KCPQ-TV (Channel 13), the Fox affiliate in Seattle, is facing criticism from a media watchdog group after a broadcast segment described the Palestinian death toll in the Israel–Hamas war as “hundreds of thousands,” a figure massively inflated from public reporting.
The Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) said the statement aired during Fox 13’s Feb. 13 “Washington News Wrap” segment. In the broadcast, reporter Matthew Smith discussed a former Amazon employee who criticized the company’s involvement in Project Nimbus, a reported cloud-computing contract between Amazon and the Israeli government. Smith said the employee spoke out about Amazon “impacting the violence in Gaza,” adding that the conflict had led to “hundreds of thousands of deaths.”
Publicly cited death toll figures are significantly lower. Fox News, Fox 13’s parent company, reported on Jan. 31, 2026, that the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health “currently reports 71,667 deaths,” while noting that Israeli officials have said the estimate does not include bodies believed to be buried under rubble.
During the same Fox 13 segment, former Amazon employee Ahmed Shahrour said he was fired after speaking out against the company and alleged that Project Nimbus was “used to commit a genocide that has wiped out nearly half the population in Gaza.” The United Nations estimates the Gaza Strip’s population at approximately 2.1 million.
CAMERA said the broadcast neither challenged nor contextualized Shahrour’s claim. The group argued that the statements overstated the death toll and amplified disputed allegations without clarification.
The segment aired while anti-Israel activists and pundits continue to falsely claim there is an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Fox News reported on Feb. 14 that military experts and researchers reject the genocide allegation and cited commentary from Danny Orbach, a military historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who said the claim is not supported under the legal definition of genocide.
🧵Hamas' new fatality data (Jan 7, 2026) shows a record level of excess adult male fatalities. Over 23,000 more men (18-59) killed than women. Teen male deaths are also ~2,000 higher than female, meaning teen combatants. Note the figures also include natural deaths in Gaza. 1/ pic.twitter.com/UUYwmKQ2tr
— Aizenberg (@Aizenberg55) January 12, 2026
Hamas has a long record of manipulating casualty data by minimizing the number of combatants killed and presenting almost all deaths as civilian. According to Honest Reporting, Hamas’s figure includes every death in Gaza, including those of natural causes. Before the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre, data from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) show that Gaza records on average about 6,000 natural deaths and 800 infant deaths annually. For the first eighteen months following the massacre, Hamas claimed that every name on its lists was a casualty of war. Only in April 2025 did the terror organization quietly admit otherwise.
Additionally, many deaths in Gaza are a result of Hamas’ own violence against its own population, including executions of alleged collaborators and looters, clashes around aid convoys, friendly fire, and misfired rockets falling inside Gaza. 10-20 percent of the 10,000+ rockets launched from Gaza into Israel since Oct 7, 2023, misfired, many falling in populated areas.
According to the IDF, approximately 25,000 Hamas terrorists have been killed since the war began, which includes terrorists killed during the Oct. 7 massacre, 20,000 killed inside Gaza through early 2025, and several thousand more since. President Donald Trump confirmed the number.
The analysis indicates a total closer to 61,125 of war-related deaths due to IDF action: approximately 25,000 combatants and 36,125 civilians, plus the deaths caused by Hamas actions against its own population. However, many of the civilian casualties have been attributed to Hamas using human shields and intentionally embedding where civilians are present because the terror group views civilian deaths as beneficial to its goals.
According to the analysis, a civilian-to-combatant ratio of 1.45 to 1 is very low by the standards of modern urban warfare in Iraq or Afghanistan, and shows that the IDF conducted a highly targeted campaign against Hamas terrorists.
