. Placed atop this week’s 70,000 denominator, that claim now suggests that civilians account for a significant majority of those killed by the IDF. Netanyahu has boasted that the Gaza campaign has achieved the “lowest ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in the history of modern urban warfare.” However, an IDF report leaked in August concluded that 83% of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces were civilians.
The mere fact that the Gaza Health Ministry is part of a Hamas government was all that Israel’s and its proxies and supporters needed to promote the assumption that the ministry’s death tally was a lie — and to buy time for Israel to continue its shattering of Gaza, with financial, military and diplomatic backing of the the United States and other Western governments.
“The Biden administration, Congress, and the U.S. media played along with Israel’s lies and deception about the horrific death toll in Gaza — over 80 percent civilians; over half, women and children — so that they could gaslight Americans into continued support for Israel,” Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of human rights group DAWN, told the Intercept after the IDF’s capitulation on the death toll.
President Biden was among the first to who sought to discredit the fatality figures coming from Gaza. “I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed,” Biden told a reporter 18 days after Oct 7, when Gaza authorities had already reported more than 6,000 dead from IDF fire. “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”
Attacks on the Health Ministry’s fatality reporting came from every type of Israel supporter, from politicians to network-TV “analysts” to think tanks and individual social media users. The Intercept’s Jonah Valdez assembled a catalogue of such criticism; here’s a sampling:
- “Every day, Hamas churns out misinformation. They inflate casualty numbers and make false accusations to smear Israel’s reputation,” said Maryland Rep. Steny Hoyer.
- “The data that we hear from Hamas is way, way exaggerated, the number of actually purely innocent civilians that have been killed are a tiny fraction,” said Alan Dershowitz, the Israel-promoting lawyer and law professor.
- “Validating 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,” said New York Rep. Ritchie Torres.
- Decrying the media citations of Health Ministry data, the Anti-Defamation League said the Hamas-controlled ministry “distorts information about the casualties in Gaza.”
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a thinly-disguised component of the sprawling Israel lobby, criticized the Biden White House for eventually giving some credence to the Gaza Health Ministry’s reporting. “As a result of trusting numbers from a Hamas-controlled entity, the Biden administration has become more focused on the restraints it can put on Israeli forces than how it can help accelerate Hamas’s defeat,” said senior fellow David Adesnik.
