Figures from the Israeli Army database have shown that 5 out of 6 Palestinians killed by the military campaign in the Gaza Strip have been civilians, an extreme rate that can hardly be equated with other wars of recent decades.
As of May, Israeli intelligence officials had listed the names of 8900 fighters from the Palestinian militant group Hamas and Islamic Jihad as dead or “probably dead,” based on joint research by the British newspaper The Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian magazine +972, and the Hebrew-language tabloid Local Call.
By that time, 53.000 Palestinians had been killed as a result of Israeli attacks, based on figures provided by health authorities in the Gaza Strip, a toll that includes both fighters and civilians. Fighters from the aforementioned militant groups make up only 17 percent of the total, indicating that the remaining 83 percent were civilians.
This ratio of civilian to combatant deaths is extremely high for contemporary conflicts, even when compared to other conflicts such as the civil wars in Syria and Sudan.
“This percentage of civilians among the dead is extremely high, especially since this has been going on for such a long time,” said Therese Pettersson of the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP), an organization that tracks civilian casualties worldwide. “If you single out a particular city or battle in another conflict, you can find similar figures, but in very rare cases.”
In global conflicts recorded by UCDP since 1989, civilians have dominated the death toll only in Srebrenica – though not in the Bosnian war as a whole – in the Rwandan genocide, as well as during the siege of Mariupol by Russian troops in 2022, Pettersson pointed out.
Many genocide scholars, lawyers, and human rights activists, including Israeli intellectuals and various groups, have argued that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza, citing the mass killings of civilians and the famine crisis.
The Israeli military did not dispute the existence of this database or the list of killed Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants when asked for comment by Local Call and +972 Magazine.
When the British newspaper The Guardian asked for additional comment on the matter, an Army spokesman said they had decided to “rephrase” their response. The response stated that “the figures are not accurate” without specifying any other details.