Stalin
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After more than two years of dismissing the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll as “Hamas propaganda,” the Israeli military has officially accepted that approximately 70,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since October 2023. This belated acknowledgment exposes years of systematic lies by the Israeli government, the imperialist powers and the Western media—all of whom worked in concert to conceal the scale of the genocide.
A senior Israeli security official told journalists Thursday that the military accepts the Health Ministry’s figure, excluding the more than 10,000 missing and presumed buried under rubble. “We estimate that about 70,000 Gazans were killed in the war, not including the missing,” the official stated. The Gaza Health Ministry’s count as of January 27 stands at 71,662 killed, with 171,428 injured.
“What other accusations could turn out to be true?” the Israeli newspaper Haaretz asked following the briefing. “The Israeli public must ask itself what this belated recognition indicates about the army and the government’s credibility regarding Israel’s conduct in Gaza.” These are questions the Haaretz editors might ask themselves. For over two years, they and their colleagues in the international press participated in the campaign to discredit the documented scale of the slaughter.
The Israeli military previously claimed to have killed 22,000 combatants in Gaza. By its own admission, this means more than two-thirds of the 70,000 dead were civilians. But even this figure understates the massacre. A leaked Israeli military database in August 2025 showed that 83 percent of those killed were civilians—consistent with what human rights organizations had documented all along and what Israel and its allies worked to suppress.
From the earliest weeks of the war, Israel and American imperialism mounted a coordinated campaign to discredit the Palestinian death toll. In October 2023, just two weeks into the assault, then President Joe Biden declared, “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using. I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.”
At the time, the Health Ministry had documented over 7,000 deaths, including nearly 3,000 children. Then National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby called the Health Ministry “a front for Hamas” whose figures could not be taken “at face value.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed allegations of mass civilian casualties as “blood libel”—invoking the medieval antisemitic slander to deflect from documented war crimes—and bragged in September 2024 that Israel had achieved “the lowest ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in the history of modern urban warfare.” This was a lie, and Netanyahu knew it was a lie when he said it.
The U.S. Congress took the extraordinary step of legally prohibiting government agencies from citing the Gaza Health Ministry’s figures. In June 2024, a bipartisan group of lawmakers passed an amendment to a State Department spending bill blocking the department from citing Gaza Health Ministry data. The vote was 269 in favor, with 62 Democrats joining 207 Republicans. Later that year, Congress passed a defense spending bill that similarly barred the Pentagon from publicly citing the estimates as “authoritative.”
comrade stalin
moscow
A senior Israeli security official told journalists Thursday that the military accepts the Health Ministry’s figure, excluding the more than 10,000 missing and presumed buried under rubble. “We estimate that about 70,000 Gazans were killed in the war, not including the missing,” the official stated. The Gaza Health Ministry’s count as of January 27 stands at 71,662 killed, with 171,428 injured.
“What other accusations could turn out to be true?” the Israeli newspaper Haaretz asked following the briefing. “The Israeli public must ask itself what this belated recognition indicates about the army and the government’s credibility regarding Israel’s conduct in Gaza.” These are questions the Haaretz editors might ask themselves. For over two years, they and their colleagues in the international press participated in the campaign to discredit the documented scale of the slaughter.
The Israeli military previously claimed to have killed 22,000 combatants in Gaza. By its own admission, this means more than two-thirds of the 70,000 dead were civilians. But even this figure understates the massacre. A leaked Israeli military database in August 2025 showed that 83 percent of those killed were civilians—consistent with what human rights organizations had documented all along and what Israel and its allies worked to suppress.
From the earliest weeks of the war, Israel and American imperialism mounted a coordinated campaign to discredit the Palestinian death toll. In October 2023, just two weeks into the assault, then President Joe Biden declared, “I have no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using. I have no notion that the Palestinians are telling the truth about how many people are killed.”
At the time, the Health Ministry had documented over 7,000 deaths, including nearly 3,000 children. Then National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby called the Health Ministry “a front for Hamas” whose figures could not be taken “at face value.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed allegations of mass civilian casualties as “blood libel”—invoking the medieval antisemitic slander to deflect from documented war crimes—and bragged in September 2024 that Israel had achieved “the lowest ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in the history of modern urban warfare.” This was a lie, and Netanyahu knew it was a lie when he said it.
The U.S. Congress took the extraordinary step of legally prohibiting government agencies from citing the Gaza Health Ministry’s figures. In June 2024, a bipartisan group of lawmakers passed an amendment to a State Department spending bill blocking the department from citing Gaza Health Ministry data. The vote was 269 in favor, with 62 Democrats joining 207 Republicans. Later that year, Congress passed a defense spending bill that similarly barred the Pentagon from publicly citing the estimates as “authoritative.”
Israel officially accepts Gaza death toll of 70,000
After years of denial by Israel, successive US and European governments and the international media, Israel has accepted the Gaza Health Ministry’s official death toll.
www.wsws.org
comrade stalin
moscow
