Palestinian children receive meals from volunteers in Gaza City, on May 29, 2025. Photo courtesy of Ali Hassan/Flash90.
JNS
In an environment saturated with powerful and often heart-wrenching media coverage of Gaza, a prevailing narrative has taken hold. It is a story of deliberate starvation, genocide, indiscriminate force targeting only women and children, and of a population defiantly unwilling to leave their land. This narrative, however, often obscures or overlooks critical facts that provide a more nuanced and accurate understanding of the conflict.
Errors In Casualty Stats
The most severe accusation leveled against Israel is that of genocide. Yet for a nation supposedly intending to exterminate a people, its actions have been remarkably inconsistent with that goal. Historically, genocide involves the systematic annihilation of a considerable portion of a population. The Holocaust claimed the lives of two-thirds of European Jewry. The Khmer Rouge slaughtered up to 25% of Cambodians. The Turks killed more than 1 million Armenians. Hutus massacred 800,000 Tutsis in the Rwandan genocide.
Multiple studies have documented the errors in the casualty figures published by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, noting, for example, the inclusion of more than 8,000 natural deaths unrelated to the war, the deletion by Hamas of thousands of people from its fatality list, the inclusion of unverified deaths and the failure to report casualties from errant Palestinian rockets. Even using this data, the total number of fatalities amounts to approximately 2% of the population. While any civilian death is a tragedy, this figure does not align with the historical definition or intent of genocide. This is particularly true for a country that has repeatedly offered pathways to Palestinian statehood and facilitates substantial humanitarian aid to the very population it is accused of trying to eliminate.
Incompetent Journalists?
Still, the media continues to parrot Hamas data uncritically, which means journalists also accept that the Israel Defense Forces is the most incompetent military in history, having failed to kill a single enemy combatant. Israel says it has killed about 20,000 terrorists, so reporters know with absolute certainty the dead are not all innocent women and children, as Hamas would like us to believe. Instead of reporting this, we get the now-formulaic language that the figures they are citing do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. Meanwhile, they ignore that the ratio of noncombatant casualties to combatants is remarkably low by historical standards, putting the lie to the argument that Israel’s actions are disproportionate.
Media outlets have also repeatedly quoted NGOs saying there is a famine in Gaza, and people are starving. It’s been a recurring theme almost from the outset of the fighting. The New York Times published a typically hyperbolic story on June 7 about emaciated children. The accompanying photo, however, showed children who were not gaunt and waiting for food. To illustrate the absurdity of the story and the broader allegation, the Times’ photo can be compared with the cover of Life magazine on July 12, 1968, which documents an actual famine among the children of Biafra, a secessionist state in West Africa that existed from 1967 to 1970 after declaring independence from Nigeria.
The media frequently reports on the destruction of hospitals in Gaza, usually expressing skepticism about their use by the Hamas terror organization, even when given tours of the command centers. This was the case when a New York Times reporter was taken to see a tunnel under the emergency department of the European Gaza Hospital. The hospital director, like those at other hospitals used by Hamas, gave the usual denial that he was aware of any tunnels. Rather than focus on how Hamas put civilians at risk and made the hospital a legitimate military target, the reporters sought out sources that would fit their preferred narrative that this was a violation of international law.
The subhead of the article illustrated the Times’ unwillingness to accept the evidence put before it, explaining, “To Israelis, the location of an underground passageway highlights Hamas’s abuse of civilians. To Palestinians, Israel’s decision to target it highlights Israel’s own disregard for civilian life.” This framing intentionally neutralizes Hamas’s culpability and presents Israel’s response to a legitimate military target as a matter of opinion, not a necessity of war.
Babies Born
Contrary to the image of a population being systematically erased, demographic data shows that the number of Palestinian Arabs there may be growing. This also contradicts the famine narrative. According to Save the Children, approximately 50,000 babies were born in Gaza between Oct. 7, 2023, and July 8, 2024. In all likelihood, another 50,000 have been born in the year since then. Instead of the population disappearing, this would mean that it has increased.
Other reports indicate that the population has declined because of Palestinians emigrating. The public may not have been aware that some Gazans have been allowed to leave. True, they face impediments, mainly the refusal of Egypt to allow anyone who wants to go to do so; nevertheless, some 100,000 have managed to flee.
Gazans Continue Emigration
This is not a new phenomenon that began after Oct. 7. After U.S. President Donald Trump proposed that Palestinians voluntarily leave, we heard the nonsense about Palestinians being indigenous to Gaza and their unbreakable ties to their land. However, Gazans, especially young people, have been leaving to escape the hardships of life under Hamas rule.
According to the World Bank, for 27 consecutive years, more Palestinians—about 20,000 annually—emigrated than entered the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Human-rights experts found that 70,000 people left Gaza between 2014 and 2020.
A Palestinian think tank found that since 2007, “over 250,000 youths migrated from the Gaza Strip in pursuit of a thriving life in Europe.” In a May survey by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, 49% of Gazans may be willing to apply to Israel to help them leave for other countries. In August 2023, three months before the Hamas-led massacre in southern Israel on Oct. 7, young adults submitted more than 16,700 Turkish visa applications.
You might expect the Palestinians to all blame Israel as their reasons for leaving before the war, but Bader Alzharna wrote in Pal-Think for Strategic Studies that the reasons for young people leaving were trauma “by the repercussions of the intra-Palestinian division,” “their crying need for a better educational system and an improved quality of life,” “job opportunities” and “to help their families in having a better life.” This desire for a better life, separate from the conflict with Israel, is a crucial part of the Gazan story that is rarely told.
If the population of Gaza has decreased, it is not because of genocide.
The facts about Gaza do not diminish the suffering of its people. They do, however, challenge the simplistic, one-sided anti-Israel narrative amplified by the mainstream media that is not supported by the evidence. A proper understanding of the tragedy requires looking beyond the headlines to the complex and often unreported realities on the ground.
