Catherine Philp, the Times journalist most known for her 2024 column trying to undermine ubiquitous evidence that Hamas used rape as a weapon of war against Israeli women girls and men, reported from Iran last year (before the protests), and published a Dec. 1, 2025 article titled “Families count the cost of war between Iran and Israel.”
The nearly 1,700 word piece details the toll the Twelve-Day War between Israel and Iran in 2025 had on Iranian civilians.
Yet, as we noted in a post at the time, her only sentence devoted to the war’s impact on Israelis got the Israeli casualty numbers wrong, falsely claiming that Iranian missiles killed “28 Israelis” while “injuring several dozen more”. The accurate death toll, as we wrote in a complaint to editors, was 32 killed and over 3,000 injured, not “dozens”. (Further, 31 of the 32 killed were civilians, a 31:1 civilian to combatant casualty ratio that Philp didn’t deem worthy of a mention.)
Philp, as we also noted in our complaint, also claimed – citing unnamed Iranian officials, that, in Iran, more than 1,000 people were killed, about 700 of whom were civilians”.
However, most outlets relied on casualty figures gathered by the U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) said 1,190 people had been killed, of whom 436 were civilians, 435 military and 319 were unidentified.
The Times rejected our complaint.
So, we appealed to IPSO, the independent regulator for the British print and digital news industry. After a nearly six-month long process, the regulator finally issued a ruling, partially upholding the part of our complaint regarding to the Times erroneous Israeli death and injury count from the war.
The relevant paragraph of the article now reads:
32 Israelis were killed and 3,343 taken to hospital, 23 in severe condition, 111 in moderate condition, 3,043 in mild condition, 144 suffering from anxiety and 22 undetermined.
The following editor’s note appears at the bottom of the article.
This note also appears on the outlet’s Corrections and Clarifications page.
