Military Casualties: Bias in Reporting in Asymmetric Armed Conflicts

The Gaza conflict has become a dominant topic in international news. Middle Eastern conflicts traditionally command significant global attention and often overshadow other world events. Casualty information in any conflict is crucial. It shapes public opinion, influences political decision-making, and informs legal proceedings, as evidenced by South Africa’s case against Israel at the International Court of Justice or by UN commission reports. Fifty Global Research Group has identified a pattern: despite frequent reporting on Gaza casualties in 2024, many leading English-language publications consistently omit the number of combatant casualties and fail to include them in overall casualty counts. The analysis highlights discrepancies between official casualty reports and media representation. This dataset contains a quantitative content analysis of 1,378 articles from 8 major English-language publications covering the Gaza conflict between February 1, 2024 and May 31, 2024. The data codes for variables including casualty counts, combatant/civilian distinction, and sources. Inter-coder reliability was assessed using a set-based Krippendorff-style alpha with Jaccard distance for multi-label coding across three independent coders. The primary estimate excluding the screening flag yielded α = 0.83, indicating high agreement. Sensitivity analyses produced comparable results.