Journalists looking to make one point or another about the 2023 Hamas war have often contrasted the fighting in Gaza with U.S. combat in Iraq.
More often than not, the point being made — at least in our largest and most influential news outlets — has been that the Gaza war is without parallel. Not just because every enemy, arena, and era are unique, but because, in the broadest sense, “Israel’s assault is different,” as a front-page feature in the New York Times put it.
More often than not, too, the point has been made dishonestly. To argue that Israel is trigger-happy, for example, the Wall Street Journal compared the number of weapons dropped at the start of Israel’s invasion of Gaza to the number of American munitions dropped in Iraq between 2004 and 2010. But the U.S. invasion of Iraq, its air campaign, and its heavy use of munitions began and ended in 2003.
The Associated Press and Washington Post likewise omitted the 2003 invasion to compare Israeli munitions use unfavorably to Iraq.
The New York Times, at least, acknowledged 2003 in its late-November feature. But the reporter chose to play word games with the U.S. war. “More women and children have been reported killed in Gaza in less than two months,” the story claimed, “than the roughly 7,700 civilians documented as killed by U.S. forces and their international allies in the entire first year of the invasion of Iraq in 2003” (emphasis added).
In reality, the “entire first year” of the American invasion lasted about a month. The war started on March 19. The regime fell on April 9. Major combat operations were declared over on May 1. It was in that first month of fighting, too, that the overwhelming majority of Iraqi civilians mentioned by the Times were killed. The paper, in other words, downplayed the intensity of the U.S. invasion. And it did so in order to misleadingly portray Israel as cramming a year’s worth of casualties into a month.
The paper led readers astray not just with the timeline, but also with the casualty numbers on which its Iraq comparison hinged. Earlier this month, casualty figures from Gaza made headlines — and not in the usual way. On May 8, the United Nations abruptly halved the figures it had used for women and children’s deaths. The methodology behind Hamas’s claims was, as researchers had pointed out, opaque, inconsistent, and unreliable.1
With all the slipperiness in media accounts of Gaza and Iraq, it’s worth taking a closer look at the overlap between the two wars. Is it true that “Gazan civilians are dying at a faster rate than civilians did during the most intense U.S. attacks in … Iraq,” as the New York Times charged in December? Or that “people are being killed in Gaza more quickly … than in even the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq,” as the paper elsewhere insisted?
The claims are untenable.
In truth, the New York Times has no idea how many Palestinian civilians have been killed in the fighting. Hamas’s policy of concealing the number of militant casualties is hardly a show of transparency. In this war and past fighting, the terror group has lied about casualties. And as mentioned above, its claims about women and children’s deaths have proven unreliable — an especially relevant concern, considering the newspaper had used Hamas figures for those demographics as a stand-in for civilian deaths.
Still, by working with flawed estimates from different parties, we can compare possible Gaza numbers to casualty figures from Iraq Body Count (IBC), whose count of verified civilian deaths in Iraq is used by the New York Times. Doing so belies the newspaper’s claims that the rate of civilian deaths in Gaza compares unfavorably to the period of heavy bombardment in the 2003 Iraq war.
Through the Fall of the Iraqi Regime
The graph below covers the first 25 days of the 2003 and 2023 wars. That time span encompasses the most intense period of U.S. bombardment in Iraq. Day 22 of the Iraq war marked the effective fall of Saddam Hussein’s reign, and the IBC’s count of civilian deaths fell dramatically after that calendar week. In this invasion period, civilian casualties in Iraq were likely higher than those casualties in Gaza.
The black dashed line depicts verified civilian casualties in Iraq, per IBC. The green, red, and blue lines show a high, a middle, and a low estimate of civilian casualties in Gaza.2 Each represents a specific proportion of the total death count (combatants and civilians) claimed by Hamas, which is depicted by the gray dotted line.
From the start of the U.S. invasion through the fall of the Iraqi regime, the number of civilian casualties in Iraq was substantively higher than the number of civilian casualties in Gaza extrapolated in the lower two estimates. Even the highest Gaza estimate initially exceeds and eventually matches the numbers from the U.S. war.
Lower Rate, Longer Duration
In Iraq, the regime fell quickly, and the pace of casualties dropped precipitously after one month. In Gaza, heavy fighting was sustained over many months, with the pace of casualties decreasing slowly (though steady and substantively) month after month. This is the main quantitative difference.
It is a reflection of enormous qualitative differences. The U.S. invaded a country 6,000 miles away. Its rationale centered on allegations that Iraq harbored hidden weapons of mass destruction. The Iraqi regime quickly collapsed.
