This is the last of a three-part series examining Rolling Stone’s coverage of the war in Gaza that started on October 7, 2023. You can also see Parts One and Two on our website.
PART THREE: FROM BAD TO WORSE
Since the start of 2025, Rolling Stone’s writing about the war in Gaza has defied probability and gotten even worse than it was in the earlier part of the war, as detailed in parts one and two of this series. The publication cherry-picks reports to use inflated Palestinian casualty statistics, while mostly ignoring the conditions of the hostages and downplaying or in some cases ignoring the causes of the war, as part of a pattern of reversing victim and perpetrator.
In addition to continuing to repeat Hamas casualty figures, as it did beginning in November of 2023, in January and February Rolling Stone selectively quoted a study that inflated the Gaza death toll while ignoring studies that showed it to be lower. At least five times, Rolling Stone quoted figures from an article in the Lancet, which estimated 64,260 deaths in Gaza due to the war between October 7, 2023, and June 30, 2024 – even higher than Hamas’s figure. However, Abraham Wyner, Professor of Statistics and Data Science at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, wrote on January 28 that the Lancet study in question suffers from “a methodological problem” and “bad data.”
The Lancet article, according to its own summary, claimed to use “a three-list capture–recapture analysis using data from Palestinian Ministry of Health (MoH) hospital lists, an MoH online survey, and social media obituaries,” that is, it compared three separate data sets. Professor Wyner found that the Lancet study badly underestimated the overlap between the three lists of mortalities. Professor Wyner also uses age and sex data to show that males 15-44 (Hamas uses child soldiers) are by far the largest group of casualties, and most likely a significant portion of any undercount.
But Rolling Stone quoted the Lancet figures, not only on January 15, January 19, and January 26, prior to Professor Wyner’s publication, but also on February 9, and on February 10, after Professor Wyner’s article was available. Moreover, Rolling Stone ignored the December report from the Henry Jackson Society, a British think tank, which found that Hamas casualty figures included about 5,000 natural deaths, included people killed by misfired Hamas rockets, included people who died before the war even began, and in some cases classified fighting-age men as children.
While, as discussed previously, in the early stages on the war, Rolling Stone blamed the Hamas atrocities on Israel’s actions, by 2025 the publication seems to have forgotten about those atrocities completely. In January and February, Rolling Stone has repeatedly whitewashed the way this war started, or in some cases even ignored the reason the war started all together, in order to reverse victim and perpetrator. On January 15, reporting on the ceasefire negotiations, Andrew Perez wrote:
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas led an unprecedented terrorist attack in which 1,195 Israelis were killed and hundreds taken hostage. Since then, Israel has led a brutal retaliatory siege in Gaza and near-total blockade. … The brutality of the war has spurred accusations of engineered famine, war crimes and genocide against Palestinians trapped in the Gaza strip.
Hamas’s attack, to Rolling Stone, is merely “unprecedented” – no mention of the torture, rape, and burning alive of entire families that occurred on October 7, 2023. But Israel’s response is “brutal,” “retaliatory,” and includes potential “engineered famine,” “war crimes,” and “genocide.” In fact, the accusations of famine are baseless. And of course there is no genocide in Gaza and claims to that effect made in the reporter’s own voice are an offense to truth and to journalism. The difference is easy enough to spot: a group fighting off a real attempt at genocide, if it were to surrender, would all be killed. In this case, in contrast, Hamas could have surrendered at any time, and released the hostages unconditionally, and in doing so would have stopped the war that it started.
A January 19 article by Peter Wade repeated the same baseless accusations: “the conflict has left Gaza devastated in the wake of genocidal acts, war crimes and intentional famine.” Yet, although the subject of the article was the hostage for prisoner exchange (more on that below), Wade neglected to mention that at the time, among the hostages that were subject to the agreement were two children, Ariel and Kfir Bibas, whose status, living or dead, was then-unknown.
And on January 18, Asawin Suebsaeng wrote:
For more than a year, Alaydi, a Palestinian American teacher living in California, has been working nonstop with an attorney in a heartrending, uphill battle to evacuate nearly two dozen of Alaydi’s family members – including small children – who’ve been trapped in Gaza during Israel’s immensely brutal war. … Alaydi adds that she is the only person sending them money, whatever she can, and because Gaza has been so catastrophically pummeled by Israeli forces, with the support of the Biden administration, the family members all financially depend on her. (“They Fought to Get Kids Trapped in Gaza to America. Under Trump , ‘Hope’ Is Gone.”)
Why is Gaza being “catastrophically pummeled” in “Israel’s immensely brutal war”? Much later in the 2100-word piece, we learn “this war … started in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks and hostage-taking in Israel.” Just as in the January 15 piece, the October 7 attack is sanitized. The attack happened, but it’s the response that is “brutal” and “catastrophic.” The war was not even started by the attack, according to Suebsaeng, but merely “in the wake of” it.
“Even if this new cease-fire deal holds and the bombing stops, Alaydi’s family, just like so many others like them, will still be in a living hell, in a destroyed Gaza, and seeking potential ways out,” we read. Just as Jesse Rosenfeld did in his October 7, 2024 article, Suebsaeng ignores the fact that Egypt had sealed its border with Gaza long before that point, attempting to put all of the blame for the plight of the people of Gaza onto Israel and the U.S.
