FACT FOCUS: Posts misrepresent report to falsely claim nearly 400,000 Palestinians are missing
'Israel has 'disappeared' nearly 400,000 Palestinians in Gaza since 2023,' reads one X post that had been shared and liked more than 35,700 times as of Thursday. 'Harvard has now confirmed what we've been screaming into a deaf world: This is a holocaust — and it's still happening.'
Here's a closer look at the facts.
CLAIM: A Harvard University study found that nearly 400,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are missing as a result of the Israel-Hamas war.
THE FACTS: Harvard published no such study. This estimate misrepresents a map included in a report by a professor at Israel's Ben Gurion University that shows the distance between new aid distribution compounds in Gaza and three main populations centers. Using spatial analysis, the report determined that these compounds are inadequate and also does not address how many people in Gaza are missing. It was published on the Harvard Dataverse, a repository managed by the university where researchers can share their work. Contributors do not need to be affiliated with Harvard and publish directly to the repository without approval from the university.
'If anyone had asked me about these numbers I would have set things straight right away,' said the Yaakov Garb, a professor of environmental studies who authored the report. 'Instead the number was circulated and recirculated by people who had not read the report or stopped to think about it for a moment.'
The inaccurate estimate comes from a post on the blogging site Medium. In the post, the author uses a map from Garb's report showing how many people live in what are currently Gaza's three main population centers — Gaza City, central refugee camps and the Muwasi area — according to estimates from the Israeli Defense Forces, to determine how many Palestinians are allegedly unaccounted for. The author subtracts the former number — 1.85 million — from the population in Gaza before the Israel-Hamas war began — 2.227 million — for a total of 377,00 missing people.
But the numbers on the map are not comprehensive.
'These IDF numbers were not intended to sum to 100% of the Gaza population,' Garb said. 'There may be Gazans in other locations outside these areas of concentration.'
Many Palestinians also have left Gaza since the war began in October 2023, a fact the Medium post does not take into account. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics said in January that about 100,000 had left.
According to Garb, the map was meant to show how difficult it would be for people in these areas to reach new aid distribution compounds. He also noted that it had a typo, which he intends to fix. There are approximately 700,000 people in the Muwasi area, not 500,000.
Other estimates have put the number of missing people, typically defined as those who are dead under the rubble of Gaza, much lower than what the Medium post alleges. A June 2024 study published in The Lancet, for example, found that between about 15,000 to 38,000 people could have been missing at that time.
'Clearly time has passed, and more have died and been buried under rubble. But it is unlikely that numbers of people buried under rubble could increase to 400,000 since then," said Shelly Culbertson, a senior policy researcher at RAND who studies disaster and post-conflict recovery. She added that even if missing people included those who had completely lost communication with their families, it is unlikely that the number would reach 400,000.
Garb lamented the negative impact this type of misinformation could have for Palestinians and those trying to help them.
'If somebody like me who's doing serious work thinks twice next time about, oh my god, do I even want to put out something about Gaza if I have to sully myself with this stuff, they've done a disservice — done a disservice to the Palestinian cause, which they are ostensibly trying to further. I mean, they need to realize that," he said.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
New York Post
15 minutes ago
- New York Post
UCLA spent millions of taxpayer dollars on DEI, has professors who compared Israel to Nazis: watchdog
As the Trump administration pushes for the University of California, Los Angeles, to pony up $1 billion to settle discrimination claims, a sweeping new report has highlighted professors who compared Israeli rhetoric to that of the Nazis and accused the Zionist movement of white supremacy. The watchdog also zinged UCLA for spending at least $3 million in taxpayer money on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. 'We support free expression and viewpoint diversity, but faddish, divisive concepts like anticolonialism and antiracism don't need taxpayer funds sustaining them,' said Jon Hart, CEO of report author Open the Books. Advertisement 'On campuses like UCLA, the rhetoric has caught up with reality with damaging consequences.' One professor named and shamed in the report is Khaled Abou El Fadl, who teaches at UCLA's law school and has been described as a leading expert on Sharia, Islamic law and Islam. 4 The University of California, Los Angeles, had been a hotbed of anti-Israel protests. Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Advertisement 4 Education Secretary Linda McMahon has been overseeing the crackdown on college campuses. AP El Fadl was filmed in late 2023 drawing parallels between Israel and Nazi Germany. His inflammatory remarks followed the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack against the Jewish state. 