By Yuval Abraham – +972 Magazine
Data from an internal Israeli intelligence database indicates that at least 83 percent of Palestinians killed in Israel’s onslaught on Gaza were civilians, an investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian can reveal.
Figures obtained from the classified database — which records the deaths of militants from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) — contradict by a huge margin the public statements of Israeli army and government officials throughout the war, which have generally claimed a 1:1 or 2:1 ratio of civilian to militant casualties. Instead, the classified data backs up the findings of several studies suggesting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has killed civilians at a rate with few parallels in modern warfare.
The Israeli army confirmed the existence of the database, which is managed by the Military Intelligence Directorate (known by the Hebrew acronym “Aman”). Multiple intelligence sources familiar with the database said the army views it as the only authoritative tally of militant casualty figures. In the words of one of them: “There’s no other place to check.”
The database includes a list of 47,653 names of Palestinians in Gaza whom Aman considers to be active in the military wings of Hamas and PIJ; according to the sources, the list is based on the groups’ own internal documents acquired by the army (which +972, Local Call, and the Guardian were unable to verify). The database designates 34,973 of the names as operatives of Hamas and 12,702 as operatives of Islamic Jihad (a small number are listed as active with both groups, but these are counted only once in the overall total).
According to the data, which was obtained in May of this year, the Israeli army believed it had killed around 8,900 operatives since October 7 — the deaths of 7,330 of whom were considered certain and 1,570 recorded as “probably dead.” The vast majority of them were junior, with the army suspecting it had killed 100-300 senior Hamas operatives out of a total of 750 named in the database.
A source familiar with the database explained that a specific piece of intelligence is attached to the name of every operative on the list whom the army is sure it killed, justifying that designation. +972, Local Call, and the Guardian obtained the numerical data from the database without the names or additional intelligence reports.
The overall death tolls published daily by the Gaza Health Ministry (which Local Call revealed last year are considered reliable even by the Israeli military) do not distinguish between civilians and militants. But taking the militant casualty figures obtained from the internal Israeli army database in May and lining them up against the Health Ministry’s total death toll, it is possible to calculate an approximate civilian casualty ratio for the war up until three months ago, when the death toll stood at 53,000.
Assuming that all of the certain and probable militant deaths were counted in the death toll, that would mean over 83 percent of Gaza’s dead were civilians. If the probable deaths are discounted and only the certain deaths included, the proportion of civilian deaths rises to more than 86 percent.
The intelligence sources explained that the total number of militants killed is likely higher than the number recorded in the internal database, since it does not include Hamas or PIJ operatives who were killed but could not be identified by name, Gazans who took part in fighting but were not officially members of Hamas or PIJ, nor political figures in Hamas such as mayors and government ministers whom Israel also considers legitimate targets (in violation of international law).
However, that does not necessarily mean the ratio of civilian casualties is lower than calculated above; in fact, it could be even higher. Recent studies have suggested the Health Ministry’s death toll — which currently stands at around 62,000 — is also likely a significant undercount of the total number of casualties from Israel’s onslaught, possibly by as many as several tens of thousands.
Fudging the numbers
Since early on in the war, Israeli officials have sought to dismiss accusations of wanton killing in Gaza as the Palestinian death toll rapidly stacked up. In December 2023, with the death toll already at 16,000, the Israeli army’s international spokesperson, Jonathan Conricus, told CNN that Israel had killed two civilians for every one militant — a ratio he described as “tremendously positive.” In May 2024, with the death toll at 35,000, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asserted that the ratio was in fact closer to 1:1, a claim he repeated in September of the same year.
The specific number of militants Israel claims to have killed since October 7 has fluctuated seemingly without any logic. In November 2023, a senior security official implied to Israel’s Ynet news site that Israel had already killed over 10,000 militants. In an official military assessment presented to the government the following month, this number dropped to 7,860.
Mysterious jumps and drops in militant casualty numbers continued into 2024. In February of that year, the IDF Spokesperson claimed that Israel had killed 13,000 Hamas operatives, but a week later, the army reported a lower figure of 12,000. By August 2024, the army declared that it had killed 17,000 Hamas and PIJ operatives — a number that shrank again two months later to 14,000 killed “with high probability.” In November 2024, Netanyahu put the number “close to 20,000.”
In his retirement speech in January of this year, outgoing Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi reiterated that Israel had killed 20,000 militants in Gaza since October 7. And in June, the right-wing Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University cited military sources claiming that the number of militant casualties in Gaza stood at 23,000.
Intelligence sources told +972, Local Call, and the Guardian that some of these claims likely arose from an older, inaccurate database maintained by the army’s Southern Command which estimated late last year — without a list of names — that around 17,000 militants had been killed. “Those numbers are tall tales of the Southern Command,” one intelligence source said.
The Southern Command’s exaggerated reports were likely based on statements from commanders in the field whose subordinates regularly misreported civilian casualties as militants.
For example, +972 and Local Call recently revealed a case in which a battalion stationed in Rafah killed around 100 Palestinians and recorded them all as “terrorists,” yet an officer in the battalion testified that in all but two cases the victims had been unarmed. An investigation by Haaretz last year similarly found that only 10 out of 200 “terrorists” the IDF Spokesperson stated that the 252nd Division had killed in the Netzarim Corridor could be verified as Hamas operatives.
In April 2024, the right-wing daily Israel Hayom reported that several members of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee had questioned the reliability of the militant casualty figures presented to them by the army. After examining the army’s own data, the committee members found that the real number was much lower, and that the army had inflated the number of militant casualties “in order to create a 2:1 ratio” between civilian and militant deaths.
