A joint investigation by the Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Local Call has found that figures from a classified Israeli military intelligence database indicate that five out of six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza have been civilians.
As of May, 19 months into the war, Israeli intelligence officials listed 8,900 named fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as dead or “probably dead.”
At that time, 53,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli attacks, according to health authorities in Gaza, with fighters named in the Israeli military intelligence database accounting for just 17% of the total.
This indicates that 83% of the dead were civilians, an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare.
“That proportion of civilians among those killed would be unusually high, particularly as it has been going on for such a long time,” said Therése Pettersson from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, which tracks civilian casualties worldwide.
In global conflicts tracked by UCDP since 1989, civilians made up a greater proportion of the dead only in Srebenica, the Rwandan genocide, and during the Russian siege of Mariupol in 2022, Pettersson said.
Many genocide scholars, lawyers, and human rights activists, including Israeli academics and campaign groups, say Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, citing the mass killing of civilians and imposed starvation.
The Israeli military did not dispute the existence of the database or the data on Hamas and PIJ deaths when approached for comment.
However, when the Guardian asked for comment on the same data, a spokesperson said they had decided to “rephrase” their response, providing a brief statement that did not directly address questions about the military intelligence database.
The database names 47,653 Palestinians considered active in the military wings of Hamas and PIJ, based on apparent internal documents from the groups seized in Gaza.
Multiple intelligence sources familiar with the database said the military viewed it as the only authoritative tally of militant casualties.
Both databases may underestimate casualty numbers, with the Gaza ministry of health listing only people whose bodies have been recovered, and Israeli military intelligence not being aware of all militant deaths or new recruits.
Israeli politicians and generals have variously put the number of militants killed as high as 20,000 or claimed a civilian-to-combatant ratio as low as 1:1.
The higher totals cited by Israeli officials may include civilians with Hamas links or Palestinians with no Hamas connections.
Israel’s southern command allowed soldiers to report people killed in Gaza as militant casualties without identification or verification.
The scale of the killing was partly owing to the nature of the conflict, said Mary Kaldor, professor emeritus at the LSE.
International humanitarian law was developed to protect civilians in conventional wars, but in Gaza, Israel is fighting Hamas militants in densely populated cities, setting rules of engagement that allow its forces to kill large numbers of civilians in strikes on even low-ranking militants.
Neta Crawford, a professor of international relations at Oxford University, said Israeli tactics marked a “worrisome” abandonment of decades of practices developed 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”.