According to a confidential database of Israeli military intelligence, five out of six Palestinians killed in Gaza by the Israel defense forces (FDI) were civilians. An extreme death rate that had hardly been seen in the wars of the last decades.
According to a joint investigation of The Guardian newspaperPalestinian-Israelí +972 Magazine magazine and the media in local Hebrew Call, Israeli intelligence services had 8,900 combatants of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic jihad as dead or “probably dead.”
In that month of May, 19 months after the start of the war, the total number of Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks amounted to 53,000 people, according to the health authorities of Gaza. That means that the combatants identified by the Israeli military intelligence database represented only 17% of the total, and that 83% of the dead were civilians.
That number of dead civilians in relation to the total represents an extremely high percentage for a modern war, even when compared to conflicts where indiscriminate killings were carried out, such as the civil or Sudan civil wars.
“That proportion of civilians among the deceased would be unusually high, especially considering that it is something that has been happening for a long time,” says Theése Pettersson, of the conflict data program of the University of Uppsala (UCDP, for its acronym in English), which records the number of civil victims in war conflicts around the world. “Similar rates can be found looking only at a city, or a concrete battle of another conflict, but is usually very rare.”
8,900 combatants identified in the Israeli database as dead or “probably dead” as of May 2025
The UCDP follows up on world conflicts since 1989. According to Pettersson, they only found a higher rate of dead civilians during the genocide of Rwanda (1994), during the Russian siege of Mariupol (2022), and during the Matanzas de Srebernica (1993 -1995), but not in the Bosnian war as a whole.
According to many scholars of genocide, lawyers and human rights activists, among which there are also Israeli academics and activist groups, Israel is committing genocide in Gaza for the large -scale slaughter of civilians and for the hunger to which they are subjecting them.
When local Call and +972 Magazine contacted the Israeli army, he did not question the existence of the confidential database or the data on the deaths of members of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic jihad.
When The Guardian asked him for statements about this data, a spokesman for the Israeli armed forces said they had decided to “reformulate” their response. In a brief statement sent to the British newspaper, it was eluded directly to the questions based on the Military Intelligence Service and it was added that “the figures presented in the article are incorrect”, without specifying what the questioned data were. The figures “do not reflect the data available in the IDF systems,” said the statement, without detailing what systems he was referring to.
A spokesman did not respond immediately after being questioned by the different versions that the army had given the questions about the same data set.
In the database it is said that there are 47,653 the active Palestinians in the military branches of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic jihad. Apparently, the database was created from internal documents of these groups seized in Gaza. None of these documents have been seen or verified by The Guardian.
Multiple members of military intelligence services said the Israeli army considered the database as the only reliable count for the casualties of members of the militant groups.
As reported by local Call, the Army also considers the counting of the Ministry of Health of Gaza. Although Israeli politicians often despise the figures by calling them propaganda, the former head of Israeli military intelligence seemed to cite it recently.
52,928: Total Dead count, according to the Ministry of Health of Gaza, as of May 14, 2025
It is possible that the two databases will underestimate the number of victims. The Gaza Ministry of Health only includes people whose bodies have been recovered, but not to the thousands of bodies that lie under the rubble. Israeli military intelligence has no record of all deaths of militants or all new recruits. In spite of this, it is those databases that the Israeli officers use to plan the war.
Israeli politicians and generals have estimated that the number of dead militants amounts to 20,000 and that the proportion between civilians and combatants is 1 to 1. In those higher figures, Israeli authorities could be including civilians who had some link with Hamas, as government administrators or as police officers, despite the fact that international law prohibits going against people who do not participate in fighting.
It is likely that their figures also include Palestinians without any link with Hamas. The Southern Command of Israel allowed soldiers to report as casualties of militants dead people in Gaza who were not identified or verified as such. “People are promoted to the terrorist rank after dead,” said a person who is part of intelligence services and accompanied Israeli soldiers on the ground. “If it were for what the Brigade said, it would have come to the conclusion that we kill 200% of Hamas's operations in the area.”
