One of the biggest stories of the year sits on a shelf, unreported and unremarked upon in serious ways. For those willing to look closely, this omission indicates a larger and increasingly dangerous breakdown of truth-seeking in public life.

On 31 July 2025, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) issued a press release in which it announced that “at least 1,373 Palestinians have been killed while seeking food” since 27 May. “Most of these killings,” the statement added, “were committed by the Israeli military.” Subsequent UN “situation updates” during early September have increased that number to 2,146. If the UN is telling the truth, this would constitute the largest military atrocity committed by a liberal democracy in at least half a century, by a wide margin. For context, according to official tallies, US troops murdered between 347 and 504 civilians during the 1968 My Lai Massacre in Vietnam. There are, however, good reasons to believe that the UN’s figures are wrong.

The exquisite precision of “1,373” and “2,146” notwithstanding, the OHCHR has dispensed entirely with evidence and sources for its Gaza claims. Instead, it hung its entire late-July press release on the word “reportedly,” and offered no external attribution whatsoever in its subsequent updates. That was deemed sufficient by far too many people in today’s information environment, especially after the claims are laundered through credulous “news media.” Not only clickbait sites and wire services but also legacy media such as the BBC and the New York Times promoted the UN’s precise numbers this summer. Other news sources hedged with “more than 1,000” killed, while influencers on social media simply printed the bumper stickers.

This is the kind of information and these are the supposedly reliable sources from which AI chatbots collect their internet scrapings when they are asked, “How many Gazans have been killed by Israel trying to get to food aid sites since May?” Try it yourself.

Missing from any of these information sources, however, are photographs or videos of the killings, documentary records of any kind, or any independent confirmation of the UN’s claims besides a handful of (unverified) first-person anecdotes. In a typical example, USA Today and its local-news affiliates linked a “gallery” of 22 photographs to a 4 August wire story about aid-site killings in Gaza, not one of which includes a dead person, let alone evidence of a larger atrocity. The slide-show makes clear that cameras do exist in Gaza, but we are invited to believe that not a single phone or other image-recording device documented even one of 1,400 killings that by then had allegedly taken place near crowded food-delivery locations and access routes over the course of more than two months. 

In late July, a self-described “eyewitness” finally emerged—a former US Army green beret named Anthony Aguilar, who had been dismissed as a security contractor for the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. News organisations (including the BBC and PBS), websites, and numerous podcasts carried interviews with Aguilar in which he was described as a “whistleblower” and permitted to allege “barbaric” tactics and “war crimes” on the part of US security contractors and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). Nobody seemed to mind that the accompanying footage from Aguilar’s body camera showed not a single killing. Aguilar’s most heart-rending story—in which he claimed to have been kissed by a grateful Palestinian boy whose killing he then witnessed—was later found to have been fabricated in every detail. The boy was never shot and remains alive. At the time of writing—four days after Aguilar’s claims had been fully discredited in early September—neither the BBC nor PBS had amended their earlier coverage.

As consumers of this kind of evidence-free “content,” ordinary citizens can be divided into roughly four categories, depending on the topic at hand. Some of us accept unverified information out of naked bias. In the case of the Gaza food-aid story, millions of our fellow citizens in the West require no evidence to embrace the familiar and uncomplicated fable of Israeli (or Jewish) evil. Indeed, facts or even nuances are highly inconvenient for these consumers, who then must take the trouble to cancel or wilfully ignore the purveyors of such evidence.

Others of us respond with what might be called “learned ignorance.” This fast-growing group has simply never been taught how to distinguish between fact and fiction, let alone fact and claim. On the contrary. Their education includes fewer and fewer examples of objective inquiry, the scientific method, and the principle of innocence until proven guilty, but many classroom hours of propaganda and critical theorising that condemns the disfavoured without a hearing. In today’s post-truth information environment, the learned ignorant are society’s babes in the woods.

A third group of us go along to get along. We conform—or appear to conform—via our social-media “likes,” our cocktail-party commiserations, our bumper stickers, or simply our silence. This is how we avoid the professional or social consequences of perceived dissent from the prevailing narratives of powerful in-groups. It is one thing to set your drunken uncle straight at a family dinner, but it is quite another to question the chosen dogma of your CEO, your pastor, your university dean, or a vaunted international organisation on the issue of the moment. 

