There is a crisis of belief in Western media, one that has little to do with evidence and everything to do with whose deaths align with the interests of empire.

For two and a half years, Western media has scrutinised every dead Palestinian, and the ways in which their bodies were maimed, broken and burned in Gaza. Were they real people? If they were, were they truly dead? If dead, were they actually killed by Israel’s bombs, bullets, torture and siege? If they were killed, how could anyone know they were not combatants, and thus actually “deserved it”?

The destruction reported by Palestinians on the ground, by those watching their loved ones fall one by one, was not believed. Even the death toll periodically released by the Gaza Health Ministry, widely acknowledged to be a massive undercount, was repeatedly questioned.

As of late 2025, the Gaza Health Ministry reports that at least 70,117 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the conflict began, with a large majority of those victims civilians. The United Nations and countless independent researchers agree that the official toll is an undercount. In the first nine months of the war alone, the number of deaths from traumatic injury was estimated at around 64,000, approximately 40 percent higher than the ministry’s figure, and that does not account for deaths caused by lack of healthcare, starvation or failures in water and sanitation. All demographic modelling suggests that overall mortality is significantly higher once indirect deaths are included. A July 2024 study published in The Lancet put the figure at more than 186,000. There is no doubt that hundreds of thousands more have lost their lives to bombs, bullets, avoidable illnesses and hunger since.

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The Health Ministry documents deaths through hospital morgues, recording names and ID numbers, counting only the bodies it is able to identify because, as we all know, many bodies in Gaza, blown to pieces, crushed under rubble or flattened by tanks, can never be identified. Further, with every hospital in the Gaza Strip bombed or rendered inoperable, there were periods when morgues were unable to count even bodies that were identifiable.

Yet Western media, to this day, refuses to report the true scale of the carnage, and even the undercount it does publish is wrapped in caveats. It is “disputed by Israel”, “cannot be confirmed”, or merely “claimed” by the “Hamas-run health ministry”, never treated as an established fact.

Now, as the genocide in Gaza continues, albeit at a slower pace under the guise of a so-called “ceasefire”, another story of conflict, loss and death has emerged in the same region. In Iran, people are taking to the streets to resist the regime, and are being killed as they do so.

The way this tragedy is handled by the very same media outlets that spent years questioning the scale of devastation in Gaza is markedly different.

Striking death tolls emerging from Iran, in many cases based on estimates by diaspora organisations such as the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), which have no ground access and no direct communication lines into the country, are being accepted as fact almost instantly.

CBS reported on Tuesday that “two sources, including one inside Iran”, told its journalists that “at least 12,000, and possibly as many as 20,000 people have been killed”. The report acknowledged that foreign journalists are not allowed into Iran and underlined the ongoing communications shutdown, yet still treated the toll claimed by an anonymous source as credible. It ran with the headline: “Over 12,000 feared dead after Iran protests, as video shows bodies lined up at morgue.”

Videos of piled-up bodies, footage of children burning alive in their tents, and photographs of mass graves, however, were never accepted as proof of a staggering death toll in Gaza.

This is just one example.

Since the beginning of the Iran protests, Western media appears to have suddenly developed a new understanding of what counts as credible, accurate and acceptable reporting of death tolls in a crisis that it cannot directly access.

Deaths in Gaza, despite being recorded and tallied as meticulously as possible amid an ongoing genocide, were relentlessly questioned and routinely presented as unreliable by the very same journalists now ready and eager to accept figures produced by the Iranian opposition, or more precisely, by Washington-based Iranian diaspora networks.

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Why?

It seems Western media applies a far lower threshold for credibility when it comes to Iranian deaths, because reporting on them, unlike reporting on Palestinians shot, crushed, starved and tortured to death by Israel, serves the interests of empire.

Thousands of Iranians killed while protesting their government offer Washington an opportunity to manufacture consent for bombing or toppling that regime, this time in the name of “human rights” and “democracy”.

This is not to say that Iranians resisting the regime are not dying. It is not to say they should not be believed, or that their deaths should be ignored because they are difficult to count or because the regime restricts information.

Their struggle matters. Their deaths matter. Every innocent death matters.

But as we listen to Iranians resisting the regime, we must not ignore the hypocrisy of media outlets that amplify their story while simultaneously transforming their struggle into a convenient pretext for imperial intervention.

These same outlets refused to believe us for years as we Palestinians documented our American-enabled slaughter. They did not believe us when we said Israel was hunting us as we queued for aid. They did not believe us when we said our babies were freezing to death or starving as Israel blocked timber, tents and even baby formula from entering the Strip.

They never believed our dead were really dead. They did not believe us when the Gaza Health Ministry published over 1,500 pages of names, the first few hundred listing only children under 16, nor when the United Nations said these figures, while still an underestimate, were the most credible available. Our corpses required endless verification.

This is because Palestinian deaths at the hands of Washington’s cherished “democratic” and “civilised” ally Israel expose the cruelty, impunity and violence of United States power. Our bodies pile up as evidence of an international order that decides which lives are expendable. The deaths of Iranians at the hands of a US-opposed government, by contrast, offer Washington a chance to present itself as the benevolent saviour, ready to “help” and deliver “democracy” once again.

So selective belief is perfected by the empire’s media. Reports of mass Iranian deaths, even when based on estimates by anonymous sources thousands of miles away, receive instant credibility.

This is not a failure of journalism alone, but a failure of moral consistency. Death is not measured by evidence, but by political utility. Some corpses demand action, others demand silence. Until Western media confronts the role it plays in deciding which deaths are worthy of belief and which are not, it will remain complicit in the violence it claims only to observe.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.