Iran, Gaza and the politics of counting the dead

Iran, Gaza and the politics of counting the dead As Western media accepts death tolls from Iran at face value, Palestinian deaths in Gaza remain endlessly questioned, revealing how belief follows power, not evidence. There is a crisis of belief in Western media, one that has little to do with evidence and everything to do with whose deaths align with the interests of empire. 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. As of late 2025, the Gaza Health Ministry reports that at least 70,117 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the conflict began, with a large majority of those victims civilians. The United Nations and countless independent researchers agree that the official toll is an undercount. In the first nine months of the war alone, the number of deaths from traumatic injury was estimated at around 64,000, approximately 40 percent higher than the ministry’s figure, and that does not account for deaths caused by lack of healthcare, starvation or failures in water and sanitation. All demographic modelling suggests that overall mortality is significantly higher once indirect deaths are included. A July 2024 study published in The Lancet put the figure at more than 186,000. There is no doubt that hundreds of thousands more have lost their lives to bombs, bullets, avoidable illnesses and hunger since. The Health Ministry documents deaths through hospital morgues, recording names and ID numbers, counting only the bodies it is able to identify because, as we all know, many bodies in Gaza, blown to pieces, crushed under rubble or flattened by tanks, can never be identified. Further, with every hospital in the Gaza Strip bombed or rendered inoperable, there were periods when morgues were unable to count even bodies that were identifiable. Yet 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. Now, as the genocide in Gaza continues, albeit at a slower pace under the guise of a so-called “ceasefire”, another story of conflict, loss and death has emerged in the same region. In Iran, people are taking to the streets to resist the regime, and are being killed as they do so. The way this tragedy is handled by the very same...

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