How is a news outlet supposed to report on war casualties? This question is particularly worth asking when it comes to a news outlet that promises its readers journalistic professionalism “without fear or favor”, and even defines itself as "a newspaper of record", or a media outlet whose information archive is supposed to serve as a reliable historical reference.
It matters because casualties in Gaza became a central topic in the discourse around the October 7 war. This discourse influenced global public opinion, as well as commercial, academic, scientific, and cultural circles, and, of course, leaders and their policies toward Israel. Despite never having been convicted, Israel was accused of genocide at the ICC as early as December 2023, in a lawsuit filed by South Africa which was suspected of being funded by Iran. Yet few are familiar with the details, and many young people on social media believe that Israel did indeed commit genocide in Gaza, and that every Israeli or Jew who supports Israel is complicit.
We all know that in the post-truth era, many ride on narratives whose connection to reality is tenuous, at best. So amid the information chaos, someone needs to take responsibility for reporting as accurately as possible and serve as a reliable source, right? That was the incentive for examining the way casualties in Gaza were reported over two years, in the news outlet that considers itself the most professional in the world.
The New York Times covered the October 7 war with 6,696 headlines between October 7, 2023 and October 10, 2025 - approximately 7% of all headlines published during that period, and reflecting the editorial significance of the topic. 19.5% of the war headlines dealt with death and killing: 1,305 in total. Of these, 709 dealt with Palestinian casualties, and of those, 653 headlines dealt specifically with Palestinians in Gaza and not elsewhere (such as the West Bank). These are the relevant headlines we analyzed.
Doubts about IDF but not about Gazan sources
When it comes to war casualties, there are three main aspects that need to be addressed. The first is the overall scope of casualties. The second is the internal breakdown - primarily between civilians and combatants. The third is who bears responsibility for the casualties. So let’s see how the New York Times reported on casualties in Gaza over two full years of war.
The cumulative number of casualties in Gaza (10,000, 25,000, 30,000, etc.) was published in 11 headlines and subheadlines throughout the war. None of them distinguished between combatants and civilians, or mentioned that the number includes Hamas fighters, as well as casualties from failed rockets fired by terrorist organizations or by internal executions. In other words, one could only conclude that all the casualties were civilians.
In all 11 headlines, the Times raised no reservations about its source. One headline noted that the total number is probably higher than reported. One headline did cite a reservation regarding the numbers but from former President Joe Biden, since it was published around the time of the false report about the explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital, in which the death toll figures were fabricated. By contrast, the IDF's assessment of the number of terrorists killed was published in only one headline throughout the war - and the Times questioned its reliability.
In terms of the internal breakdown, a very clear editorial pattern can be identified. Of 653 headlines, 231 (35%) stated that the casualties were civilians, and an additional 322 headlines did not specify who the dead were. In total, 553 headlines (85% of all casualty headlines) referred to civilians or simply to "Palestinians."
Where did the fighters go?
Of 653 headlines about casualties in Gaza, 100 referenced Hamas members, but a further examination reveals a different picture. 86% of these headlines referred specifically to the elimination of one of Hamas's leaders (Arouri, Deif, Sinwar, Haniyeh) specifically by name, and not to the killing of Hamas fighters on the battlefield. Each elimination generated many headlines - Sinwar's killing, for example, was covered in 31 separate headlines.
But in practice, this means that of all the war headlines, only 14 referred to Hamas fighters other than Haniyeh, Deif, Sinwar or Arouri, Hamas terrorists killed on the battlefield in Gaza as a result of IDF operations, which targeted them primarily. This amounts to only 2% of all headlines about Palestinian casualties published in the Times throughout the entire war. It is fairly clear what impression emerges from such reporting - that Israel's strikes on Gaza only kill civilians.
When you add to this the fact that headlines reporting on cumulative casualty figures never once mentioned that the figure includes terrorists; and the fact that Israel's assessments of the number of terrorists killed were almost never published – it’s hard to refrain from understanding that this is precisely Hamas's stated strategy.
Hamas makes no distinction between combatants and civilians. Time and again it is revealed in hindsight that journalists, teachers and doctors who were killed were in fact registered members of terrorist organizations. Hamas soldiers shed their uniforms during military confrontations and hide among civilians, as part of the organization's human shield doctrine. The goal is to confuse the IDF, cause soldiers to hesitate before firing, and to report all deaths as civilian in order to exert international pressure on Israel to stop fighting.
In practice, the distortion is even more severe, because 7 headlines, half of the 14 headlines that did report on the terrorist casualties, presented the information as an Israeli claim whose credibility should be questioned. So only 7 out of 653 headlines dealing with Palestinian casualties constituted clear reporting on the death of combatants on the battlefield in Gaza. This represents a complete internalization of Hamas's casualty-reporting strategy - in a Western news outlet that promises to help its readers understand the world.
Who is responsible here?
On the question of responsibility, there are two aspects: who is the party responsible for the casualties, and who is the source from which the data was drawn. These are particularly important questions in light of the false report about the explosion at Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza, which occurred right at the start of the war on October 17, 2023, and caused the Times considerable embarrassment.