'The Germans blamed the Jews for their own slaughter. The Germans insisted that what they did in the countries they occupied wasn't their fault,' he said at the time. 'It was always the fault of the occupied. The rhetoric of the Germans is indistinguishable from the rhetoric that Israel uses about Palestinians.' Advertisement Later in the same video, El Fadl vented that Palestinians 'are considered like animals. Exactly like the Nazis looked at Jews.' 'Something subhuman, something less than human, exactly like the narrative and the language of the Nazis,' he went on. Open the Books also knocked UCLA history professor Robin Kelley, an advisory board member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel, which is part of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against the US ally. Advertisement 'The way that Zionism has emerged in Israel has basically taken up the mantle of white supremacy,' Kelley said during a 2017 University of Toronto lecture, 'that is, domination by the peoples, through colonial domination.' In 2021, in a lecture at York University, Kelley also suggested a direct link between Israel and Nazi Germany. 'I was thinking about what it meant when Germany… gave $58 billion to Israel to help start a nation in the name of reparations,' he said at the time. 'In the name of reparations for the Holocaust, it literally provided start-up capital for new settler-colonial state.' Shortly after the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, two professors convened an 'Emergency Teach-In On The Crisis in Palestine,' calling Israel a 'settler colonial' society. One of those professors later told The Post that Israel is 'a power driven by an exclusionary racial ideology.' 4 President Trump's team has been leveraging federal aid to pressure colleges and universities into making significant reforms. REUTERS Those two professors were listed on a grant application for the Department of Education's Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) initiative. UCLA has raked in some $6.1 million worth of FLAS grants from taxpayers since 2020. UCLA touts its antisemitism crackdown In response to questions about the Open the Books report, a spokesperson for UCLA stressed that the school's 'partnership with the federal government advances life-saving care, research, and economic innovation in California and across the nation.' 'Americans depend on the research pioneered at UCLA,' Mary Osako, UCLA Vice Chancellor for Strategic Communications, told The Post. 'We have been abundantly clear that antisemitism has no place on our campus.' Advertisement 'We have taken concrete steps to extinguish hate by taking decisive action against groups for violating our longstanding policies and launching our Initiative to Combat Antisemitism earlier this year.' The school also highlighted some of its efforts to curtail antisemitism, such as its interim suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine and Graduate Students for Justice in Palestine back in February following the vandalization of Jewish regent Jay Sures' home. The school has also tightened its rules for protests and has worked with the Los Angeles Police Department to investigate those who violate campus policies. Showdown with Trump Since the start of this month, the Trump administration has frozen some $584 million in federal funding, according to UCLA chancellor Julio Frenk. Advertisement The Trump administration has accused the university of civil rights infractions for failing to protect Jewish students during pro-Palestinian demonstrations that erupted on campus following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack. UCLA was infamously the site of a 'Jew Exclusion Zone,' in which protesters blocked parts of campus to community members who did not have a certain wristband. Last month, the university agreed to pay $6 million to settle discrimination complaints brought by Jewish faculty and students in connection with the demonstrations. 4 The Trump administration has sought a $1 billion settlement from UCLA. Anadolu via Getty Images DEI grants Advertisement Open the Books also highlighted about $3 million worth of DEI-related grants that UCLA received over recent years. This includes about $1 million since 2021 to research 'equity and antiracist learning in computer science,' according to data found from USA Spending. UCLA also raked in at least $216,000 'to increase participation of underrepresented groups in the mathematical sciences' and $1.6 million since 2020 for a 'workshop on mathematics on racial justice.' Overall, UCLA has taken in at least $4.3 billion from the taxpayers between 2021 and June 2025.
Wall Street Journal
16 minutes ago
- Wall Street Journal
Israel's Military Chief Under Fire From Netanyahu Government
TEL AVIV—Tension is growing between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin's government and the head of the country's military, whom some ministers see as out of step with a plan to expand the war in Gaza after 22 months of fighting. Israeli lawmakers in recent days have stepped up public criticism of the military's chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, who pushed back against a plan to take over Gaza in a security cabinet meeting last week, a person familiar with the matter said.
