4 reasons why it’s challenging to get a clear picture of the tragedy in Gaza

The hunger in Gaza has become impossible to ignore. The World Food Program, an arm of the United Nations, said last week the Gaza hunger crisis had reached “new and astonishing levels of desperation.” And Yannay Spitzer, an assistant professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, recently shared evidence that “the situation (in Gaza) is radically different from everything up to now.”

Yet there are at least four reasons why it’s been difficult to assess the scope of hunger, injury and death in Gaza. Some of these were highlighted in a recent analysis by Matti Friedman, a Jerusalem-based columnist for The Free Press, entitled “Is Gaza Starving? Searching for the Truth in an Information War.”

“Very little of what is reported here,” Friedman concludes, “is what it seems.”

The Israeli journalist went on to describe his own attempts to try and understand the scope of hunger taking hold in Gaza by calling trusted colleagues with long experience covering the area.

These were journalists concerned about both Israelis and “innocent Palestinians.” Yet Friedman laments how difficult it was even for these seasoned journalists to ascertain the truth.

When he asked one individual who recently worked as a senior Israeli government official whether people were starving in Gaza, the person said honestly: “I don’t know.”

Why would it be challenging for even connected journalists on the ground in the Middle East to know what’s going on? Here’s why:

1. Doubts about Hamas-influenced health numbers from Gaza

A few weeks after the Gaza war began, news outlets around the world — including the New York Times — reported that a hospital had been bombed in Gaza with “at least 500 dead.”

“Furious protests erupted,” Friedman notes, with an enraged mob even burning a synagogue in Tunisia.

Yet the story turned out to be vastly exaggerated — with the hospital still intact, albeit with some fire damage from what U.S. intelligence concluded was a misfired Palestinian rocket.

Like other outlets, the Deseret News reported mass casualties from the explosion at the time. But the publication focused its coverage on exploring “who was responsible for explosion in Gaza hospital?” in an article entitled, “Early Israel, U.S. intelligence claims Islamic Jihad rocket responsible for Gaza hospital explosion.”

The New York Times later published an Editors’ Note acknowledging that earlier coverage “relied too heavily on claims by Hamas, and did not make clear that those claims could not immediately be verified.”

After other journalist colleagues made repeated attempts to seek verification on various facts, Friedman says the consensus was that there are “nearly no trustworthy sources regarding reality in Gaza.”

This is largely because of continuing doubts about official figures reported by the “Gaza Health Ministry,” which is responsible for managing health care and medical services in the Gaza Strip. Although the health ministry has denied manipulating death figures, it’s widely known the ministry is strongly influenced or controlled by Hamas.

Luke Baker, a former Reuters Jerusalem bureau chief, wrote in 2023, “Hamas has a clear propaganda incentive to inflate civilian casualties as much as possible.” He later added, “Any health official stepping out of line and not giving the death tolls that Hamas wants reported to journalists risks serious consequences.”

At a minimum, this explains why even appraising the scope of hunger in Gaza is so difficult.

Even AI seems to agree, with a Google AI overview stating, “It is important to note that misinformation and disinformation surrounding the Israel-Hamas conflict are widespread, and it’s essential to critically evaluate all information and consult multiple credible sources before forming conclusions.”

2. Curated reports from the Israeli government and armed forces

Information released by the Israeli government and armed forces also must be questioned, Friedman adds, describing how government messages about the war’s progress and goals have shifted frequently. The Israeli public has raised continued concerns about both government messaging and strategy.

Friedman also highlights with concern information from the Israel Defense Forces, which he says can mislead “overtly or by omission.” For instance, he describes how a reporter for the Israeli daily Haaretz, Amos Harel, critiqued a video released by the army recently showing Hamas members eating abundant food underground, and pointing out that the clip was from last year.

3. Misinformation spread by other countries

In October of 2024, Steven Lee Myers and Sheera Frenkel reported on efforts by Russia, China and Iran to use state media and covert influence campaigns on social media networks to support Hamas, undermine Israel and criticize the United States.

At the time, these New York Times reporters described the start of the Gaza war as unleashing a “deluge of online propaganda and disinformation” that was “larger than anything seen before” and “fast becoming a world war online.”

