After Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger’s rebuttal speech to President Trump’s State of the Union address, PBS News Hour’s foreign affairs correspondent Nick Schifrin nitpicked President Trump’s claim about the carnage in Iran.
Nick Schifrin: ….the president accused Iran of working to build missiles that will soon reach the United States. That's from a defense intelligence assessment. And also the death toll, 32,000 killed in those protests, much higher than most activists believe, or at least have said publicly. Combined, clearly, Amna, trying to paint the regime in Iran as something that he could target if he decides, and, of course, that big military buildup will give him that opportunity in the days and weeks to come.
There’s an ideological point to casting doubt on the estimated number of peaceful protesters killed by the Iranian regime, given that Trump may be building up U.S. forces in the region to strike against Iran.
While PBS quibbles over the American president’s numbers, there’s one national body whose death toll figures Schifrin and his colleagues seem to trust intimately: PBS has been all too eager to validate anti-Israel propaganda fatality figures, often originating from the Gaza Health Ministry -- numbers approved by the terrorist group Hamas that runs Gaza.
Schifrin on August 15, 2024, under the online headline “Gazan families shattered as war's death toll crosses 40,000”: "on average, every day, for 314 days, more than 100 Gazans have died, often before they had the chance to live."
Schifrin on October 4, 2024 came close to full disclosure but didn’t make it: “Gaza's Health Ministry, which answers to Hamas, says 140,000, or more than 5 percent of the Gaza Strip, have been killed or wounded, 900 families wiped off entirely from the civil registry, and in more than 1,300 cases, only one family member survived….But all the numbers may yet prove an undercount.”
On August 22, 2025 he took dictation from a report by the anti-Israel United Nations: “Since the war began, the U.N. says more than 17,000 Gazan children have been killed, 33,000 wounded.”
Seemingly every PBS reporter or anchor took Hamas’s propaganda at face value. Co-anchor Amna Nawaz introduced an October 8, 2025 Schifrin report this way: “Today, we examine the toll on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Palestinian health authorities say more than 67,000 people have been killed. More than 40,000 children have lost one or both parents.”
But when President Trump gives a plausible figure for the murder count of the hostile Iranian regime, estimates are suddenly dubious?