An article on January 26, again by Peter Wade, told readers, “nearly all 2 million Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes during the conflict amid the Israeli military’s mass destruction of infrastructure,” and another on the same date said, “they got word that, after 15 months of relentless, devastating war in Gaza, Israel and Hamas had finally reached a cease-fire agreement.” What is the cause of the “relentless, devastating war in Gaza,” that has “forcibly displaced” “nearly all” Gaza residents? By this point, despite its own reporting in October and November of 2023, Rolling Stone seems to have total amnesia. Nor does Wade mention the extent to which Hamas used civilian homes as part of its military operations, which of course is the reason for the “mass destruction of infrastructure.”
And by this month, in a February 4 article about Trump’s plans for Gaza, Ryan Bort has almost completely reversed victim and perpetrator:
The president’s comments came on Tuesday as he met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose bombardment of the region in response to Hamas’ Oct. 2023 terrorist attack on Israel killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. Trump and Netanyahu have long been allies, and Trump voiced support for Israel’s relentless attacks against Gaza during his presidential campaign. Former President Joe Biden waffled publicly, but his administration never stopped supplying Israel with military aid it needed to level Gaza.
The October 7 attack, while described as a “terrorist” attack, reads as no different from the hundreds of other terrorist attacks perpetrated against Israel or worldwide, and is linguistically sandwiched in between Netanyahu’s “bombardment” that has “killed tens of thousands of Palestinians,” so that a reader might not even notice it. In contrast, Israel’s “attacks against Gaza” are “relentless” and have “levelled” it. (Nor does Bort seem to be aware that Biden did in fact place an embargo on the 2000-pound bomb, although Rolling Stone reported it on January 26.)
This was followed on February 9 by Peter Wade describing Netanyahu as someone who “has led a more than year long military assault,” on Gaza. Rather than being accurately described as defensive, the military action merely “follow[ed]” Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack. Wade continues:
This past October, [Navi] Pillay and a team of UN Human Rights Council-appointed experts released a report that concluded Israel has committed war crimes and attempted to shatter Gaza’s healthcare system while intentionally targeting medical personnel and facilities, including torturing healthcare workers. “Children in particular have borne the brunt of these attacks, suffering both directly and indirectly from the collapse of the health system,” Pillay said at the time.
As he did in earlier reporting, Wade omits that the Biden administration corroborated Israel’s claims that hospitals were being used for military purposes, and that such use causes them to lose their protected status under international law. Any harm to the Gaza healthcare system is therefore the fault of those who turn hospitals into military assets, i.e., Hamas. He also omits that Pillay has a history of anti-Israel animus, including in 2014, when she bizarrely suggested that Israel should share Iron Dome with the same people against whom it was deploying the defensive weapon.
Incorrectly referring to the whole of the Gaza Strip as a “city,” on February 10, reporting on the Superbowl halftime protester who waived a Palestinian and a Sudanese flag, Rolling Stone claimed, “the mass destruction of infrastructure came by way of the Israeli military’s attacks on the city in which nearly all 2 million Palestinians were forcibly displaced from their homes and an estimated 45,000 and 65,000 Palestinians were killed since October 2023.” For no reason whatsoever, apparently.
Throughout, of course, the magazine continued to ignore that Hamas could have ended the war at any time if it would have surrendered and released the hostages unconditionally.
Even worse, however, was the minimal way the magazine reported on the hostages during this time frame. The January 19 article about the ceasefire agreement mentioned above reported on the first three freed hostages of this ceasefire, Romi Gonen, Emily Damari and Doron Steinbrecher. But Rolling Stone failed to mention the harrowing circumstances of the exchange, nor did it note that many of the Palestinians who were slated to be released under the exchange have been convicted of murder. And as previously noted, it failed to inform its readers of the ages of the two youngest hostages subject to that agreement, which, had they lived, would have been two- and five-years old.
Rolling Stone did not report on the emaciated condition in which the hostages Or Levy, Eli Sharabi, and Ohad Ben Ami returned, or the way they were paraded before Gaza audiences in a bizarre ceremony before they were allowed to return home.
And when Ariel and Kfir Bibas, along with their mother Shiri, were finally returned, Rolling Stone did not even report on the return of the bodies. It did not report on the depraved parade of coffins to cheering crowds in Gaza, or that Hamas attempted to substitute another woman’s body for Shiri’s, or that the names on the two children’s coffins were switched, or the fact that the Israeli medical examiner found that the two children had been killed “with bare hands.” Instead, on February 26, the day of their funeral, while millions of people in Israel and the U.S. were mourning them, Rolling Stone reported on President Trump’s Truth Social page sharing a video about Gaza:
Gaza remains the site of widespread devastation as international negotiators attempt to extend a fragile ceasefire, but that isn’t stopping President Trump from posting grotesque, greedy fantasies about turning the Palestinian region into one of his resorts.
Trump’s video is “grotesque,” but the dead baby parade in Gaza is … not worth mentioning.
As with the earlier analysis of the magazine’s coverage, this article cannot, and does not purport to, cover every distortion or falsehood that Rolling Stone published. But by the start of 2025, Rolling Stone’s coverage included a pattern that ignored the savage and barbaric nature of the October 7, 2023 attack, focused only on Israel’s response, and even exaggerated the lethality of that response by cherry-picking studies on the casualties. Most egregiously, the magazine ignored the horrific treatment of the hostages that has been exposed as they have begun to return home.
In Rolling Stone’s telling, the manner in which this war started has been completely forgotten, only Palestinians are victims, only Israelis are perpetrators, and Hamas’s power to end the suffering on both sides at any time by surrendering is non-existent. This is not reporting, this is propaganda. As a music magazine, Rolling Stone has no obligation to cover these events at all. Yet it not only chooses to do so, it chooses to do it in a manner that misinforms and misleads its readers, some of whom may not follow any other news about the conflict.