LONDON: As many as 83 percent of Palestinian casualties in Gaza could be civilians, classified Israeli data suggests.
A joint investigation by The Guardian, Hebrew-language Local Call and the Israeli-Palestinian +972 Magazine found that Israeli officials had been able to name 8,900 people killed or “probably dead” in Gaza as members of Hamas and Islamic Jihad as of May this year.
At the time, the total death toll from the war was believed to be at least 53,000 people according to local authorities, meaning that just 17 percent of those identified were combatants.
The database used to assess combatant casualty figures is based on documents seized by the Israeli military in Gaza.
In total, 47,653 Palestinians are identified as being members of Hamas or Islamic Jihad, meaning that a little under 40,000 are believed to be still alive
The Israeli military also believes Gaza’s health authorities’ data on casualties to be reliable, Local Call reported, though these figures are likely to be an underestimate as thousands of people remain buried under rubble, and only bodies positively identified are counted.
Therese Pettersson of the Uppsala Conflict Data Program told The Guardian: “That proportion of civilians among those killed would be unusually high, particularly as it has been going on for such a long time.
“If you single out a particular city or battle in another conflict, you could find similar rates, but very rarely overall.”
She added that since 1989, UCDP had only identified the siege of Srebrenica, the Rwandan genocide and the 2022 siege of Mariupol as conflicts that saw civilian casualties outnumber combatants.
Previously, Israeli politicians have cited a far more balanced casualty rate, with some suggesting it could even be equal between combatants and civilians. Others have suggested in the past that 20,000 people killed in Gaza were militants.
This could be on account of collating members of the enclave’s civilian infrastructure or people with loose ties to fighters — such as police and politicians — with membership of militant groups, but it is also believed that civilians without ties to Islamic Jihad or Hamas are included in those tallies.
One source who spent time with the Israeli military in Gaza told The Guardian that “people are promoted to the rank of terrorist after their death,” adding: “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.”
Retired Gen. Itzhak Brik, a former commander of Israel’s military colleges, told The Guardian that he had been told by former colleagues the numbers were inflated.
“There is absolutely no connection between the numbers that are announced and what is actually happening,” he said. “It is just one big bluff.”
Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada told the newspaper that by last December, the number of dead Hamas and Islamic Jihad members from their own data was around 6,500.
“Israel expands the boundaries so they can define every single person in Gaza as Hamas,” he said. “All of it is killing in the moment for tactical purposes that have nothing to do with extinguishing a threat.”
Moreover, the number of dead, and the disparity between civilian and combatant deaths, may have increased since May, with hunger now believed to be widespread due to a lack of food in Gaza, and an increase in the number of civilian deaths at aid distribution sites in the enclave.
The impending Israeli ground offensive in the north of Gaza will likely further widen this gap. So far, in excess of 62,000 people are believed to have been killed in the enclave.
Mary Kaldor, professor of global governance at the London School of Economics, said the nature of the Gaza conflict is also causing a disproportionate number of civilian casualties.
“In Gaza we are talking about a campaign of targeted assassinations, really, rather than battles, and they are carried out with no concern for civilians,” she added.
Comparing Gaza to recent conflicts in Syria, Yemen and Sudan, she said: “These are wars where the armed groups tend to avoid battle. They don’t want to fight each other, they want to control territory and they do that by killing civilians.
“Maybe that is the same with Israel, and this is a model of war (in Gaza) that is about dominating a population and controlling land. Maybe the objective always was forced displacement.”
Neta Crawford, professor of international relations at Oxford University, said tactics used by Israel mark a “worrisome” departure from previously established norms to protect civilians.
“They say they’re using the same kinds of procedures for civilian casualty estimation and mitigation as states like the United States. But if you look at these casualty rates, and their practices with the bombing and the destruction of civilian infrastructure, it is clear that they are not,” she said.
In a statement to The Guardian, the Israeli military said the figures published in the investigation “are incorrect.”