The final group of us is simply exhausted and fully expects the discussion to move on regardless of what we do. Where Gaza is concerned, defenders of Israel instinctively discount the atrocity claims, while many other observers are broadly numb to narrative-driven stories designed to outrage one tribe or the other without evidence on almost every issue of the day. They recall that in the last few years, millions of their fellow Americans—of all backgrounds and strata—have been led to believe not only that their principal ally in the Middle East committed mass murder of aid-seeking civilians but also that a Ukrainian president enriched himself on US foreign aid intended to fight Russia, that multiple elections were stolen, and that swarms of unidentified flying objects invaded New Jersey. And that is a greatly truncated list.

The exhausted cohort is correct to believe that things will eventually move on, as they did in all of those examples. Regarding the supposed food-site killings in Gaza, Israel’s government appears to have adopted this stance as well. It has offered little beyond curt denials. Some vastly smaller number of innocent Gazans may in fact have been injured or killed in the early-summer chaos around aid delivery. But nuance has few purveyors or consumers right now, which removes the incentive for transparency even among the unjustly accused. Why prolong the indignities?

A Crisis of Aid and Information

Distinguishing fact from fiction is crucial to understanding the situation in Gaza and holding the correct parties accountable.

QuilletteAndrew Fox

Already, the OHCHR’s drumbeat on aid-site killings has grown fainter in recent weeks. In August, the larger Gaza narrative moved briefly on to allegations of generalised famine, and then to a hastily organised resolution by the misleadingly named “International Association of Genocide Scholars,” accusing Israel of that same crime.

The implications of our rotating, reality-optional information bazaar for policy- and decision-making in international security need urgent attention. In a recent scenario-based analysis, I list three kinds of challenge of ascending severity affecting our information space:

• Competing Realities, in which bespoke worldviews clash along tribal-political lines.
• Catastrophic Disconnect, in which even top-level decision-making is detached from verified reality.
• Virtual Retreat, in which more and more people self-segregate into curated online worlds where kinetic reality seems hardly to matter.

Competing Realities describes our existing digital environment, as “news” organisations of all types provide tribal fan service and pervasive algorithms feed us more of what we already believe.

Catastrophic Disconnect is in rehearsal, as Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools spoon-feed unverified online consensus to students, experts, and decision-makers alike, hobbling their discernment and truth-seeking skills to dangerous effect. Professional intelligence services and other truth-seeking gatekeepers were seen as a protective barrier until recently. But who now observes current Western governments, regardless of party, and concludes that their leaders have a firm grip on objective reality?

Virtual Retreat may be just a matter of time as the underlying technologies—including immersive social media, AI companionship, gaming, and ubiquitous hoods and visors—increasingly allow us to live in places much nicer than the world’s frightening or humdrum reality. In a virtual universe, one can just as easily “live” on Mars and pledge allegiance to mythical sand creatures as live in the United States and pledge allegiance to a creaking constitutional republic.

International relations under these scenarios may undergo profound transformations. Consider the risks when US Congressional votes on aid, decisions about military shipments, and discussions of regional strategy take place in a fog of unsubstantiated allegations and outright lies enveloping millions of Americans. Consider the difficulty of pushing back on the UN and other “authorities” once their claims have gone unchallenged for so long. And consider how these problems will worsen as nearly perfect deepfakes proliferate, and foreign adversaries refine their already substantial targeting of our beliefs and opinions. 

Disproportionate responsibility for this growing detachment from reality falls on the practice of journalism, or lack thereof. Whether it’s a once-in-a-generation military atrocity, a brazen smear by the OHCHR and its allies, or a nuanced example of war’s tragedies, the Gaza food-aid story is not only a big story but also a reportable story. Yet it is not being reported. Truth is not being sought by those who were, until recently, entrusted to do so. Gaza is challenging terrain for journalists, but Geneva is not. Reporters could begin by asking the United Nations OHCHR to open its books and provide a detailed justification for what it meant by “reportedly.”

Disappearing journalism is not the only problem. Academic experts increasingly avert their eyes as well, either because they have succumbed to alternative realities themselves or simply because they fear the professional and social risks of offering basic reality checks on tribalised topics. An expert might observe, for example, that even the worst militaries learn from mistakes and adjust, which makes the rising curve of supposed butchery by the highly competent IDF around aid sites farcically implausible. The UN’s estimate of the killings rose from 798 dead on 11 July to 1,373 on 31 July to 2,146 on 4 September, as already noted.

Meanwhile, primary and secondary schools—and, of course, colleges and universities as well, though it is almost too late then—need to do better than reinforcing “learned ignorance.” The tribe that dominates education may believe that it has gained too much from the status quo to reverse course, but history shows that a sheep-like population can turn very quickly on its shepherds. The rise of video deepfakes and sophisticated foreign-influence campaigns may make the stampede away from truth even worse, but the barn doors are already wide open. We’re a society primed to believe everything—and nothing. That is a big story, too.