Gaza Horror: IDF Admits 83% of Those Killed Were Civilians, But the True Total May Be 95%

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On August 21, the day before the UN’s mechanism for assessing famine, the IPC (the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification) confirmed, in a devastating report, that the most severe famine conditions are occurring in the Gaza Strip, the Israel-based +972 Magazine and Hebrew Call, along with the Guardian, simultaneously published their own independent analyses of a revelatory document that they had received in May — an official assessment by the Israeli military, contained in a database compiled by Israel’s Military Intelligence Directorate, of how many Palestinian resistance fighters they believe the IDF had killed since their military assault on the Gaza Strip began following the deadly military incursion into southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

As Yuval Abraham explained for +972 Magazine, “Multiple intelligence sources familiar with the database said the army views it as the only authoritative tally of militant casualty figures.” As one of them said, “There’s no other place to check.”

The figure — of around 8,900 fighters — is revelatory, in the first instance, because it is consistently lower than figures regularly touted by Israeli government spokespeople, which have included, in November 2024, Benjamin Netanyahu putting the number “close to 20,000”, the outgoing Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi stating in his retirement speech in January this year that Israel “had killed 20,000 militants in Gaza since October 7”, and a report in June by the right-wing Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, which “cited military sources claiming that the number of militant casualties in Gaza stood at 23,000.”

Intelligence sources cited by Abraham explained that “some of these claims likely arose from an older, inaccurate database maintained by the army’s Southern Command which estimated late last year — without a list of names — that around 17,000 militants had been killed.” One intelligence source referred to those numbers as “tall tales of the Southern Command”, with Abraham adding that their “exaggerated reports were likely based on statements from commanders in the field whose subordinates regularly misreported civilian casualties as militants.”

Last month, to cite just one example, a +972 and Local Call investigation “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.” Similarly, an investigation by Haaretz last year “found that only 10 out of 200 ‘terrorists’ the IDF Spokesperson stated that the 252nd Division had killed in the Netzarim Corridor could be verified as Hamas operatives.”

Crucially, the Israeli database is also revelatory because it shows that, according to the most authoritative Israel military analysis, over 83% of those killed since October 7 were civilians, which Emma Graham-Harrison, writing for the Guardian with Yuval Abraham, accurately called “an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare”, “even compared with conflicts notorious for indiscriminate killing, including the Syrian and Sudanese civil wars.”

These revelations, of civilian to military casualties at a ratio of nearly 5:1, eviscerate official Israeli claims, made at various times, that the ratio was 2:1, or, as Netanyahu claimed in May 2024 and repeated in September, “closer to 1:1.”

Doubts about the accuracy of the military death toll

Even with the figure of 8,900 fighters killed, doubts remain about its accuracy. According to the database, the Military Intelligence Directorate (known in Israel as Aman) assessed that there were 47,653 named Palestinians in Gaza who were considered to be “active in the military wings” of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, “based on the groups’ own internal documents acquired by the army (which +972, Local Call, and the Guardian were unable to verify).” The database describes 34,973 of these people as Hamas operatives, and 12,702 as operatives of Islamic Jihad.

Of the 8,900, however, only 7,330 of the deaths “were considered certain” in the database, with the other 1,570 recorded as “probably dead.” With the uncertain deaths removed, the civilian death toll rises to over 86% of the total number of Palestinians killed.

Additionally, Yuval Abraham noted that the “vast majority” of those killed were only junior operatives, with “the army suspecting” that it had only managed to kill between 100 and 300 senior Hamas operatives out of a total of 750 named in the database.

Abraham noted that the intelligence sources that he spoke to sought to claim that the total number of militants killed “is likely higher than the number recorded in the internal database”, because “it does not include Hamas or PIJ operatives who were killed but could not be identified by name”, or other Palestinians in Gaza “who took part in fighting but were not officially members of Hamas or PIJ”, or even “political figures in Hamas such as mayors and government ministers whom Israel also considers legitimate targets”, even though, as Abraham added, that kind of deadly subterfuge — seeking to describe civilians working for an administrative government as militants — is “in violation of international law.”

