Palestinian sources, especially from Hamas, are unreliable and untrustworthy.

Since October 2023, Israel and Western governments have systematically cast doubt on Gaza's death toll, while mainstream media repeatedly prefaced casualty figures with "Hamas-run Ministry of Health," implying Palestinian data itself was suspect. By the time Israeli officials themselves admitted the figures were accurate, the damage of the denial had already been done. Yet the mainstream media continues the dehumanizing dismissal. The issue was never accuracy, but manufacturing doubt long enough to normalize and prolong the genocide while shielding Israel from accountability.

Claims that Palestinian casualty figures are unreliable collapse under scrutiny. Across successive Israeli assaults on Gaza, casualty data from the Ministry of Health has consistently aligned with later findings by the UN, World Health Organization, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International, and in many cases proved conservative. During the ongoing genocide, The Lancet estimated Gaza's death toll at around 72,000 in the first 15 months alone, 50% higher than the official figures at the time. Another Lancet analysis projected total deaths from bombings, starvation, disease, and healthcare collapse could exceed 186,00001169-3/fulltext).

That Palestinian civil servants in Gaza's Ministry of Health documented their own live-streamed genocide under bombardment, starvation, and collapsing hospitals, yet are still treated as inherently unreliable, is profoundly racist and dehumanizing. When we read UN or The Lancet reports demonstrating the massive scale of killings in Gaza, we learn little that Palestinians themselves had not already revealed. The issue is not reliability, but a racist system in which the testimony and expertise of the oppressed are treated as inherently suspect, considered credible only after Israeli or Western validation, or dismissed altogether as fabricated.

Israel itself has a long-documented history of spreading disinformation: denying responsibility for killings later proven to be Israeli attacks, circulating fabricated evidence, and repeatedly changing official accounts under scrutiny. Yet Israeli military statements continue to be amplified globally with little verification, even when later disproven. Meanwhile, Palestinians are forced not only to survive genocide, but to continuously prove that the atrocities against them are real. The issue is not reliability, but a racist hierarchy that determines whose voices are believed.

Accusations that Palestinian sources are unreliable are part of a long-standing Israeli propaganda tactic referred to as "Pallywood," designed to portray Palestinians as faking their own suffering. This racist narrative resurfaces after nearly every Israeli assault, flooding media and social media with claims that Israel's massacres, bombings, starvation, or grieving families are staged. The goal is not fact-checking, but dehumanization, atrocity denial, and the protection of Israeli impunity.

Hamas repeatedly called for an independent international investigation into the events of October 7, 2023. Israel rejected these calls and obstructed international investigations and scrutiny. What more do we need to know?