"Though the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza does not distinguish between civilians and combatants using those specific terms, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) relies on data from the Gaza MoH to provide detailed breakdowns by gender and age in its official reports."
April 25, 2025
To the Globe and Mail newsroom,
I am writing on behalf of Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East regarding the misleading framing of the Palestinian death toll in your Associated Press sourced article, titled: “Palestinian diplomat tells UN court that Israel is killing and displacing civilians in Gaza,” published on April 28, 2025.
From a journalistic perspective, as pro-Israel lobby groups advanced a narrative aimed at discrediting the validity of the Palestinian Health Ministry’s death toll in Gaza, media outlets began to uncritically mirror this discourse.
Reports of the Palestinian death toll in Canadian media are typically accompanied by a reference to the fact that the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza is “Hamas-run,” with the implicit argument being that, since the Ministry of Health in Gaza functions under a government administered by Hamas, it could be exaggerating numbers. This baseless claim has become the assumed norm in the media, despite the fact that the Health Ministry's numbers have historically been considered reliable by the United Nations[1] and the World Health Organization[2].
More egregious is that Canadian media outlets state that the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza does not distinguish between civilians and militants, a misleading narrative that has been perpetuated by the Israeli military in order to justify its systematic killing of Palestinian civilians. Your article echoes this dehumanizing narrative by stating: “Israel’s air and ground war has killed over 51,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not say how many of the dead were civilians or combatants.”
After 571 days of Israel’s ongoing genocide in the occupied Gaza Strip, it is shocking that such phrasing continues to appear in mainstream and wire media coverage.
Though the article acknowledges that most of the Palestinians Israel killed are women and children, it goes on to claim that the Health Ministry “does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.” This is only half true — or at the very least, misleading.
Though the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza does not distinguish between civilians and combatants using those specific terms, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) relies on data from the Gaza MoH to provide detailed breakdowns by gender and age in its official reports.
As the data visualization below illustrates, the Ministry records fatalities by category — including women, men, children, and the elderly — making clear that the majority of Palestinians killed by Israel are women, children, and elderly.
Saying, then, that the Gaza MoH does not differentiate between militants and civilians is misleading and serves to delegitimize the credibility of the Palestinian death toll.
I urge The Globe and Mail and the Associated Press to exercise greater caution in future reporting and refrain from pairing Palestinian casualty figures with language that unjustly casts doubt on their credibility of the Palestinian death toll.
Lynn Naji,
Media Analyst
Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East
[1] United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), “Reported Impact Snapshot: Gaza Strip,” 17 December 2024, December 17, 2024, accessed December 18, 2024, https://www.ochaopt.org/content/reported-impact-snapshot-gaza-strip-17-december-2024.
[1] World Health Organization (WHO), “Occupied Palestinian Territory, Gaza: Situation Report 52,” December 17, 2024, accessed December 18, 2024, https://www.emro.who.int/images/stories/Sitrep_52.pdf.