Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas addresses the 79th United Nations General Assembly at United Nations headquarters in New York, US, Sept. 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

On the Aug. 5 Morning Edition segment, “As ongoing wars create strain, a look at how Americans and Israelis view one another,” NPR’s Frank Langfitt spread false information to his wide audience, leading them to believe that more than 50% of those killed during the Israel-Hamas war were women and girls.

Following his short interview of an Israeli woman at a fish stall in an outdoor market, during which he cited 73,000 casualties in Gaza, Langfitt said that in April 2026, the UN tallied 38,000 women and girls had been killed as of December 2025. Given that the total killed is approximately 73,000, this number represents more than 50% and supposedly does not even include male children.

The problem? It’s false information.

Rather than fact-check the UN (Women) claim, NPR simply regurgitated the wholly incorrect statistics, which are even more extreme than those claimed by Hamas, to its broad audience. This is inexcusable especially after several documented incidents from which the UN had to backtrack, due to providing false information. These include:

1. In March 2024, the UN-founded Integrated Security Phase Classification (IPC) warned that Northern Gaza met, or was on the verge of meeting, the criteria for “famine.” In June 2024, the UN was forced to admit “the available evidence does not indicate that Famine is currently occurring.”
2. On May 6, 2024, UN OCHA (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs) reported that nearly 70% of total deaths in Gaza at that time – about 24,000 – were women and children. Not long after, OCHA reduced that number by almost half.

How did the UN come to these figures? In a UN Women advocacy brief entitled “Invisible No More: Estimating the Death Toll, Injuries and Long-term Disability for Women and Girls in Gaza as of 31 December 2025,” the organization relied on a February 2025 Lancet publication to support the idea that the Gaza Ministry of Health’s (MOH) fatality figures were likely understated. Accordingly, UN Women multiplied the Hamas-reported fatalities by 1.69 to arrive at what it believed – due to the Lancet study – was the true estimate.

But the Lancet study itself merits serious scrutiny. Of four different models tested, the authors used the one that produced the second-highest estimate, more than 64,000 deaths (while stating they believed the MOH underreported mortality by 41%). Meanwhile, one of the alternative models produced an estimate of about less than 51,000 deaths. This was then promptly ignored.

The study also used circular, not scientific logic: The authors assumed the MOH data was reliable and then used their analysis to retroactively “prove” its reliability. Moreover, the authors vastly underestimated overlap between social media lists, hospital records, and survey responses. This resulted in an overestimation of casualties by Lancet, which UN Women then further augmented.

The authors were also the only ones given access to dates of death for the fatalities by Hamas’s Palestinian Information Center at the MOH, who the authors thanked at the conclusion of the article.

And what happened to the media going to original sources for information, instead of relying on a third party for reports? NPR could have gone straight to the source and vigorously cross-checked. Instead, it relied on multiple hearsay: records given by Hamas only to the Lancet study authors, whose flawed study was then cited by UN Women, who did their own adjustment to the data, which was then quoted by NPR. In failing to do so, it violated its own internal guidelines, which state that journalists must independently verify data.

Hamas’s Ministry of Health began reporting in July 2025 that the majority of fatalities in Gaza were men. Most recently, on July 2, 2026, the Hamas media office reported that out of 73,066 people killed during the war, 21,500 were children and 12,500 were women. That’s a total of 34,000 which is: (a) more than 10% fewer casualties than the 38,000 claimed by UN Women, whose number did not include male children and (b) is less than half of the total casualties.

Of course, it also ignores the open secret that both Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) use child soldiers, which means some of those counted as male children were combatants.

Gabriel Epstein of the Israel Policy Forum noted that in recent weeks, PIJ claimed at least 20 child combatants, aged 15 – 17 years old, who held a range of roles from foot soldiers to rocket and manufacturing units. And many child combatants were identified prior to the last few weeks.

Estimates suggest the number of announcements released by Hamas and PIJ has only now surpassed 2,500, which represents only about 10% of the number of terrorists the IDF estimates it killed in Gaza. Presumably, more child combatant casualties will be revealed over time.

NPR’s third-hand regurgitation of false statistics on a broadcast meant that millions of listeners may have accepted them as established facts. Even if NPR were to update its online content later, such belated, quiet retractions never reach the same audience size, allowing false narratives to more easily, and perhaps permanently, shape public (mis)perceptions.

NPR’s failure to check sources and cross-reference claims, instead opting to amplify United Nations’ statements, signals an abandonment of proper news gathering techniques. Instead, NPR acted as an echo chamber. Until it applies rigorous skepticism to any and all organizations — whether international aid groups presumed to be of prestige — or those designated terrorist by the United States government, NPR’s audience will have a compromised understanding of complex geopolitical events.

The author is a media researcher at CAMERA, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis, where a version of this article first appeared.