In modern warfare, credibility is not a rhetorical flourish. It is a strategic asset. And once compromised, it is difficult to restore.
That reality came into focus recently, when Israeli media reported that a senior military officer told reporters that Israel “accepts” the casualty figures published by Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry. Although the IDF later clarified that the remark did not reflect an official assessment, the clarification arrived too late. The comment was translated, amplified and quickly treated by critics as confirmation that Israel itself now endorsed Hamas’s numbers.
The issue was not a single careless phrase. It was the exposure of a deeper and longstanding failure.
Since the start of the Gaza war, casualty figures have played an outsized role in shaping global perceptions of the conflict. Claims issued by Hamas authorities — often unverified, revised without explanation and lacking any distinction between civilians and combatants — have been cited repeatedly by governments, international organizations and major media outlets. Israel has consistently argued, not unreasonably, that figures supplied by a party to the conflict should be treated with skepticism.
But skepticism is not a substitute for evidence.
For much of the war, Israel failed to produce and publicly defend a systematic alternative. There was no standing Israeli casualty assessment presented to the world, no transparent methodology shared with allies or journalists and no sustained effort to distinguish between civilians and combatants killed in the fighting. Instead, Israel relied primarily on rebuttals and contextual explanations — important tools, but insufficient ones when standing alone.
In the information arena, the side that provides numbers, however imperfect, defines the debate. Silence does not communicate restraint; it creates a vacuum. And vacuums are quickly filled by the most readily available figures, regardless of their provenance.
That vacuum became impossible to ignore when a senior officer appeared — however inadvertently — to ratify Hamas’s figures without qualification or context, and without reference to Israel’s own estimates of Hamas fighters killed in battle or targeted strikes.
The resulting confusion was not merely a messaging failure. It was the predictable consequence of operating without a coherent, institutionalized system for addressing one of the war’s most scrutinized metrics.
This episode also highlighted a broader structural gap. For long stretches since October 2023, Israel has lacked a fully empowered National Information Directorate — the body created after the Second Lebanon War to coordinate messaging across the military, diplomatic and political spheres during national crises. According to reports, strategic communication has been fragmented, understaffed and too often treated as ancillary to military operations rather than integral to them.
None of this was unavoidable. Israel has demonstrated extraordinary analytical and intelligence capabilities in other domains. It routinely reconstructs battlefield events, tracks targets with precision and conducts complex post-strike assessments under difficult conditions. Developing a rigorous, evolving casualty database — drawing on operational reporting, open-source intelligence, satellite imagery and post-conflict analysis — was well within its reach.
Israel cannot control the claims of its adversaries. It can control whether it meets those claims with discipline, transparency and institutional seriousness — and whether it treats credibility as a core responsibility rather than an afterthought.
