As the number of Palestinians killed in the Israel-Hamas war continues to rise, social media users are falsely claiming that a Harvard University study has determined that hundreds of thousands in the Gaza Strip are also missing.
“Israel has ‘disappeared’ nearly 400,000 Palestinians in Gaza since 2023,” reads one X post that had been shared and liked more than 35,700 times as of Thursday. “Harvard has now confirmed what we’ve been screaming into a deaf world: This is a holocaust — and it’s still happening.”
But Harvard did not publish the report in question. Moreover, these claims misrepresent data from the report that was intended to address an entirely unrelated topic.
Here’s a closer look at the facts.
CLAIM: A Harvard University study found that nearly 400,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are missing as a result of the Israel-Hamas war.
THE FACTS: Harvard published no such study. This estimate misrepresents a map included in a report by a professor at Israel’s Ben Gurion University that shows the distance between new aid distribution compounds in Gaza and three main populations centers. Using spatial analysis, the report determined that these compounds are inadequate and also does not address how many people in Gaza are missing. It was published on the Harvard Dataverse, a repository managed by the university where researchers can share their work. Contributors do not need to be affiliated with Harvard and publish directly to the repository without approval from the...
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