Our research has been published in the inaugural issue of the peer-reviewed journal The Digital Hate Review. We analysed 1,378 articles published between February and May 2024 by eight major news outlets: The Guardian, The New York Times, BBC, CNN, The Washington Post, Reuters, Associated Press, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The study examines a gap in journalistic standards in reporting on military conflict, specifically, the reporting of casualty figures in Gaza. During the most heavily covered war in Gaza’s history, we found a striking asymmetry in the use of sources. Both principal sources offered incomplete information: • Gaza’s Hamas-run Ministry of Health reported total deaths, without distinguishing between civilians and combatants. • Israel reported figures for killed combatants. Comparing these two sets of data is essential for assessing one of the central questions of the war: the proportion of civilian and combatant casualties. Yet Israeli figures appeared in only 3% of the articles we analysed. This systematic omission led to removing Hamas combatants from the public picture and reinforced a narrative in which Israel is fighting Gaza’s civilian population alone. News outlets also increasingly failed to identify primary sources. The Guardian was the clear outlier: in 43% of the articles in which it cited casualty figures from Gaza’s Hamas-run Ministry of Health, it did not identify the source at all. While the UN sources put disclaimers saying that the data from Gaza still hasn’t been independently verified, this disclaimer is almost absent in the media. Instead, the figures were presented as self-evident or generally known information. This was the highest rate among all the outlets we analysed. This imbalance also matters beyond the media. International institutions often treat press reporting as an epistemic authority. For example, when citing the number of killed militants, the UN commission referred to a Guardian article rather than to IDF data. The Guardian article relied on a database of individually named militants, a figure nearly twice lower than the IDF’s reported total number of killed militants. Our article examines how these reporting choices can shape an “authoritative version of reality”, and why standards of sourcing, attribution, and context are so important in conflict reporting. The full article is available: digitalhatereview.com/articl…