Data from a confidential Israeli military intelligence database shows that five of the six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza were civilians.
This was reported by the Guardian, emphasizing that this is an extreme level of massacre that can rarely be found in recent decades of warfare.
By May, 19 months into the war, Israeli intelligence officials had listed 8.900 named Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fighters as dead or “probably dead,” according to a joint investigation by The Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language website Local Call.
At that point, according to Gaza health authorities, 53.000 Palestinians, including both fighters and civilians, had been killed in Israeli attacks. Fighters listed in the Israeli military intelligence database made up only 17 percent of the total, indicating that 83 percent of the dead were civilians.
This apparent ratio of civilians to combatants among the victims is exceptionally high for modern warfare, even compared to conflicts known for indiscriminate killing, including the Syrian and Sudanese civil wars, the British newspaper said.
"That proportion of civilians among the dead would be unusually high, especially considering it has been going on for so long," she said. Terese Peterson from the Uppsala Conflict Monitoring Program (UCDP), which tracks civilian casualties around the world. “If you single out a particular city or battle in another conflict, you might find similar rates, but very rarely when it comes to the overall ratio.”
In global conflicts, which UCDP has monitored since 1989, civilians accounted for a higher proportion of the dead only in Srebrenica, although not in the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina as a whole, then in the genocide in Rwanda and during the Russian siege of Mariupol in 2022, Peterson said.
Many genocide experts, lawyers and human rights activists, including Israeli academics and activist groups, claim that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, citing the mass killing of civilians and the imposed famine.
The Israeli military did not deny the existence of the database or the casualty figures for Hamas and PIJ when contacted for comment by Local Call and +972 Magazine. When The Guardian asked for comment on the same data, a spokesperson said they had decided to “rephrase” their response. A brief statement sent to The Guardian did not directly address questions about the military intelligence database.
It states that “the figures presented in the article are incorrect,” without specifying which data the Israeli military disputes. It also states that the figures “do not reflect the data available in the IDF’s systems,” without specifying which systems are in question.
The spokesman did not respond to a question about why the military gave different answers to inquiries regarding the same data set.
The database lists the names of 47.653 Palestinians believed to be active in the military wings of Hamas and the PIJ. It is based on what appears to be internal documents from the groups seized in Gaza, which the Guardian has not seen or verified.
Multiple intelligence sources familiar with the database said the military considers it the only authoritative list of militant deaths.
The military also considers the Gaza health ministry figures reliable, Local Call reported, and the former head of military intelligence recently appeared to quote them himself, although Israeli politicians regularly dismiss them as propaganda.
The Guardian writes that both databases may underestimate the number of victims. The Gaza Health Ministry lists only those whose bodies have been recovered, not the thousands buried under rubble. Israeli military intelligence is not aware of all militant deaths or all new recruits. Yet these are the databases used by the Israeli military to plan for war.
Israeli politicians and generals have cited varying figures, claiming that up to 20.000 militants were killed, or that the ratio of civilians to fighters was 1:1.
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