At Least 83% of Palestinians Killed in Israel’s Gaza Genocide Were Civilians: Israeli Military Data
Gaza (Quds News Network)- At least 83 percent of Palestinians killed in Israel’s genocide in Gaza were civilians, a new investigation has revealed, citing data from an internal Israeli intelligence database.
The investigation by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and the Guardian show that figures obtained from the classified database backs up the findings of several studies suggesting Israel’s bombardment of Gaza has killed civilians.
The Israeli military confirmed the existence of the database, which is managed by the Military Intelligence Directorate (known by the Hebrew acronym “Aman”).
The database includes a list of 47,653 names of Palestinians in Gaza whom Aman claims to be active in the military wings of Hamas and PIJ, according to sources.
The database designates 34,973 of the names as members of Hamas and 12,702 as members of Islamic Jihad. According to the data, which was obtained in May of this year, the Israeli military claimed it had killed around 8,900 resistance group members since October 7.
The overall death tolls published daily by the Palestinian Health Ministry (which Local Call revealed last year are considered reliable even by the Israeli military) do not distinguish between civilians and fighters. But taking the fighters casualty figures obtained from the internal Israeli military 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 fighters were counted in the death toll, that would mean over 83 percent of Palestinians killed in Gaza during the assault were civilians. If the probable killings are discounted and only the certain deaths included, the proportion of civilian deaths rises to more than 86 percent.
The Israeli army’s international spokesperson, Jonathan Conricus, told CNN that Israel had killed two civilians for every one fighter — 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.
+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.
“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.”
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.
Maj. Gen. (res.) Itzhak Brik, who served for many years as a commander in the Israeli military, said, “They created a measure [whereby] the more you killed, the more you succeeded, and as a result they lied about how many they killed,” describing the numbers presented by the Israeli military 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.”
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