The Lancet and the price of academic Judeophobia

Just a few days ago, two researchers—demographer Sergio DellaPergola, professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and data analyst Mark Zlochin—once again placed The Lancet in the eye of the storm. They published in The Lancet Global Health a letter that, backed by data, debunks one of the most cited studies in this conflict—a study that estimated 75,200 violent deaths in Gaza and even accused the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health itself of having underestimated the actual figure by 35%. This is not an isolated incident. It is the latest chapter in a pattern that has been repeating for years, and one that is becoming increasingly difficult to explain away as mere “methodological errors.”

What is remarkable about this case is that, as has happened with other organizations controlled by terrorists, the figures from the (once) prestigious academic journal went beyond Hamas’s propaganda—a biased source that does not distinguish between combatants and civilians in its tally and has been singled out repeatedly for inconsistencies in its numbers. That starting point, in fact, is what makes what follows so serious: The Lancet, an institution that presents itself as the gold standard of scientific review, did not merely revise that already-questioned source upwards with additional caution, but rather far exceeded it, using a methodology that we now know was tainted by a handful of survey teams producing impossible results. Even starting with a source we all knew was biased, a top-tier scientific journal managed to produce something even worse—and it took months, and the intervention of external researchers, to admit it. That is the standard that must be applied to everything that follows.

The original study, led by economist Michael Spagat along with a team of co-authors, followed a simple logic—at least on paper: survey 2,000 households in Gaza, count how many violent deaths those families reported and then extrapolate that number to the entire population of the Strip. But DellaPergola and Zlochin, after examining the raw data published by the authors themselves, found something that should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the journal’s track record: two of the survey teams (identified as "Gaza9" and "Gaza3") produced results that were statistically impossible to reconcile with the rest of the sample. As reported by The Jewish Chronicle, the Gaza9 team conducted only 8% of the interviews but accounted for a quarter of all recorded violent deaths, with an average household size much smaller than that of Gaza as a whole and an abnormally low proportion of minors. Gaza3 exhibited the same pattern, even more pronounced.

When these two teams are excluded, the figure drops to about 59,200 deaths, a number that is much closer to the Gaza Ministry of Health’s own estimate. Put another way: the "finding" that so many media outlets repeated as evidence of a massive cover-up depends, to a large extent, on two field teams whose data were not even flagged as outliers during data collection, even though the study’s design itself—which included satellite tracking—was intended to precisely detect that kind of deviation. Professor Michael Spagat himself, the study’s lead author, acknowledged to the press that excluding those teams "reduces the central estimate to approximately 59,200," though he stood by his overall conclusions. This response does not answer the underlying question: How did this material come to be published in the first place?

Anyone familiar with the recent history of The Lancet knows that this is not an isolated incident. In 2014, an investigation by NGO Monitor revealed that several of the journal’s regular contributors on Israel-related topics, including the founder of a medical NGO frequently cited by the publication, had privately disseminated antisemitic libel regarding alleged Jewish control of banking and the media. The then-editor, Richard Horton, apologized publicly in an Israeli hospital, promising to put an end to the use of the journal as a platform for political attacks against Israel. The promise did not last long.

In July 2024, The Lancet published, not as a peer-reviewed study, but as simple letter to the editor titled "Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential," that up to 186,000 people may have died in Gaza—an estimate without a solid empirical basis that was nonetheless cited by U.N. rapporteurs and amplified by much of the international press as if it had the journal’s scientific backing. The journal itself clarified that this type of "correspondence" does not typically undergo peer review, and the lead author, Rasha Khatib, a researcher at Birzeit University, had a history of social media posts in which she described Palestinian violence as "inevitable"—a fact that none of the media outlets that amplified the 186,000 figure mentioned when citing it. Months later, in 2025, the publication featured a petition from organizations such as the Health Advisory Council of Jewish Voice for Peace and the People’s Health Movement to expel the Israeli Medical Association from the World Medical Association, even though the article itself in The Lancet did not include a single statement in which those organizations condemned Hamas.

What emerges, time after time, is a journal that undermines its own prestige whenever it can amplify narratives hostile to Israel. What happened to The Lancet with the death toll is not an isolated incident for that journal: it is the same mechanism that was repeated, almost to the letter, in two other areas of the academic, humanitarian and media ecosystem, and looking at them together helps us understand that these are not isolated errors but rather an alarming pattern.

This is the case with the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), whose database of journalists killed in Gaza was cited throughout the war as evidence that Israel was deliberately targeting the press. However, it was found that the list of "journalists" included Islamic terrorists, as corroborated by the obituaries themselves released by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. On June 25, the CPJ admitted that it would review its entire list after confirming that it had classified several combatants as journalists.

Another example is Doctors Without Borders. The organization’s former secretary general, Alain Destexhe—who worked as a doctor with the NGO in the 1980s and later led it in the 1990s—publicly accused his successors in Gaza of becoming "accomplices of Hamas." Destexhe maintains that the organization, which in his day defined itself as neutral and impartial, today uncritically parrots the figures and narrative of the Gaza Ministry of Health, and points out in particular that Doctors Without Borders never corrected or retracted its immediate condemnation of the explosion at Al-Ahli in 2023—which it initially attributed to Israel—even though it was later established that the explosion was caused by a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket that veered off course.

This parallel not only confirms how prestigious institutions were used as apologists for terrorist organizations and their actions, but also how those institutions abandoned their scientific or professional neutrality after being co-opted by the wave of Judeophobia sweeping the West.

Tel Aviv University’s annual report on antisemitism, published in April, documented that in 2025, 20 Jews were killed in four separate attacks in different parts of the world—the highest figure in three decades. Organizations such as the Antisemitism Research Center have recorded a steady increase in antisemitic propaganda throughout 2026, and Eurobarometer surveys show that a growing percentage of Europeans—47%, 11 points higher than in 2018—perceive that antisemitism has increased in their country over the past five years.

In this climate, a world-renowned medical journal, a committee for the protection of journalists or a prestigious humanitarian NGO are not neutral actors when they decide, systematically, to lend their name to inflated figures in an effort to support Islamist propaganda. The Lancet itself seemed to admit this, albeit obliquely, in a January 2026 editorial in which it warned of the risks of emotional urgency supplanting empirical rigor, explicitly mentioning the alarming rise in antisemitism worldwide as part of the context in which these debates are taking place. It is a hypocritical admission, as the journal is capable of naming the problem in its opinion pages but fails to apply to itself the standard it demands.

What the Lancet case (and those of the CPJ and Doctors Without Borders) reveals is the willingness of institutions that presented themselves as guardians of neutrality to bend their own standards to suit their ideology. A medical journal, a committee for the protection of journalists, a humanitarian organization: three bastions that were supposed to resist political pressure ended up serving it. It is yet another loss for the West, which is watching as its most prestigious institutions—those that were supposed to act as a check on fanaticism, not its vehicle—cease to be trustworthy, corroded from within by a prejudice that no longer needs to hide behind science to assert itself.