Israel has been bombing Gaza for nearly two years, killing more than 62,000 people, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza says, but the real number is likely much higher.
Israel claims it is targeting fighters from Hamas, not civilians, but a leaked military report reveals a different story.
The report says 83 percent of the Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza were civilians.
How many people has Israel killed? And what did Israel say about killing them? Why is this latest report so important? Here’s what we know:
What did the report say?
The report was based on an internal Israeli intelligence database that records the deaths of fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
The database estimated that Israel has killed 8,900 fighters throughout its war on Gaza, according to data from May. That is an estimate because, of that number, 1,570 names are listed as “probably dead”.
The 8,900 figure is out of 47,653 people whom the database lists as active fighters – 34,973 Hamas, and 12,702 PIJ.
Let’s put that against the total number of people Israel has killed in Gaza, which was 53,000 in May, according to +972 Magazine. That means 16.8 percent of the people Israel killed or “probably” killed were fighters.
How many Palestinians did Israel kill in Gaza?
According to the Health Ministry’s most recent numbers, Israel has killed at least 62,686 people in its 22-month offensive on the enclave and wounded 157,951. Thousands more remain missing.
Studies have found the number of casualties is far higher. A peer-reviewed study published in The Lancet medical journal said the actual number killed in the first nine months of the war may have been 40 percent higher than reported.
Many of the bodies of those killed by Israel are incinerated during bomb or missile strikes, left rotting in areas occupied by the Israeli military or remain crushed under the rubble of destroyed buildings with rescuers unable to reach them.
The high civilian death toll makes Israel’s assault on Gaza City, which it said has already begun, even more frightening.
What does Israel say about killing civilians?
Israel has repeatedly claimed that it does all it can to limit civilian casualties and regularly disputes the Health Ministry’s numbers.
In September, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bragged that Israel had the “lowest ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in the history of modern urban warfare”, claiming the army was killing one civilian for every fighter it killed.
But this was months after Local Call and +972 reported on an Israeli army AI targeting system codenamed Lavender, which, according to sources in Israeli intelligence, marked tens of thousands of people in Gaza as potential fighters and eligible to be killed.
According to two of the sources, the army decided during the early stages of the war that it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians for every junior Hamas operative earmarked for death by Lavender.
And members of Netanyahu’s far-right coalition have shown little to no concern for Palestinian lives when addressing their domestic audience.
Speaking on Israeli radio last month, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said: “The government is rushing to erase Gaza, and thank God we are erasing this evil. All of Gaza will be Jewish.”
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told a settlement conference in May: “Gaza will be entirely destroyed,” and what remains of its people would be exiled to a narrow strip of land in the south.
Do media reports on Israel’s war on Gaza suggest Israel is limiting civilian casualties?
They do not.
Throughout the conflict, Al Jazeera has reported on numerous accounts of civilians being massacred while seeking food, the dropping of heavy ordnance on displacement camps, the systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system and the deliberate killing of its medics as well as the use of starvation as a weapon of war.
“I think anyone who has closely observed the genocide in Gaza can’t have been surprised by the report,” Orly Noy of Local Call told Al Jazeera.
“Everything we knew about the war suggested that the mass killing, destruction and brutality there was indiscriminate. That is the nature of this war. This is its logic. Israel has created a mechanism for genocide that it’s deploying indiscriminately across Gaza.”
How has the Israeli army responded?
When approached by Local Call and +972, the Israeli military confirmed the existence of the database on which the report was based.
However, when approached by The Guardian, the Israeli authorities said they had decided to “rephrase” their initial response.
A brief statement sent to the paper did not directly respond to any questions about the data but said the “figures presented in the article are incorrect” without detailing which parts of the article Israel was disputing.
It also claimed that the numbers quoted by the media outlets “do not reflect the data available in the [Israeli military]’s systems” without detailing which systems it was referring to.
What are the Israeli army’s numbers?
They have varied wildly during the war.
In November 2023, a senior Israeli security official suggested that Israel had killed 20,000 people in Gaza, most of them fighters.
The following month, that number shrank to 7,860 fighters. In February 2024, the Israeli army said it killed about 13,000 fighters, then reduced the figure by 1,000 a week later.
In August 2024 it claimed to have killed 17,000 fighters but changed it to 14,000 two months later.
“We are reporting a lot of Hamas operatives killed, but I think most of the people we report as dead are not really Hamas operatives,” an intelligence source who had accompanied Israeli forces into Gaza told +972.
“People are promoted to the rank of terrorist after their death. 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.”
Ironically, the one consistent set of figures that the Israeli army uses is that produced by the Palestinian Health Ministry.
Do other wars have similar levels of civilian casualties?
Not consistently throughout the course of a war.
About 83 percent “of civilians among those killed would be unusually high, particularly as it has been going on for such a long time”, said Therese Pettersson from the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme, which tracks civilian casualties worldwide.
The post Did Israel know over 80 percent of those it killed in Gaza were civilians? appeared first on Al Jazeera.