Los Angeles Times
an hour ago
- Los Angeles Times
Israeli gunfire kills at least 25 in Gaza as Netanyahu says he will allow Palestinians to leave
TEL AVIV, Israel — Israeli gunfire killed at least 25 people seeking aid in Gaza on Wednesday, health officials and witnesses said, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel will 'allow' Palestinians to leave during an upcoming military offensive in some of the territory's most populated areas. Netanyahu wants to realize President Trump's vision of relocating much of Gaza's population of over 2 million people through what he refers to as 'voluntary migration' — and what critics have warned could be ethnic cleansing. 'Give them the opportunity to leave! First, from combat zones, and also from the Strip if they want,' Netanyahu said in an interview aired Tuesday with i24, an Israeli TV station, to discuss the planned offensive in areas including Gaza City where hundreds of thousands of displaced people shelter. 'We are not pushing them out but allowing them to leave.' Witnesses and staff at Nasser and Awda hospitals, which received the bodies, said people were shot dead on their way to aid distribution sites and while awaiting convoys entering Gaza. Israel did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Efforts to revive ceasefire talks have resumed after apparently breaking down last month. Hamas and Egyptian officials met Wednesday in Cairo, according to Hamas official Taher al-Nounou. Israel has no plans to send its negotiating team to talks in Cairo, the prime minister's office said. Israel's plans to widen its military offensive against Hamas to the areas of Gaza that it does not yet control have sparked condemnation and criticism at home and abroad, and could be intended to raise pressure on Hamas to reach a ceasefire. The militants still hold 50 hostages taken in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that sparked the war. Israel believes around 20 of them are alive. Families fear a new offensive endangers them. Netanyahu was asked by i24 News if the window had closed on a partial ceasefire deal and he responded that he wanted all of the hostages back, alive and dead. Egyptian Foreign Ministry Badr Abdelatty told reporters that Cairo is still trying to advance an earlier proposal for an initial 60-day ceasefire, the release of some hostages and an influx of humanitarian aid before further talks on a lasting truce. Hamas says it will only release the remaining hostages in return for the release of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, a lasting ceasefire and an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. The militant group has refused to lay down its arms. Israel and South Sudan are in talks about relocating Palestinians to the war-torn East African nation, The Associated Press reported Tuesday. The office of Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister, Sharren Haskel, said Wednesday she was arriving in South Sudan for a series of meetings in the first visit by a senior government official to the country, but she did not plan to broach the subject of moving Palestinians. South Sudan's ministry of foreign affairs in a statement called reports that it was engaging in discussions with Israel about resettling Palestinians baseless. The AP previously reported that U.S. and Israel have reached out to officials of three East African governments to discuss using their territories as potential destinations for moving Palestinians uprooted from Gaza. Among those killed while seeking aid were 14 Palestinians in the Teina area approximately 1.8 miles from a food distribution site run by the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, according to staff at Nasser hospital. Hashim Shamalah said Israeli troops fired toward them as people tried to get through. Many were shot and fell while fleeing, he said. Israeli gunfire killed five other Palestinians while trying to reach another GHF distribution site in the Netzarim corridor area, according to Awda hospital and witnesses. GHF said there were no incidents at or near its sites Wednesday. The U.S. and Israel support GHF, an American contractor, as an alternative to the United Nations, which they claim allows Hamas to siphon off aid. The U.N., which has delivered aid throughout Gaza for decades when conditions allow, denies the allegations. Aid convoys from other groups travel within 328 feet of GHF sites and draw crowds attempting to loot them. An overwhelming majority of violent incidents over the past few weeks have been related to those convoys, the GHF said. Israeli fire killed at least six other people waiting for aid trucks close to the Morag corridor, which separates parts of southern Gaza, Nasser hospital said. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric on Tuesday shared the warning from the World Food Program and said Gaza's Health Ministry told U.N. staff that five people died over the previous 24 hours from malnutrition and starvation. The Health Ministry says 106 children have died of malnutrition-related causes during the war and 129 adults have died since late June. The U.N. and humanitarian partners still face significant delays and impediments from Israeli authorities who prevent the delivery of food and other essentials at the scale needed, Dujarric said. Hamas-led militants abducted 251 people and killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians, in the 2023 attack. Most of the hostages have been released in ceasefires or other deals. Israel's air and ground offensive has since displaced most of Gaza's population, destroyed vast areas and pushed the territory toward famine. The offensive has killed more than 61,700 Palestinians, according to Gaza's Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters or civilians but says around half were women and children. The ministry is part of the Hamas-run government and staffed by medical professionals. The U.N. and independent experts consider it the most reliable source on war casualties. Israel disputes its figures but has not provided its own. Lidman and Magdy write for the Associated Press.