By touching on this particular point, however, the intelligence officials only further undermined their suggestion that the military death toll was an undercount, because, as +972 Magazine established in a number of investigations into the sweeping AI programs used by Israel to target Hamas operatives, which I summarized here, “low-level” operatives who “don’t really mean anything”, according to an Israeli official, were being targeted, as were entire families under the “Where’s Daddy?” program that deliberately targeted operatives in their homes.

Another official explained that, when one of the programs was set up, the programmers “used the term ‘Hamas operative’ loosely, so that ‘employees of the Hamas-run Internal Security Ministry, whom he does not consider to be militants’, were included.”

In addition, further evidence of the sweeping generalization of the “Hamas” label was publicly declared in May this year by Bezalel Smotrich, one of two far-right ministers in Netanyahu’s coalition government, who proudly stated, “The IDF is finally conducting a campaign against the civilian rule of Hamas and not just focusing on the military infrastructure. We are eliminating ministers, officials, money changers, and elements of the economic and governmental system of Hamas.”

Moreover, as has been startlingly apparent throughout the genocide, Israel has deliberately smeared both journalists and doctors as being “Hamas operatives”, targeting and killing over 270 Palestinian journalists to date, after seeking to tarnish the reputations of many of them with demonstrable lies, and also abducting, torturing and killing doctors and other medical staff on the basis of equally spurious assertions.

Even more devastating condemnation of the official figures of the numbers of militants allegedly killed came from Maj. Gen. (Res.) Itzhak Brik, who served for many years as a commander in the Israeli army and later as the Ombudsman for Soldiers’ Complaints. Commenting on a data collection system initiated after October 7 by Yossi Sariel, the commander of the army’s elite signals intelligence squad, Unit 8200, which was criticized for being obsessed solely with numbers, without any detailed context, Brik “explained how this outlook fueled a culture of lying”, as Abraham described it.

“They created a measure whereby the more you killed, the more you succeeded, and as a result they lied about how many they killed,” Brik said, describing the numbers presented by the IDF as “one of the most serious bluffs” in Israel’s history.

He added, “They lie non-stop — both the military echelon and the political echelon. In every raid, the IDF Spokesperson’s announcements said, ‘Hundreds of terrorists were killed.’ 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.”

Brik also explained that, in discussions with soldiers whose job was to examine and identify the bodies of those killed in Gaza, they told him, “Everyone the army says it killed, most of them are civilians. Period.”

The total death toll as a serious undercount

The death toll on which the media outlets based their calculation that 83% of those killed were civilians was, at the end of May, 53,000, according to the health ministry in Gaza.

Although both Israel and some of its western allies have regularly sought to suggest that the health ministry’s figures are exaggerated, Abraham noted that, in fact, last year Local Call revealed that their figures “are considered reliable even by the Israeli military.”

Since May, the official death toll has risen to 62,819, with another 158,629 injured, according to a health ministry report today.

However, while no plausible analysis indicates that these numbers are exaggerated, other credible investigations suggest that the figures are a serious undercount.

Just two days before the +972/Guardian articles were published, Adam Rzepka, a researcher at Montclair State University in New Jersey, had an article published on CounterPunch, “The Real Gaza Death Toll is Impossible to Know Today — But the Minimum Isn’t”, in which he suggested, plausibly, that the total death toll in Gaza, as of now, and taking into account future indirect deaths that are essentially unavoidable, is more than 460,000.

As he described it, “The minimum scientifically plausible number of traumatic deaths only — immediate deaths from bullets, bombs, and demolished buildings — in the Gaza genocide is currently more than 115,000. The minimum scientifically plausible number of deaths attributable to the genocide overall is more than 460,000.”

Rzepka cited two reports in The Lancet, in February and June 2025, which both indicated that, through no fault of their own, given the chaotic conditions on the ground in Gaza, the health ministry’s figures undercounted the death toll from traumatic injury by 41%.

