Dear Tucker,
As men with public platforms, our responsibility is to tell the truth — whether one may or may not receive payment from middle eastern antisemitic propagandists. That standard applies to me. It applies to you too, Mr. Carlson.
For months, you and others have used the word "genocide" to describe what's happened in Gaza — not as a legal conclusion reached through evidence and process, but as settled, obvious fact, repeated with total confidence to millions of listeners. This week, the Gaza Health Ministry itself — the same Hamas-run body that has supplied you the death toll numbers driving that narrative from the beginning — released something it hadn't released before: a full breakdown of 2025 mortality, separating violent deaths from natural ones for the first time since the war began.
Look at what's actually in it.
Of 24,650 total deaths recorded in Gaza in 2025, 5,780 were non-violent — roughly the same non-violent death rate Gaza saw before the war even started, with a similar age distribution to 2022. That's not what population collapse looks like. Meanwhile, births in Gaza are now running around 6,000 a month, which means roughly 12 times more births than total deaths, violent and non-violent combined. Gaza's population, by this data, isn't being annihilated. It's growing, at one of the faster rates anywhere on earth right now.
And look at who the violent deaths are concentrated among. The ministry's own report shows deaths among 20- to 34-year-olds climbing to 28.8 percent of the total, and deaths under 20 rising to 28 percent — up from 17.4 percent in 2022. Translation: the casualty pattern looks like what you'd expect from a war concentrated among fighting-age men, not a campaign of indiscriminate civilian extermination targeting the defenseless and the very young disproportionately, which is the picture that's been painted on your show for two years running.
I want to be careful here, because precision matters and I'm asking you for exactly that. Genocide isn't just a body count. It's a specific legal finding requiring proof of intent to destroy a people, and this one data release doesn't settle that question by itself, in either direction. Other surveys, including a Lancet-published household study, have argued Gaza's actual death toll runs higher than the ministry's own running count, not lower. Serious people can look at a brutal, devastating war and disagree about where it lands on the spectrum between terrible and genocidal. That disagreement is legitimate.
What isn't legitimate is what you did: taking the most extreme available word, applying it with total certainty, night after night, to an audience that trusted you to have actually weighed the evidence first. This new breakdown — age distribution skewing toward combat-age men, a birth rate outpacing deaths twelve to one, natural mortality tracking pre-war norms — is precisely the kind of evidence that should have made you pause before reaching for the word you reached for. It didn't stop you. It should have.
President Trump and Ambassador Mike Huckabee have spent this war being mocked, in some of the same circles you run in, for refusing to adopt the genocide framing and for insisting Israel's campaign was aimed at Hamas, not at Gaza's population as a whole. If these numbers hold up to scrutiny — and they deserve real scrutiny, from real journalists, not just true believers on either side — then Trump and Huckabee owe no apology. The people who spent two years calling them liars, callous, or worse, for declining to use a word this data now complicates, owe one instead.First among them is you.
I'm not asking you to cheerlead for a war that has killed tens of thousands of people and devastated a civilian population, Hamas-ruled or not. That's not where this is going, and it shouldn't be. I'm asking you to apply the same skepticism to a politically convenient narrative that you'd demand of literally anything the State Department or the Pentagon ever told you to take on faith. You built a career on refusing to accept the establishment's word for things. This time, the establishment narrative was "genocide," repeated so often it became unquestionable in certain corners of the right as much as the left — and you helped make it that way. You did everything you could to ensure it.
The data showed up. It's sitting right there, released by the very source that's been feeding the narrative for two years. The least you owe your audience now is an honest second look, out loud, on the record.
To be clear, no genocide has occurred in Gaza. And anyone who continues to say so after these reports is just lying.
Please don’t let that continue to be you.