Israeli military intelligence data indicates that five out of six Palestinians killed by Israel’s army are civilians, according to a joint investigation.
A report published by +972 Magazine, its Hebrew-language sister outlet Local Call and the Guardian found that as of May this year, a classified Israeli military intelligence database listed 8,900 named Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fighters as dead or “probably dead”.
At that time, the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli forces was around 53,000, according to the Gaza health ministry.
That would indicate that 17 percent of the total deaths were of fighters, while the other 83 percent were civilian deaths.
When asked about these figures by +972 Magazine and Local Call, the Israeli military did not dispute the existence of such a database, or the number of Hamas and PIJ deaths.
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However, when later approached by the Guardian on the same data, a spokesperson said the military had opted to “rephrase” its response.
The spokesperson said “figures presented in the article are incorrect”, without stating what data it disputed. They added that the numbers “do not reflect the data available” in the military’s “systems”.
The military did not respond to why it gave different responses to different publications about the same data.
The data named 47,653 Palestinians who Israeli intelligence officials considered to be active members of the armed wings of Hamas and PIJ. The information is based on alleged internal documents seized from these groups in Gaza, not seen or verified by the Guardian, +972 Magazine or Local Call.
It lists 34,973 names of Hamas operatives, and 12,702 PIJ operatives.
Of the 8,900 killed figure, it considered 7,330 to be certain, while 1,570 were “probably dead”.
The majority of these names were junior figures, while between 100-300 senior operatives were suspected of being killed, from a total of 750 senior names in the dataset.
Civilian death toll higher
Local Call has previously reported that the Israeli military considers the death toll from the Palestinian health ministry in Gaza to be reliable. A former head of military intelligence appeared to cite the toll recently.
The investigation notes that the percentage of civilian deaths may in fact be higher.
‘People are promoted to the rank of terrorist after their death’
– Israeli intelligence source
This is partly due to the fact that the health ministry death toll likely underestimates the number of those killed by attacks, as it does not include thousands buried under the rubble.
In addition, it is probable that Israeli intelligence officials may have included civilians with alleged connections to Hamas in their figures for combatants. This includes police officers or people involved in administrative positions in Gaza – who under international law are considered non-combatants.
Israeli officials may also have included Palestinians with no Hamas or PIJ connection at all, the report stated.
One example given is that Israel’s southern command allows soldiers to report deaths as militant casualties with no verification.
“People are promoted to the rank of terrorist after their death,” one intelligence source who accompanied Israeli forces on the ground said.
“If I had listened to the brigade, I would have come to the conclusion that we had killed 200 percent of Hamas operatives in the area.”
In addition, the ratio of civilian deaths is likely to have increased since the May figures, given that was the month that the Israel- and US-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began operating in place of international aid groups.
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Close to 2,000 Palestinians have been killed while waiting to collect aid since then, according to Gaza health officials.
The 83 percent rate of civilian death is extremely high for modern warfare, the report states, even compared to conflicts in which indiscriminate killings took place such as recent civil wars in Syria and Sudan.
According to research by the Guardian, using information from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program since 1989, only the genocide in Srebrenica, the Rwandan genocide and the Russian siege of Mariupol in Ukraine saw higher proportions of civilian deaths.
Leading human rights organisations have reached the conclusion that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
In December 2024, Amnesty International became the first major organisation to conclude that Israel had committed genocide during its war on Gaza, followed by New York-based Human Rights Watch and Israel’s B’Tselem.
Francesca Albanese, the UN’s top expert on Palestine, authored two reports last year suggesting that genocide was taking place in Gaza.
Last month, renowned professor of Holocaust and genocide studies Omer Bartov called Israel’s war on Gaza an “inescapable” case of genocide, joining a chorus of prominent Israeli and Jewish scholars coming to the same conclusion.
