Catherine Philp, the anti-Israel Times journalist most known for her 2024 column trying to undermine ubiquitous evidence that Hamas used rape as a weapon of war, has been reporting from Iran recently, and published a report at the outlet on Dec. 1 titled “Families count the cost of war between Iran and Israel.”
The nearly 1,700 word piece details the toll the war with Israel had on Iranian civilians.
Yet, in her only sentence devoted to the war’s impact on Israelis, Philp gets the Israeli casualty numbers wrong when she claims Iranian missiles killed “28 Israelis” while “injuring several dozen more”. The accurate death toll is 32 killed, all but one of whom were civilians, and over 3,000 injured.
Concerning the Iranian casualty count, she writes that “according to Tehran, more than 1,000 people were killed, about 700 of whom were civilians“, a civilian death toll we’ve never seen quoted by any source, including official numbers released by the Iranian state-controlled media.
For instance, Associated Press (AP) reported on June 30, 2025 that, though the state-run IRNA news agency did not give a breakdown between military and civilian casualties, it reported that 935 people were killed, which includes 38 children and 132 women.
AP also noted that the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists said 1,190 people had been killed “according to data collected by the agency’s network of medical and local volunteers.” Of those, it said 436 were civilians, 435 military and 319 weren’t identified. The organisation, AP added, had consistently reported higher casualties than the official reports from Iran.
Another respected source compiled data determining that at least 1,082 individuals were killed in Iran during the war, which includes 182 civilians and 900 members of the military, security forces, and technical personnel affiliated with the Islamic Republic’s military institutions. Among the civilian casualties, it adds, at least 68 women and 45 children were identified.
We’ve contacted Times editors asking them to correct Philps’ erroneous Israeli casualty numbers, and to substantiate her claim regarding the Iranian civilian death toll.
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