Fox 13’s Matthew Smith during the erroneous Feb. 13, 2026 broadcast
KCPQ – TV (Channel 13), Fox News’ Seattle affiliate, grossly inflated the Palestinian death toll during the Israel-Hamas war as “hundreds of thousands.” In the Feb. 13 “Washington News Wrap” broadcast, KCPQ reporter Matthew Smith egregiously misreported: “In fact, we heard from a former Amazon worker who was fired up after he spoke up about how Amazon was impacting the violence in Gaza, leading to Palestinians dying after an attack on Israel led to counterattacks and hundreds of thousands of deaths.”
Yet, even according to the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, the death toll is a minuscule fraction of what Smith claimed. As Fox News reported on Jan. 31, 2026: “The Gaza Health Ministry currently reports 71,667 deaths, including more than 450 since the October 2025 ceasefire, though Israeli officials said the estimate does not include bodies believed to be buried under rubble.” [Emphasis added.]
Furthermore, Smith failed to challenge an on-air statement by former Amazon employee Ahmed Shahrour, who unbelievably inflated even beyond Smith’s own egregiously overstated figure. Shahrour appeared in the broadcast stating: “I was fired three months ago for daring to speak up against executives and educate my colleagues about Project Nimbus, a $1.2 billion project between Amazon and the Israeli military used to commit a genocide that has wiped out nearly half the population in Gaza.”
According to the United Nations, the Gaza Strip’s population is 2.1 million. In other words, if nearly half the population — conservatively, we can use 40 percent to stand in for “nearly” — then the number of fatalities would by 840,000. By any count, 72,000 is not even close to that figure.
Assuming that Hamas’ 72,000 figure does not include any who died from natural causes (and critics have made exactly that point), then war fatalities amount to around four percent of the population. In allowing the bogus “nearly half” comment to stand uncorrected, Fox 13 inflated the fatalities by a factor of over 1000 percent.
Both absurdly overstated figures, which are at odds both with reality and Fox News’ own national coverage, serves the activist’s odious genocide libel.
Finally, regarding the unchallenged and completely false genocide libel, Fox News itself rightly reported Feb. 14:
Military experts and genocide researchers have debunked the allegation that Israel carried out a genocide against Palestinians during its self-defense war against the Hamas terrorist organization that started after Hamas terrorists attacked communities in parts of southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 that saw over 1200 Israeli and foreign nationals killed and 251 brutally kidnapped and taken into Gaza by Hamas and other terrorists.
Danny Orbach, a military historian from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and co-author of “Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Reexamination of the Israel-Hamas War from October 7 2023, to June 1, 2025,” told Fox News Digital that Ocasio-Cortez accusation that Israel committed genocide is an “accusation that is incorrect both factually and legally. Under the Genocide Convention, genocide requires proof of a special intent to destroy a protected group, in whole or in part, and as a baseline condition, an active effort to maximize civilian destruction.
“The evidence shows the opposite: as demonstrated in our multi-author study Debunking the Genocide Allegations, Israel undertook unprecedented measures to mitigate civilian harm, including establishing humanitarian safe zones that independently verified data show were approximately six times safer than other areas of Gaza.”
Orbach added, “Israel also issued detailed advance warnings before strikes and facilitated the entry of over two million tons of humanitarian aid, often at significant cost to its own military advantage, including the loss of surprise and the sustainment of an enemy during wartime.”
Fox News promises its viewers news reporting which “pursues the facts wherever they may lead” and states its “foremost principles are the accuracy of information, clarity of opinion and quality of our content.” KCPQ-TV’s obligations to its viewership of some 37,000 Seattle area residents are not lesser than Fox News’ obligations to its national audience of 2.6 million.