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Early this month, Shayndi Raice, CBS News’s foreign editor, cut a mention of the number of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza while working on a piece about the anniversary of the Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. Earlier this week, in a virtual meeting of the foreign bureau, Raice delivered what Status—which obtained audio of the meeting—called “an uninterrupted fifteen-minute tirade” defending her decision and warning that “insubordination” is “legal grounds for firing.” When Holly Williams, the longtime foreign correspondent who reported the segment, pushed back, she and Raice engaged in a back-and-forth in which Raice referred to the death toll in Gaza—which is now above seventy-four thousand—as a “magic number.” Mentioning the number in the piece, she said, was “posturing” that was “not saving Palestinians.” 

A person at CBS News familiar with the meeting told me that Raice was not denying the death toll: her use of the phrase “magic number” was her way of saying that CBS News needs to be “objective in regards to all sides.” The person continued, “It’s more than just this ‘magic number’ of seventy-four thousand. We need to contextualize it. What are the Israeli deaths? What is the distinction between civilians and combatants?” (Raice did not respond to a request for comment.)

The contentious decision recalls suspicions that David Ellison, who took over CBS in 2025, was motivated by his own support of Israel when he installed Bari Weiss, an advocate for the country, as CBS News’s editor in chief. Weiss in turn hired Raice, a longtime Wall Street Journal editor, to replace Claire Day, the previous foreign editor, whom Weiss reportedly deemed too critical of Israel.

The current flare-up over the death toll is now new: the validity of the number, which is reported by the Gaza Health Ministry, has been under attack since the very outset of Israel’s assault on Gaza. Speaking weeks after the October 7 attacks, Joe Biden said he had “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.” A provision in a bill that the House of Representatives passed in the summer of 2024 explicitly barred the State Department from citing the Gaza Health Ministry. Israel’s Foreign Ministry has called the Gaza Health Ministry’s numbers “misleading and unreliable.” Capturing a sentiment common among defenders of Israel’s military tactics, David Adesnik, the vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington think tank, called the numbers “completely implausible.” 

Then, this January, a senior Israel Defense Forces official essentially confirmed the accuracy of the Gaza Health Ministry’s accounting while speaking on background with several Israeli outlets. “In the war, we estimate that about seventy thousand Gazans were killed, not including the missing,” the official told Ynet, one of the outlets. “The work of classifying between terrorists and uninvolved civilians is being carried out these days.” The IDF quickly tried to walk it back. The “details published do not reflect official IDF data,” a spokesperson posted on X. “Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels.” The IDF has yet to release the promised data. 

When I reached out to Adesnik, he defended his past critique of the Gaza Health Ministry’s methodology. “At the time I wrote that, I think it was on fully solid ground,” he told me, before acknowledging that it was tough to spin his past statements. “No question, right, if you look at my statement in isolation there, you’d say, ‘Oh, Adesnik was completely wrong.’”

Nir Hasson, a Haaretz reporter, believes that the international media gives “too much credit to the IDF. Since the beginning of the war, they didn’t give us any good information. Just copy-and-paste announcements about terrorists hiding in civilian populations.”

Oren Persico—a staff writer at The Seventh Eye, an Israeli media criticism publication—has observed that, fairly soon after October 7, the death toll in Gaza began to disappear from his country’s TV news reports. “As the numbers grew, they vanished,” Persico said. “The number wasn’t there. Not even to discredit it. It was just ignored. In Israel, it’s a nonissue. Nobody wants to think or speak about dead Palestinians. Not while they’re being killed and not after.”

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