No, the Death Toll in Gaza Is Not 186,000

The slow work of pushing back on viral misinformation.

Yesterday, Instagram was awash with a grim new figure about the war in Gaza. According to a new study from The Lancet, the death toll from the war could be as high as 186,000.

This would be shocking if it were true, but there’s no reason to believe that it is.

The “study” is not actually based on any data from Gaza.

Rather, it’s a completely speculative estimate about how many deaths could plausibly be said to be caused by the war at some point in the future.

But of course, no one read it that way. People took it as fact and shared it widely.

And by the time you sit down to do to push back against the new narrative (as I am now), millions have already shared the shocking headline, promoting the idea that Israel has killed five times more people than previously believed.

A similarly misleading headline made the rounds a few weeks ago when the NGO Save the Children reported that “more than 20,000 children are missing in Gaza.”

Everyone who reads such a headline will instantly think the same thing. They will imagine that there are over 20,000 children in Gaza who have disappeared during the course of the war.

But for those who read the caption of the post, a different picture emerged.