There is a crisis of faith in Western media that has little to do with the evidence and everything to do with the death of figures aligned with imperial interests.
For two and a half years, Western media has scrutinized every Palestinian killed in Gaza and how their bodies were mutilated, destroyed and burned. Were they real people? If so, were they really dead? If they died, were they actually killed by Israeli bombs, bullets, torture, and siege? If they were killed, how could anyone know that they were not combatants and therefore actually “deserving of execution”?
The destruction reported by Palestinians on the ground and those watching their loved ones fall was unbelievable. Even the death toll regularly released by the Gaza Ministry of Health is widely acknowledged to be a gross undercount and has been repeatedly questioned.
The Gaza Ministry of Health reports that as of the end of 2025, at least 70,117 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the conflict began, with the majority of the victims being 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, an estimated 64,000 people died from trauma, about 40 percent higher than the ministry’s figures, but this does not include deaths from lack of medical care, starvation, or lack of water and sanitation. All demographic models suggest that including indirect deaths significantly increases overall mortality. A July 2024 study published in The Lancet puts the number at more than 186,000. Since then, there is no doubt that hundreds of thousands more people have died from bombs, bullets, avoidable disease and starvation.
The Ministry of Health maintains death records through hospital morgues, records names and ID numbers, and only counts bodies that can be identified. Because, as everyone knows, many bodies in Gaza that have been blown away, crushed under rubble, or flattened by tanks cannot be identified. Furthermore, all hospitals in the Gaza Strip were either bombed or inoperable, and there were times when morgues could not even count identifiable bodies.
But to this day, Western media refuse to report the true scale of the massacre, and even the undercounts they publish are shrouded in alarm. It is “disputed by Israel,” “cannot be confirmed,” or simply “claimed” by the “Hamas-run Ministry of Health,” and is never treated as established fact.
Now, as the massacre in Gaza continues, albeit at a slower pace under the guise of a so-called “ceasefire,” new stories of conflict, loss and death are emerging in the same region. In Iran, people are taking to the streets to resist the regime and are being killed.
The handling of this tragedy by the same media that has spent years questioning the scale of the devastation in Gaza is strikingly different.
The alarming death toll revealed in Iran is often based on estimates by diaspora groups like the Human Rights Defenders News Agency (HRANA), which have no ground access or direct lines of communication to Iran, and are almost immediately accepted as fact.
CBS reported on Tuesday that “two sources, including one inside Iran,” told reporters that “at least 12,000 people were killed, and possibly as many as 20,000.” The report acknowledges that foreign journalists are not allowed into Iran and emphasizes that the communications blackout continues, but treats the damage claimed by anonymous sources as credible. The article was headlined, “More than 12,000 feared dead in Iran protests; footage shows bodies lined up in morgue.”
But videos of piled bodies, images of children being burned alive in tents, and photos of mass graves were never accepted as evidence of the staggering death toll in Gaza.
This is just one example.
Since the Iranian protests began, Western media suddenly seem to have developed a new understanding of what constitutes reliable, accurate, and acceptable reporting of the death toll in a crisis to which they do not have direct access.
The death toll in Gaza, despite being recorded and tallied as meticulously as possible amidst the ongoing genocide, has been relentlessly questioned and routinely presented as unreliable by the very same journalists who are ready and eager to accept the numbers produced by the Iranian opposition, and more precisely by the Washington-based Iranian diaspora network.
why?
Western media appears to apply a much lower standard of credibility when it comes to Iranian deaths. Because reporting on Iranian deaths serves imperial interests, unlike reporting on Palestinians shot, squeezed, starved, and tortured to death by Israel.
Thousands of Iranians killed while protesting against their government are now providing the US government with an opportunity to fabricate consent to bomb Iran and regime change in the name of “human rights” and “democracy.”
This is not to say that Iranians resisting the regime are not dead. That’s not to say they shouldn’t be believed or ignored because their deaths are difficult to count or because the regime is restricting information.
Their fight is important. Their deaths matter. Every innocent death matters.
But as we listen to the voices of Iranians resisting the regime, we must not ignore the hypocrisy of the press, which amplifies their narrative while simultaneously turning their struggle into a convenient pretext for imperial intervention.
These media outlets refused to believe us for years, even though we Palestinians documented the atrocities committed by America. They didn’t believe us when we told them that Israel was after us while we were waiting in line for help. They didn’t believe us when we told them that our babies were freezing to death or starving because Israel blocked access to the Strip with wood, tents, and even baby formula.
They never believed that our dead were really dead. They didn’t believe us when the Gaza Ministry of Health published more than 1,500 pages of names, the first few hundred pages listing only children under 16, and when the United Nations said these numbers were still an underestimate but the most reliable available. Our corpses required endless examination.
Because the deaths of Palestinians at the hands of Washington’s cherished “democratic” and “civilized” ally Israel exposes the cruelty, impunity, and violence of American power. Our bodies are piled up as evidence of an international order that determines which lives are disposable. In contrast, the deaths of Iranians at the hands of governments opposed to the US give the US government a chance to show itself as a benevolent savior ready to “help” and make “democracy” a reality once again.
In other words, selective beliefs are perfected by imperial media. Reports of mass deaths of Iranians gain instant credibility, even when they are based on estimates from anonymous sources thousands of miles away.
This is not just a failure of journalism, but a failure of moral coherence. Death is not measured by evidence, but by political merit. Some corpses demand action, others silence. Until Western media confronts the role it plays in determining which deaths are worth believing in and which are not, they will continue to be complicit in the violence they claim to only observe.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of Al Jazeera.