“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 accompanied forces on the ground told +972, Local Call, and the Guardian. “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.”
An official security source confirmed that before the intelligence database was in use, the army’s militant casualty figures — such as the number 17,000 — were just an “estimate” largely based on officer testimonies. “The method of counting changed,” the source said. “At the start of the war, [we relied] on commanders saying ‘I killed five terrorists.’”
The intelligence database, in contrast, is based on a person-by-person analysis and is the only number the army can “commit to” with a high degree of certainty, the source explained — even while assuming that it could be an undercount. The source added that the numbers political leaders say publicly are not coordinated with the available intelligence data.
Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada told +972, Local Call, and the Guardian that the numbers in the intelligence database line up closely with figures quoted to him by Hamas and PIJ officials: in December 2024, they estimated that Israel had killed around 6,500 of their members, including from the political wing.
‘They lie non-stop’
Soon after October 7, Yossi Sariel, then-commander of the army’s elite signals intelligence squad, Unit 8200, began sharing a daily update with his subordinates showing the number of Hamas and PIJ operatives killed in Gaza. The graph, according to three sources familiar with it, was called the “war dashboard” and was presented by Sariel as a measure of the army’s success.
“He put a lot of emphasis on ‘data, data, data,’” one of Sariel’s subordinates explained. “[There was a] need to measure everything in quantitative terms. To show efficiency. To try to make everything smarter and more technological.” Another source said it was like “a football game, officers sitting around watching the numbers go up on the dashboard.” (Yossi Sariel declined our request for comment, referring us to the IDF Spokesperson.)
Maj. Gen. (res.) Itzhak Brik, who served for many years as a commander in the Israeli army and later as Ombudsman for Soldiers’ Complaints, explained how this outlook fueled a culture of lying. “They created a measure [whereby] the more you killed, the more you succeeded, and as a result they lied about how many they killed,” he said, describing the numbers presented by the IDF Spokesperson as “one of the most serious bluffs” in Israel’s history.
“They lie non-stop — both the military echelon and the political echelon,” Brik added. “In every raid, the IDF Spokesperson’s announcements said: ‘Hundreds of terrorists were killed,’” he continued. “It’s true that hundreds were killed, but they weren’t terrorists. There is absolutely no connection between the numbers they announce and what is actually happening.”
While speaking to soldiers whose job was to examine and identify the bodies of people the army kills in Gaza, he said they told him: “Everyone the army says it killed, most of them are [civilians]. Period.”
Both Hamas and PIJ have been severely weakened by Israel’s offensive over the past two years, which has killed most of the groups’ senior command and significantly damaged their military infrastructure. Still, the data obtained from the intelligence database shows that Israel has killed only one-fifth of those it considers to be militants. American intelligence estimates suggest Hamas has recruited 15,000 operatives during the war — twice as many as Israel killed.
But widespread genocidal rhetoric from Israel’s leadership and senior military command since the very beginning of the war suggests an intention to harm all Palestinians in Gaza, not just militants. On the morning of October 7, then-Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi told his wife, “Gaza will be destroyed,” she revealed on a recent podcast. And in a leaked recording from recent months aired last week on Israel’s Channel 12, the then-director of Aman, Aharon Haliva, said “50 Palestinians must die” for every Israeli killed on October 7, adding, “it doesn’t matter now if they are children.”
International law does not assert what constitutes an “acceptable” civilian casualty ratio, but rather examines each attack according to the principle of “proportionality.” In this regard, as early as November 2023, +972 and Local Call revealed that the Israeli army had significantly loosened restrictions on civilian casualties after October 7, authorizing the killing of more than 100 Palestinian civilians when attempting to assassinate one senior Hamas commander, and up to 20 for junior operatives.
The result of this firing policy and the broader culture of revenge following October 7 is a civilian casualty ratio in Gaza that is extremely high for modern warfare, experts say, even compared with conflicts notorious for indiscriminate killing such as the Syrian and Sudanese civil wars.
“That proportion 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 (UCDP), which collects data on civilian casualties worldwide. She added that it is possible to find similar civilian casualty ratios when singling out a particular city or battle within a broader conflict, but “very rarely” when looking at a war as a whole.
In global conflicts tracked by UCDP since 1989, civilians made up a greater proportion of the dead only in the genocides in Srebrenica (1992-95) and Rwanda (1994) and during Russia’s three-month siege of Mariupol (2022), Pettersson said.
Only when there is a ceasefire will it be possible to precisely calculate the number of civilian and militant casualties in Gaza. But the intelligence database indicates that the civilian casualty ratio is vastly higher than the figures Israel has presented to the world for almost two years.
+972 and Local Call initially approached the IDF Spokesperson for comment at the end of July, and received a statement that did not dispute our findings: “Throughout the war, comprehensive intelligence assessments were conducted on the number of terrorists eliminated in the Gaza Strip. The count is a complex intelligence process that is based on the situation of the forces on the ground and intelligence information, while cross-referencing a wide range of intelligence sources.”
Three weeks later, after the Guardian’s request for comment on the same data, the army said it wanted to “rephrase” its response and rejected our findings without further explanation: “The figures presented in the article are incorrect and do not reflect the data available in the IDF’s systems. Throughout the war, continuous intelligence assessments are conducted regarding the number of terrorists eliminated in the Gaza Strip, based on BDA [bomb damage assessment] methodologies and cross-checking efforts from various sources … [including] documents originating from terrorist organizations in the Strip.”
A spokesperson did not immediately respond when asked why the military had given different responses to questions about a single set of data.