Israel, meanwhile, was attacked from a territory a half mile from its nearest town. Terrorists made the short trip across the border to murder, maim, rape, behead, and kidnap. In one day, over a thousand people were killed and hundreds of hostages including tiny children were taken, in the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Hamas has promised more of the same.
Another distinction from Iraq is that hundreds of miles of tunnels have been dug under Gaza — a serpentine military base beneath the civilian population. The tunnels help keep the Hamas regime from crumbling, while doing the opposite for the civilian infrastructure.
In light of these differences, the comparable casualty rates at the start of the two wars might be unexpected. Less surprising is the divergence in total numbers of casualties, as the Gaza war drags on without a clear victory.
Still, as Hamas militants lost ground, the casualties declined.
Before looking at those numbers, one additional difference between Iraq and Gaza should be noted — and it doubles as a caveat. IBC’s database of Iraqi casualties distinguishes between those killed by U.S. coalition forces and those killed by other actors. Hamas’s numbers do not. They appear to include, for example, the Hamas Ministry of Health’s count of 471 deaths caused by an explosion at the al Ahli hospital. Intelligence agencies believe the blast was caused by a Palestinian rocket, and that the casualty count was greatly exaggerated. And as with al-Ahli, so too should we expect that countless other deaths from misfired rockets, which inevitably fall on Gaza, are included. Even Palestinians intentionally shot by Hamas are tallied in Hamas’s list of war casualties.
Despite these flaws and and whatever others may exist, Hamas’s numbers are ones the media and international institutions use. So back to the numbers.
The U.S.-led coalition killed an estimated 285 civilians per day from the start of the Iraq war through the fall of the regime.3 Per Hamas’s reports, an average of 320 people per day, combatants and civilians, were killed in Gaza between Oct. 7 and Oct. 31. Keeping with the assumptions about civilian death rates used above, we can estimate that somewhere between 192 civilians per day (Israel extrapolation) and 256 civilians per day (Hamas extrapolation) were killed in the initial weeks of the war. Those numbers, as noted above and depicted in the following chart, have declined each month.
In short, the rate of civilian casualties at the start of the Gaza war was either comparable to or substantively less than the rate of civilian casualties in Iraq through the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime. And that rate has declined consistently in the months that followed Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre. Media comparisons of the two wars have been specious, sometimes in ways that suggest an intentional attempts to mislead. This is consistent with the way the press has mishandled other comparisons.
1. In Commentary, David Adesnik and Kevin Chan give a thorough overview of how reporting from the Gaza Ministry of Health, reporting from Gaza’s Government Media Office, reporting from “reliable media sources,” and reporting from relatives of victims combine to produce flawed and unreliable numbers. Read more from Adesnik here.
Mike Spagat, who had initially defended Hamas’s numbers, describes here a number of concerns with the group’s data, citing a “trend toward declining data quality,” including because thousands of deaths have seemingly “been entered into an unavailable database using an unknown methodology.” Read more from Spagat here.
A series of papers by Gabriel Epstein of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy likewise explore the flaws with Hamas’s data. See here, here, and here.
Note that figures used by the New York Times are based to a significant degree on the weaker of Hamas’s data sets, which appears to be in large part responsible for the UN’s subsequent reduction in published figures. ↩
2. The “Hamas extrapolation” of civilian casualties assumes 80% of the group’s reported total casualties are civilians. According to a Feb. 19, 2024 Reuters story, “A Hamas official based in Qatar told Reuters that the group estimated it had lost 6,000 fighters during the four-month-old conflict.” Hamas at the time was reporting 29,092 total deaths, meaning they claimed 20% of the casualties were its fighters. (Even with these assumptions, the civilian death rate would be lower than the one we use here, as other groups beside Hamas are active in the fighting and have likely sustained significant casualties.)
The same Reuters report describes an Israeli estimate of 12,000 fighters killed, or 40% of the total reported deaths. This is the basis of the “Israel extrapolation” of 60% civilian casualties. Note that Israel’s prime minister subsequently estimated that 53% of the fatalities were civilians. We use the higher estimate here.
The “Egypt extrapolation” of 70% civilian casualties is based on Egyptian intelligence officials cited in the Wall Street Journal who suggest “the true number of dead militants is in between the Israeli and Hamas claims.” ↩
3. Iraq Body Count gives casualty data in units of one week or longer. Based on the four calendar weeks that encompass the start of the Iraq war and the fall of the regime, around 243 civilians per day were killed in the US war. That, however, is an undercount because the timespan includes a few days before the war started and a few days after the fall of the regime. Assuming that the first week’s casualties began on the first day of the war and that the last week of casualties were evenly distributed, the rate is 286 per day. ↩