This Sept. 7, 2026, Op-Ed by CAMERA’s Shay Khatiri appeared in Jerusalem News Syndicate.
The IDF’s Sept. 4, 2025 announcement of the elimination of Hamas terrorist Muhammad Mahmoud Marshad Al-Qadi, who took part in the Oct. 7 massacre and held hostages (IDF’s X account)
Casualties have been a point of contention and a tool to discredit the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza since October 2023. Civilian deaths are both regrettable and inevitable, and the number is often higher in unconventional wars, when the enemy hides in civilian areas. In this context, it is even more important to distinguish between dead militants and collateral damage, something the press has failed to do in the Gaza Strip and now in Lebanon.
News reports too often casually mention numbers, leaving out that many killed were terrorists. At best, readers are left to investigate that question themselves. At worst, there is an implication that the vast majority are innocent. The “Stop the Genocide” camp cites the casualty numbers as evidence.
Several problems are associated with simply invoking casualties as evidence for a genocide or even excessive force, including that many of them deserve to be dead. The raw number of the dead obscures the fact that many of them are militants and legitimate military targets, not simply collateral damage.
Read the rest of CAMERA’s Op-Ed at JNS.