At the time, the Gaza Health Ministry reported 500 dead at the hospital as a result of an IDF airstrike. The Times presented the source as "Palestinians," without mentioning that authorities in Gaza were appointed by Hamas and subordinate to its authority. The report was entirely false - the explosion was caused by a failed rocket fired by Palestinian Islamic Jihad, in a parking lot and not in the hospital itself, and the number of casualties was far lower. Although the IDF quickly refuted the report, the Times waited five days before correcting the headline, and only after a harsh rebuke from the White House did it publish an unusual editor’s note. It included a promise not to rely on claims by Hamas in the future. But when it came to casualty reporting, the Times appears to have done just that.
The Gaza Health Ministry continued to serve as the primary source of information, usually without being acknowledged. Of 653 headlines dealing with casualties in Gaza, 448 (69%) cited no source at all for the data, presenting the information as fact. 89 headlines did attribute the information to official sources in Gaza, and an additional 82 headlines attributed the information to other sources such as the UN or rights organizations, which in practice were citing Health Ministry data. Only 4 headlines revealed that Hamas actually runs the Gaza Health Ministry. Hamas's involvement was simply concealed.
Moreover, of all 653 headlines reporting on casualties in Gaza, only 18 expressed doubt or reservations about the source. The majority of these (8) questioned Israeli sources to which reports were attributed. Among the remaining headlines that expressed reservations, 3 presented conflicting reports — one from Gaza and one from Israel. 3 headlines expressed reservations about the Gaza figures, but on the grounds that the real number was probably higher than reported.
Of the only 3 headlines that genuinely expressed reservations about the Gaza data, 2 referred retroactively to that same false report about the hospital explosion, and only 1 headline expressed reservations about UN data, which had in fact published the Gaza Health Ministry's own correction about a year into the war. The Ministry significantly reduced the proportion of women and children in the total casualty count, after claiming for a year that they constituted the majority of casualties.
In short, the Times rarely cited Israeli sources, yet questioned their reliability in 25% of the cases where it did cite them. By contrast, it never questioned its primary source from Gaza, despite the fact that it is run by Hamas. The fact that Hamas controls the Health Ministry and other official sources in Gaza, such as hospitals and media outlets, was onso not revealed in the headlines.
Innocent terrorist organizations
On the question of who is responsible for the casualties, the Times' editorial line was entirely clear. Of 653 headlines dealing with casualties in Gaza, Israel was presented as responsible in 404 headlines (62%). In 246 headlines (37.5%), no party was identified as responsible. And in only three headlines were Hamas and Islamic Jihad presented as responsible - two of which were follow-up headlines to the false hospital explosion report. These are not reasonable proportions, and it is clear that the overall picture they project is distorted.
Returning to that false report from October 17, 2023, and the Times’s promise to henceforth question Hamas's claims - it is fairly clear that this did not happen. The Times continued to cite the Gaza Health Ministry without revealing that it is a Hamas-controlled body. It questioned IDF assessments and rarely published them, while praising the credibility of the Gaza Health Ministry. So in hindsight — what did that editor’s note actually accomplish?
In November 2023, just one month after the false hospital report, the Times published another erroneous headline claiming that the rate of civilian killing in Gaza was unprecedented. In December 2023, it again published an incorrect headline claiming that casualties in Gaza were higher than in any Arab war in the past 40 years – ignoring over a million casualties in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen. A correction was issued again.
The accumulation of errors in itself points to an editorial line that can no longer be ignored - motivation to convict Israel of indiscriminate killing of civilians, and lack of motivation to assign minimal responsibility to Hamas.
The war is over, but this hasn't really changed. Last week, the Times published yet another opinion piece from the genre that accuses Israel of genocide. The piece again cited questionable "facts." CAMERA demanded that the Times correct the claim that over 1,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza since the ceasefire, without noting that many of them were terrorists. The Times did issue a correction, but did not call them terrorists or even combatants - instead referring to them as "people other than civilians." It appears that the editorial team continues to insist on keeping Hamas invisible to the readers.
The op-ed also claimed that the IDF admitted to 70,000 casualties in Gaza, the majority of them civilians - but the IDF never confirmed this. When the IDF publishes its casualty assessments for Gaza, even if the overall number does not change, a clear distinction will be made between terrorists and civilians. It will noted that the number of dead most likely includes natural deaths, and thousands killed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad's own failed rockets, as well as executions. It will also note that children under 18 include teenage boys recruited by Hamas as fighters - a fact the Times did not publish in a single headline. So is it truth and accuracy that drives the most important newspaper in the world — or is it perhaps the opportunity to repeatedly invoke the word "genocide"?
How did we do it?
We used Anthropic's Claude Code AI tool, running on the Claude Opus 4.8 and Claude Fable 5 models, for two defined tasks: collecting the data and coding it at scale under rules that we established.
All headlines and subheadlines published between October 7, 2023 and October 10, 2025 (the day the ceasefire took effect) were collected from The New York Times' official archive. The unit of analysis is the headline and subheadline only (what most readers actually encounter) and not the body of the article. We formulated the coding questionnaire and the rules ourselves - who was killed, what was the source of information, were there reservations about the source - and spot-checked the findings in several rounds. The findings are expected to undergo further processing and validation ahead of academic publication, but can be considered highly reliable interim findings for an ongoing study in colaboration with Prof. Eytan Gilboa for Bar Ilan University. The work with Claude was carried out by Alon Giladi.