DaysofPal- A joint investigative report by The Guardian and Israeli magazine +972 has uncovered that a secret Israeli military intelligence database shows the overwhelming majority of Palestinians killed in Gaza are civilians, in stark contrast to the Israeli official narrative.
Professor Mary Kaldor, author of “New and Old Wars”, said what is happening in Gaza cannot be considered a conventional war but rather a “campaign of targeted assassinations carried out with no regard for civilians.”
Kaldor noted that the violence is directed more at the population than combatants, resembling conflicts in Sudan, Yemen, and Syria, where the aim is often control over people and territory, and possibly forced displacement.
According to the leaked data, by May 2025, Israeli intelligence had listed 8,900 fighters from Hamas and Islamic Jihad as “killed or presumed killed.”
However, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported 53,000 Palestinian deaths in total, meaning fighters accounted for only 17% of the casualties, while 83% were civilians.
Researcher Therese Pettersson from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program said this ratio is “exceptionally high” and typically seen only in cases of genocide or large-scale indiscriminate attacks.
She emphasized that Gaza’s civilian casualty rate surpasses that of Syria and Sudan, and is comparable only to atrocities such as Srebrenica in Bosnia, the Rwandan genocide, and the siege of Mariupol, Ukraine, in 2022.
Several genocide and human rights experts, including Israeli academics, described what is happening in Gaza as genocide, citing the mass killing of civilians and the use of starvation as a weapon of war.
The investigation further revealed that the Israeli military relies on the database for operational planning, while political leaders publicly cite inflated figures, claiming 20,000 fighters killed or portraying casualties as evenly split between civilians and combatants, directly contradicting its own intelligence.
Intelligence sources accompanying field units admitted that individuals are often “classified as terrorists after being killed.”
Retired General Yitzhak Brick described the official numbers as a “massive deception,” acknowledging that field officers concede most of the dead are civilians.
Israeli soldiers also confirmed that battlefield instructions effectively allowed treating all Palestinians in Gaza as targets, where one soldier in Rafah recounted, “We opened fire on anyone who crossed an imaginary line in the sand, even children and women.”
Professor Neta Crawford, an international relations expert at the University of Oxford, said the extremely high civilian death rate, coupled with the widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure, makes it clear that “Israel has no effective mechanisms in place to protect civilians, despite its claims of using safeguards similar to those of the United States.”
Backed by U.S. support, Israeli occupation forces have been carrying out a genocide in Gaza since October 7, 2023, killing at least 62,192 Palestinians, injuring 157,114, leaving over 9,000 missing, displacing hundreds of thousands, and causing a famine that has claimed 271 lives, including 112 children.
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