According to the retired general Itzhak Brik, Israeli soldiers in service know that politicians are inflating the number of victims of Hamas. Brik advised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the beginning of the war and is now one of his most staunch critics. “There is absolutely no connection between the figures that announce and what is really happening is a great deception,” he said.
Brik was director in the Israel military academies and maintains contact with officers in service. He says that on one occasion he met soldiers from a unit in charge of identifying Palestinians dead in Gaza, and that they told him that “the majority” were civilians.
According to the confidential database, almost 40,000 people classified by the Army as militants are still alive, although much of Gaza has been reduced to ruins and tens of thousands of people have lost their lives.
According to the Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada, in their public statements the Israeli authorities also exaggerate the number of deaths of militants of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic jihad. Members of these groups told Shehada that the estimation of the dead for December 2024 was 6,500 people, including the military and policies of the two groups. “Israel expands the limits to be able to define all the people of Gaza as members of Hamas,” said Shehada. “Everything is to kill at the time for strategic purposes that have nothing to do with putting an end to a threat.”
The proportion of civil victims among the dead may have increased even more since May, after the Israeli decision to replace humanitarian and UN organizations that fed the Palestinians during the war. Israeli forces have killed hundreds of people while they went to food to the distribution centers, located in military exclusion areas.
Hungry and confined in only 20% of the territory, survivors have now received the order to leave the north of the strip, while Israel prepares for another land operation whose consequences for the civilian population will probably be catastrophic.
According to Mary Kaldor, Emerita Professor of the London School of Economics and director of the Conflict Research Program, the magnitude of the massacre is partly due to the nature of the conflict. International Humanitarian Law developed as a form of protection of civilians in conventional wars, when countries deploy their soldiers to face on the battlefield. A model that largely remains that of war in Ukraine.
In Gaza, Israel is struggling against Hamas militants in densely populated cities and the combat standards that it has set allow their soldiers to kill a large number of civilians in attacks against low -ranking militants. “More than battles, in Gaza we are talking about a selective murder campaign, and are carried out without taking into account civilians,” said Kaldor, who is also the author of New Warsan influential book on the form of war after the fall of the Berlin wall.
According to Kaldor, the proportion of civilians among Gaza's dead is comparable to that of the last wars of Sudan, Yemen, Uganda and Syria, where much of the violence went against them. “These are wars in which armed groups tend to avoid the battle, do not seek to fight one against the other, they want to control the territory and do so killing civilians,” he said. “Perhaps that is the same with Israel, and (that of Gaza) is a war model that consists of dominating the population and controlling the territory, perhaps the objective was always a forced displacement.”
The Israel government argues that war is a self -defense measure after the attacks led by Hamas on October 7, 2023, during which 1,200 people died. But the usual rhetoric of the Israeli political and army leaders refers to a genocide. Aharon Haliva, the general responsible for military intelligence when the war began, has said that for each person killed in Israel on October 7, 50 Palestinians should die, and “now it doesn't matter if they are children.” In recordings broadcast this month on Israel's television, he is heard saying that Gaza's large scale killing was “necessary” as a “message for future generations” of Palestinians (Haliva presented his resignation in April 2024).
Many Israeli soldiers have testified to the way in which all Palestinians of Gaza are considered as a goal. For Rafah this year, one of them spoke of a 'line' that his unit had imagined in the sand, shooting at anyone who crossed it. On two occasions, children. And in one, to a woman. They shot to kill, not to warn. “No one pointed to the legs,” he said.
According to Neta Crawford, Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford and co -founder of the Costs of War project (war costs), the Israeli proceeding marked a “worrying” abandonment of civil protection practices that had been in force decades.
In the seventies, the public rejection that aroused the massacres of the Americans in Vietnam forced Western armies to change the way to fight. Although the new policies will apply imperfectly, said Crawford, they reflected an attempt to limit damage to the civilian population that no longer seems part of Israel's military calculation.
“They say that to estimate and mitigate civilians are using the same procedures as countries as the United States,” said Crawford. “But if we look at those casualties, and their practices with bombings and the destruction of civil infrastructure, it is clear that it is not so.”
Translation of Francisco de Zárate
