Edward Wong, who covers the State Department for the New York Times, has a news article in the Feb. 2 newspaper that says “the Israeli military has killed about 70,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to statistics from the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.”
That’s more or less standard Times language. It’s problematic in its own right, failing to disclose that the health ministry is part of the Hamas-controlled Gaza government, and using the term “combatants” instead of “Hamas terrorists.”
What really caught my eye, though, was the new language in the following paragraph. It says, “A senior Israeli security official told Israeli journalists that was an accurate number.”
This is scraping the bottom, even by the Times’s own very low standards—relying on what an anonymous source supposedly told some other journalists. For verification, the online version of the Times article links not to anything written by “Israeli journalists” but rather a piece in the far-left British newspaper the Guardian by a former visiting scholar of Chinese literature at Peking University who “also worked in Cuba for a year,” Emma Graham-Harrison. That Guardian article relies largely on the far-left Israeli newspaper Haaretz, whose own published articles on the topic say nothing about “a senior Israeli security official.” The Guardian also links to an article from the Times of Israel’s Emanuel Fabian, who mentions an anonymous “senior Israeli military official.”
Even the Times’s “senior security official” is a vague term and could apply to a variety of figures, including political rivals of the current Israeli prime minister and disgruntled former military officials who have been ousted.
Meanwhile, the official Israel Defense Forces international spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani, posted on Jan. 30 to debunk the false claim that the IDF has accepted the casualty figures. “The IDF clarifies that the details published do not reflect official IDF data,” Shoshani said. “Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels.” The Times didn’t share that denial with its readers.
Colonel Richard Kemp, a 30-year veteran of the British Army who frequently visited Gaza alongside IDF troops, described the claims as “[f]ake news.” He wrote on social media, “No, the IDF has not ‘accepted’ that Hamas figures are accurate.”
A former IDF spokesman, Jonathan Conricus, also noted that the IDF has not accepted the Gaza Health Ministry death toll numbers. “[T]he most important number is actually the number of dead terrorists in relation to non-combatants,” Conricus said, emphasizing that the deaths of non-combatants were “far lower than any other war in urban terrain.”
Wong, the Times’s diplomatic correspondent, has been a consistent harsh critic of Israel, which is one thing to be on the Times Opinion pages, but another thing coming from a supposed straight news reporter. In June 2023 I described an article Wong wrote about then-secretary of state Antony Blinken’s visit to Saudi Arabia, when he characterized normalization between Israel and Saudi Arabia as “a move that would be opposed by many Saudi citizens,” as “so egregiously slanted against Israel that it reads as if it were dictated by the Iranian information ministry.” In January 2025 I wrote about him under the headline “New York Times State Department Reporter Emerges as Foe of Israel,” noting his omission of important facts inconvenient to his preferred narrative.
The Times would have readers believe, simultaneously, that Gaza has been so devastated that it has no electricity, food, water, housing, and health care and also that the territory manages to maintain a health ministry that keeps a scrupulously accurate death count that’s somehow able reliably to distinguish Israel-caused deaths from those attributable to natural causes, to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad missile misfires, to improvised-explosive-device accidents, and to violent intimidation by Hamas. The “health ministry” is high-priority because it serves Hamas as a propaganda weapon against Israel and America. The second it stops serving that function, the armed Hamas terrorists in charge of Gaza would shut it down and reallocate its resources to other forms of warfare.
A Dec. 28, 2025, paper by Israeli major general (retired) Yaakov Amidror for the Jewish Institute for the National Security of America noted, “The Gaza Strip, which stretches over an area of 365 square kilometers, is home to a civilian population of between 1.5 and 2 million people who are the kin and community of Hamas operatives. Many of them cooperate with the terrorist organizations (Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad) both passively (for example, families hiding Israeli hostages in private homes) and actively (such as assisting in the transport of weapons using civilian vehicles).”
He went on, “To understand the complexity of combat in Gaza, it’s important to recall that in many cases there is simply no distinction between civilians and Hamas operatives. The same person can shift roles from one moment to the next — sometimes appearing as an ordinary civilian, sometimes emerging with a weapon kept at home. In practical terms, it is impossible to visually distinguish between civilians and combatants, and it is no surprise that the IDF often failed to do so. How exactly should one classify a Hamas company commander who eats lunch with his family and then steps into the next room to pick up a Kalashnikov? Or a civilian who walks out in civilian clothes, connects his personal cellphone to a nearby rocket battery, and fires it remotely from his bedroom?”
And Amidror concluded, “The number of civilians killed in Gaza was the IDF’s greatest vulnerability in the Strip, but it was unavoidable. None of those who lectured Israel about the high casualty count — nearly 70,000 according to Hamas, of whom likely 40 percent or more were actual combatants — offered any credible way to fight Hamas without harming civilians. In practice, demanding that Israel avoid harming civilians was equivalent to demanding that it not fight Hamas at all — a demand that is neither moral nor feasible from Israel’s perspective.”
The falsehood about Israel’s supposed embrace of the Hamas casualty numbers was embedded in a Times story whose headline is also misleading.
“Trump Officials Bypass Congress to Push Billions in Weapons Aid to Israel,” the headline says. Yet this aid is not bypassing Congress. Every effort Israel’s enemies in Congress have made to vote to end the arms to Israel has been defeated, and instead arms sales to Israel have been approved with overwhelming bipartisan support. If Congress thinks the Trump administration is spending money that it has not appropriated, it has plenty of potential steps it could take in reaction. If Congress wants, at Wong’s behest, to render American arms factory workers unemployed by refusing arms sales to Israel even as Israel faces potential retaliation from Iran, a regime whose murderousness against its own people makes the worst mistake Israel committed in Gaza look angelically pure by comparison, there is nothing to prevent Congress from taking that action.
The Times’s goal here seems less to provide an accurate portrayal of the reality, either in Gaza or on Capitol Hill, but rather to provide fodder to its paying readership of dedicated haters of President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The New York Public Library recently announced “Unlimited On-Site Access to The New York Times Online” at all library locations, even without a library card or a login, meaning that individual readers don’t even have to pay money to the Times for the privilege of wading through this nonsense. It’s useful mainly for educational purposes: about the ways that news organizations can mislead readers by withholding facts and passing along, instead, thirdhand anonymously sourced smears.
