Iran protests: Are viral atrocity numbers part of a march to war?

Some have pegged the death toll in the tens of thousands, but without context or verification, we must remain sceptical

Hala Jaber  

Newspapers at a kiosk in Tehran are pictured on 27 January 2026, one with a headline reading: 'Iran is ready for a big response', amid speculation about a US attack (Atta Kenare/AFP)

When people casually throw around figures like “36,500 killed in 48 hours”, “43,000 dead” or “50,000 murdered since 2 January” in Iran’s recent protests, without providing context or verification, you don’t just get misinformation. You get consequences.

These are not neutral statistics, but weapons. They form a deliberate pretext, laundered through sensational headlines, echoed by opportunistic politicians, swallowed whole by outraged audiences, and then deployed to rationalise escalation and bloodshed.

You have watched this pattern unfold before: the fabricated story about Kuwaiti incubator babies that fuelled the Gulf War; the nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that launched the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq; and the false claims of beheaded infants that spread widely after the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel.

Every claim was breathlessly reported, relentlessly amplified, weaponised to manufacture consent, and then quietly retracted or debunked long after the wars were underway and the damage irreversible.

Lies are deliberately framed as urgent moral imperatives to demand immediate action. Conflicts are then green-lit on waves of public fury. The truth is eventually unearthed, sometimes years later, long after the graves could have been stopped from being filled.

Disinformation requires no sophistication. It needs only raw emotion, endless repetition, and a temporary inability to verify, in order to outpace scrutiny.

So demand answers now: where is the independent, on-the-ground evidence from Iran? Who is rigorously verifying these extraordinary figures? Who benefits most if outrage eclipses reason?

Disinformation doesn’t need to persuade you fully. It needs only to inflame you faster than facts can catch up. By the time verification emerges, the missiles are already in flight.

Every viral atrocity statistic must be treated with the fierce scepticism history demands, because the price of blind belief is always paid in human lives.

Figures amplified

The highest casualty estimates circulating widely - putting the death toll from Iran’s recent protests in the 30,000-40,000 range - are promoted primarily by exile-based advocacy organisations, not neutral observers on the ground. Chief among them is the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), based in New York.

The CHRI’s board chair is Minky Worden, an American writer long associated with Human Rights Watch and high-profile campaigns against China.

The Iranian people deserve truth, not inflated pretexts that history shows can lead to worse outcomes

Similar data has been amplified by outlets such as Iran International (funded in part by sources linked to Saudi interests), the US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, and Iran Human Rights in Norway. 

On Monday, HRANA published an article that puts the confirmed death toll at just over 6,000 while noting that other reported deaths are still under investigation

These organisations rely on activist networks inside Iran, but they are operating in the midst of an information war, where exaggeration can boost visibility, funding and political pressure. Their work is valuable for highlighting abuses, but it is advocacy, not forensic verification. 

Many people have asked why I demand rigour for Iran, while “accepting Gaza figures uncritically”. This is a false equivalence, and it misunderstands both the call for scepticism and the radically different information environments.

Gaza has been one of the most documented conflicts in history. For more than two years, thousands of Palestinian and international journalists, doctors and citizens have provided real-time footage, geolocated videos, supplied hospital records, and gathered the names, ages and photos of victims.

Satellite imagery has shown entire neighbourhoods erased, and on-the-ground access, while extremely limited, has enabled United Nations agencies and humanitarian groups to observe the crisis firsthand. Even the figures from Gaza’s health ministry, contested by Israel and its allies, have been corroborated in independent analyses by Airwars and the Un, and via satellite monitoring. The broad scale of destruction and loss of life is not in serious dispute.

Willful blindness

Iran today is the opposite: a near-total internet blackout for weeks, no international media or humanitarian access, and no free flow of verifiable evidence. 

What is happening in Iran is brutal and tragic, but extraordinary claims of up to 50,000 deaths are emerging almost exclusively from exile networks and unverified “leaked” documents that have neither been publicly shared nor independently authenticated by any major outlet. There are no morgue photos or named lists at that scale, and no satellite evidence of mass graves. Rumour and advocacy are filling the void.

Scepticism is not a denial of suffering; it is proportionate to the context. From an evidentiary perspective, a filmed, accessible war cannot be treated the same as a blacked-out state. To do so is not consistent but rather willful blindness to reality.

And as we have already seen, disinformation cuts both ways. An Israeli woman recently discovered her photo misused by Israel’s Channel 12, falsely claiming she was one of four Jews killed during the Iran protests. She is alive, has never been to Iran, and lives in an Israeli settlement. False stories travel fast in chaos. Rigorous verification is the only antidote.

I have spent two years watching Gaza, documenting every hour of its destruction in real time: bodies, names, families, hospitals, neighbourhoods. We saw the bombs fall. We saw the mangled corpses. The evidence was never hidden.

To now see unverified claims that the death toll in Iran over a period of days is equivalent to the killings in Gaza over the past two years is not only dishonest; it is grotesque. Weaponising Gaza’s genocide to inflate unverified numbers, trigger a war, and push regime change is offensive.

The truth from Gaza shifted public opinion and galvanised the world - so now others want the same sympathy, even if they have to borrow trauma and distort reality to get it.

I will not play along. I will not pretend the motives are pure. I will not let Gaza’s genocide be used as marketing for anyone else’s war.

The Iranian people deserve truth, not inflated pretexts that history shows can lead to worse outcomes. Real solidarity means demanding evidence, not outrage on demand.

Hala Jaber is a six-time award-winning journalist and former senior correspondent for The Sunday Times, with two decades of reporting across the Middle East, Africa, and Europe. She is the author of two books, has served as a media consultant for the UN's International Organization for Migration (IOM), and now focuses on independent investigative and geopolitical journalism.