They reported that in the year since Hamas attacked Israel, Cyabra, a social media intelligence company in Tel Aviv, had documented 40,000 inauthentic accounts or bots online. They described the content generated by these accounts as “visceral, emotionally charged, politically slanted and often false” — saying it stoked “anger and even violence far beyond Gaza, raising fears that it could inflame a wider conflict.”

4. Reporting from journalists with biases against Israel

Palestinian journalists have been intimidated by Hamas, according to reports throughout the war. Friedman claims that during his years as an Associated Press reporter and editor, “I saw coverage altered by Hamas threats to our staff, while this fact was concealed from readers.”

In mainstream media coverage around the world, this journalist notes that Israelis have been “accused of fake massacres and rapes” over the years — with deceptive allegations of wrongdoing “often using statistics that are themselves untrue.”

Even early in the war, Friedman says, “which had barely begun at the time,” the Israeli response to the Oct. 7 terror attack began to be described in international media as a “genocide.”

The Israeli journalist says that reports of “impending hunger engineered by Israel in Gaza have been commonplace not just since the beginning of this war but for at least a decade and a half, since Hamas seized the territory.”

As coverage of worsening hunger has increased in recent months, Friedman notes that “nearly all the blame has been directed at Israel, with the implicit or explicit explanation being malevolence or genocidal intent.”

Yet is there truth to some of the strongest criticism of Israel’s approach? Especially as the war has continued, a growing number of observers have raised serious concerns at the level of destruction in Gaza.

That includes two leading Israeli rights groups, who released a report on Monday arguing that “Israel’s claim that Hamas fighters or members of other armed Palestinian groups were present in medical or civilian facilities, frequently without providing any evidence, cannot justify or explain such widespread, systematic destruction.”

Omer Bartov, a professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Brown University, also wrote an article earlier in July entitled, “I’m a Genocide Scholar. I Know It When I See It.”

In that article, this former soldier in the Israeli army gathers evidence leading him to conclude that a genocide is taking place. He cites other scholars, such as A. Dirk Moses of the City University of New York who described the Gaza destruction as a “mix of genocidal and military logic.”

Yet even Bartov cites “Gazan health authorities” for the mass casualty figures in his analysis.

Hunger is real, but with multifaceted causes

Like other journalists, Friedman doesn’t deny the existence of real hunger — and even starvation — in Gaza. But his own investigations reveal reasons to question the scope of hunger, while confirming that the causes are complex.

He cites Ohad Hemo, the Palestinian affairs reporter for Channel 12 News, Israel’s most widely watched news program, who reported last week that food warehouses serving Hamas fighters were still full.

“I don’t know if people are dying directly from hunger, as is being claimed in Gaza,” Hemo stated. “But there is hunger in Gaza, and we need to state this loud and clear.”

That trusted reporter described speaking to people who hadn’t eaten in days, and said that aid arriving wasn’t reaching many in greatest need.

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation reports that more than 90 million meals have been distributed directly to Gazans in recent months through this American-operated and Israeli-affiliated food distribution.

Yet this assistance threatens Hamas’ own control of food. As a result, Friedman reports, “Hamas has been doing what it can to foment unrest around its distribution sites, kill its workers, and intimidate people accepting its food.”

According to Friedman’s associates who are serving with army reserves close to the food distribution, there has continued to be “chaotic scenes of thousands of men descending on the distribution sites and picking them clean.”

As has been widely reported, fatal shots have been fired from Israeli soldiers “who are understandably scared of disguised Hamas fighters and unprepared for the kind of mass chaos they’re expected to control.”

The number of casualties, again, is almost impossible to know. But what does seem increasingly clear, as Friedman recounted from a colleague’s conversation with a senior figure in the Israeli military last week, is that “Gaza really is on the brink this time,” even if it’s not the mass starvation “claimed by pro-Hamas propaganda.”

“There have been tremendous lies told about Israel’s war,” Israeli journalist Amit Segal acknowledges. But “that doesn’t mean the threat of starvation isn’t real.”

This reality is reflected in Israel’s increasing “humanitarian pauses” and more airdropping of aid. And it underscores the tragedy in having so much confusion in a basic understanding of life-and-death figures — even to this day.