As of today, that would mean that, at a minimum, there have been 106,472 deaths in Gaza by violent injury since October 7, 2023.

Rzepka then added “those who are missing and presumed dead”, accepting a minimum figure of 10,000, cited by civilian defense teams in Gaza since last year, and quoted by the UN and The Lancet, even though, as he noted, that figure “is almost certainly much higher now: ever more buildings have been bombed and demolished, and no heavy equipment capable of digging out bodies has been allowed to operate.”

To get to a true death toll, we need to add to this figure of 116,472 deaths by violent injury all those caused through “indirect deaths” — “Israel’s strategic denial of food, water, medical supplies, power, and medicine”, as well as the deliberate spread of diseases resulting from these factors.

To assess this, Rzepka drew on a letter from three internationally respected doctors and epidemiologists that was published in The Lancet last summer, and which I wrote about here, which, as he described it, noted that, “according to extensive studies of recent wars compiled by the UNHCR [the UN High Commissioner for Refugees], the ratio of “indirect deaths” to direct deaths from traumatic impact ranged from 3:1 to 15:1.”

Taking the most conservative minimum ratio of 3:1, that indicates a total death toll of 349,416, or, via a ratio of 4:1, which is the barest minimum used in the UNHCR report, 465,888 deaths.

The death toll could, of course, be even higher, given the unprecedented ferocity of the destruction over the last 22 months, equivalent in intensity to seven of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, and with clear and overlapping aspects of persistent genocidal intent that readily fulfil the 1948 Genocide Convention’s assertion that one key aspect of a genocide is the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” not just by killing them directly, but by “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

The figures — of deaths in the hundreds of thousands — constitute a death toll that is almost beyond comprehension, but I can see no good reason to refute it. The figure of 465,888 deaths represents around 20% of Gaza’s total population on October 7, 2023, and, even using the 3:1 ratio of indirect to direct deaths, the figures also represent a ratio of nearly 300:1 of Palestinian deaths since October 7 compared to the numbers killed on October 7 itself (1,195 in total).

As for how many of these are civilians, I suspect that the soldiers, hidden in tunnels, continue to be considerably less vulnerable to extermination than the civilians living above ground. Let’s say, however, that, of these 349,416 dead, twice the amount claimed by Israel (17,800) were soldiers, that still means that, one day, when the truth is eventually revealed, it will become apparent that 95% of all those killed in Gaza will have been civilians.

This is a figure so grotesque that the State of Israel will forever be tainted as a deadly pariah state that, in its hunger for vengeance and its messianic quest for the colonization of the Palestinians’ land, engaged in the slaughter of civilians on such a significant scale that it will be forever compared to the Nazis.

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Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer (of an ongoing photo-journalism project, ‘The State of London’), film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose music is available via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (see the ongoing photo campaign here) and the successful We Stand With Shaker campaign of 2014-15, and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo”, which you can watch on YouTube here.

In 2017, Andy became very involved in housing issues. He is the narrator of the documentary film, ‘Concrete Soldiers UK’, about the destruction of council estates, and the inspiring resistance of residents, he wrote a song ‘Grenfell’, in the aftermath of the entirely preventable fire in June 2017 that killed over 70 people, and, in 2018, he was part of the occupation of the Old Tidemill Wildlife Garden in Deptford, to try to prevent its destruction — and that of 16 structurally sound council flats next door — by Lewisham Council and Peabody.

Since 2019, Andy has become increasingly involved in environmental activism, recognizing that climate change poses an unprecedented threat to life on earth, and that the window for change — requiring a severe reduction in the emission of all greenhouse gases, and the dismantling of our suicidal global capitalist system — is rapidly shrinking, as tipping points are reached that are occurring much quicker than even pessimistic climate scientists expected. You can read his articles about the climate crisis here. He has also, since, October 2023, been sickened and appalled by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, and you can read his detailed coverage here.

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