"For two and a half years, Western media has scrutinised every dead Palestinian, and the ways in which their bodies were maimed, broken and burned in Gaza. Were they real people? If they were, were they truly dead? If dead, were they actually killed by Israel’s bombs, bullets, torture and siege? If they were killed, how could anyone know they were not combatants, and thus actually “deserved it”?
The destruction reported by Palestinians on the ground, by those watching their loved ones fall one by one, was not believed. Even the death toll periodically released by the Gaza Health Ministry, widely acknowledged to be a massive undercount, was repeatedly questioned."
"Western media, to this day, refuses to report the true scale of the carnage, and even the undercount it does publish is wrapped in caveats. It is “disputed by Israel”, “cannot be confirmed”, or merely “claimed” by the “Hamas-run health ministry”, never treated as an established fact."
"Videos of piled-up bodies, footage of children burning alive in their tents, and photographs of mass graves, however, were never accepted as proof of a staggering death toll in Gaza."
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/1/14/iran-gaza-and-the-politics-of-counting-the-dead