Over the weekend, The Guardian, and local Israeli outlets +972, and Mekomit published reports claiming an internal IDF document from May admits that 83% of casualties in Gaza during the Iron Swords war were civilians.
According to the joint revelation, Military Intelligence maintains a classified database containing names of 47,653 operatives in the military wings of major organizations in the Gaza Strip (34,973 in Hamas and 12,702 in Islamic Jihad). According to the same database, Israel eliminated only about 8,900 of the people on this list in the past two years (about 7,330 with certainty and another 1,570 with high probability). In other words, out of approximately 53,000 people killed according to Hamas from October 7 until May of this year, fewer than 9,000, or 17%, were combatants. This means the ratio of civilians to terrorists killed in the war is approximately 5:1 – more than two and a half times the ratio Israel presents.
However, as Salo Aizenberg from Honest Reporting analyzes, this conclusion is ridiculous for five reasons:
A. Hamas provided the total casualty number it relies on and has already been proven to include people who died in natural circumstances and those killed by Hamas itself, making it inflated from the start.
B. The list includes, as mentioned, operatives in the military wing of each organization. Both have political wings that "only" give instructions to the military wing, and during the war, Israel has killed quite a few people from that wing, who, according to the count by the three media outlets, are considered innocent civilians for all purposes.
C. As mentioned, the list includes Hamas and Islamic Jihad, which are the two largest terrorist organizations in the Gaza Strip – but certainly not the only ones. Operatives from other organizations, such as the Salah al-Din Brigades, the Mujahideen, and the Popular Front, are also considered civilians according to this calculation. Even Yuval Avraham, who wrote both Israeli versions of the article in English and Hebrew, admits this part.
D. Since the list is based on documents obtained previously, it does not include new recruits from the course of the war itself, whom we already managed to kill before we obtained the official documents defining them as organization members.
E. Since this is a name-based list, only identified casualties are removed from it. During the war, thousands of strikes were carried out where the IDF could not identify every casualty itself. According to the name-based method, every unconfirmed casualty is a civilian, even if he does appear on the list.
An IDF spokesperson responded to the report, stating that "the numbers presented in the article are wrong and do not reflect the information available in IDF systems. During the war, ongoing intelligence assessments are conducted regarding the number of terrorists eliminated in the Gaza Strip, based on combat damage assessment methods and efforts to cross-reference various sources. One of the cross-referenced information sources is documents originating from terrorist organizations in the Strip. The IDF is a professional army, operating according to operational methods accepted by many armies around the world. The claims presented in the article are not only wrong, but also reflect a lack of military understanding."
