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Calculation of Gaza Casualty Data Shows: 70% of the Casualties Are Civilians


A new calculation indicates that 30,000 innocent Gazans have been killed by IDF Fire – an exceptional figure in modern warfare. The IDF and Israel are essentially adopting Palestinian casualty estimates.

By Ronen Shklarsh

Editors Tom Alfia and Maayan Galili

Translation using Google Translate with minor edits by Bernice Keshet

Date of original publication: 10/10/2024

Original Hebrew text: https://www.rosamedia.org/episodes/articles/55

In Israel and around the world, there is an ongoing heated debate regarding the number of people Israel has killed in Gaza and the split between Hamas terrorists and civilians. Since the answer has great significance both legally and in terms of public perception, even Israel is officially participating in this debate. On August 15th, 2024, the IDF spokesperson declared that the army had eliminated "more than 17,000 terrorists" in the Gaza Strip. In my opinion, this is an implausible claim that does not align with other available data or with common sense, and therefore, this article begins with a critical evaluation of this claim and ends with an alternative calculation based on data and facts, which shows that the number of Hamas terrorists killed is likely closer to 11,000. The significance of this figure is that, in a conservative estimate, around 70% of the total casualties in Gaza are civilians—a striking number in modern warfare, indicating a systematic and blatant violation of the laws of war. I should note that, although discussions and analyses of this type sometimes tend to flatten the human tragedy unfolding in Gaza and dull our senses, I still believe there is value in promoting a more reasoned and informed discourse about the horrific price of the war, despite the inherent issues.

17,000 – Is it so?

According to data from the Ministry of Health in Gaza, published by the UN, over 40,000 people have been killed in the Strip, with over 32,000 identified by name. Of those 32,000, about 40% are [adult] men (13,000), 19% are [adult] women (6,000), 32.5% are minors (10,500), and 8.5% are elderly people (2,700). The numbers are rounded for simplicity of calculation.

The Ministry of Health's data is, of course, controversial, and Israeli Hasbara activists [see comment below – BK] claim that Hamas is artificially inflating the number of casualties in the Strip. Some argue that the lists of the dead published by the Ministry of Health include names of people who were not killed by IDF fire (some quote a total of 20,000 dead), while others claim there are no additional casualties besides those identified by name (and in this case, the death toll is 32,000).

The problem is that, to reconcile the number 17,000 with a lower death toll, one would need to make questionable and unrealistic assumptions: one would have to assume that all 13,000 of the men who were identified and have died so far in the war were Hamas fighters and add another 4,000 fighters from the group of women, minors, and the elderly. Any reasonable person understands that these assumptions are unrealistic. The claim becomes even more implausible if one adopts the lower death toll calculations used by Israeli advocates, as this would mean assuming that most of the women and minors killed in Gaza were fighters. Indeed, there is evidence that Hamas recruits boys under 18, so it is reasonable that some of the identified minors were Hamas fighters. However, even according to Israeli Hasbara activists who have researched this topic, this number amounts to less than 1,000 minors, so this claim does not resolve the contradictions either.

To make a reasonable argument in support of the claim that the IDF killed more than 17,000 terrorists in the war, one would need to adopt the death toll figures reported by the Palestinians (40,000), and it seems that recently, some Israeli advocates and media personalities have started to align with this number. For example, the military correspondent for Galei Tzahal [the IDF radio station – BK], Doron Kadosh, recently released a tweet in which he adopted the death toll figures reported by the Gaza Ministry of Health to justify the claim that the IDF killed over 17,000 terrorists.

A new advocacy narrative attempts to salvage the assertion that the IDF killed 17,000 terrorists, claiming that all the unidentified dead in Gaza are Hamas fighters. However, since there is no significant indication of differences between the identified and unidentified populations of the dead, the composition of the unidentified casualty group is likely similar to that of the identified group. Both groups are Gazans killed in the war, and the fact that some were identified while others were not is not an indicator of other kinds of differences. In other words, if we assume that the composition of the identified casualty group is similar to that of the unidentified casualties, we can estimate that about 16,200 men, 7,500 women, 13,100 minors, and 3,400 elderly people have been killed in the Strip so far.

If we assume that 10% of the minors killed in Gaza were Hamas terrorists (which is higher than Israeli advocates estimate), then to uphold the claim that the IDF killed more than 17,000 terrorists in Gaza, we would need to assume that more than 96% of the adult men killed (15,690) were terrorists, and this is obviously an entirely unrealistic assumption. Therefore, in conclusion, the Israeli claim that the IDF killed more than 17,000 terrorists in Gaza simply does not align with the numbers, and to accept it, one would have to adopt a series of highly improbable assumptions, which there is no good reason to accept.

But the truth is, one doesn’t really need this lengthy explanation to conclude that the claim is an unfounded one. Officers in the IDF who fought in the Strip have already told Haaretz newspaper that the military is artificially inflating the number of terrorists it has killed in Gaza and counts every male Gazan killed by IDF fire as a terrorist. In other words, the IDF likely accepts the Gaza Ministry of Health's data that about 40,000 Gazans died in the war, and simply declared with no good reason that all of the men who died—between 16,000 and 17,000—are terrorists.

What Are the Real Numbers?

Is it possible to create a more reasonable estimate of the number of terrorists the IDF killed in Gaza and the ratio of terrorists to civilian casualties in the Strip? Well, I believe it is possible to do so, and all that is required is to take on board two fairly reasonable assumptions already outlined above: the first is that the group of the unidentified dead is similar in composition to the group of the identified dead, and the second is that the number of innocent women and men killed in Gaza is roughly similar.

As I will show below, these two assumptions alone can yield a fairly reasonable estimate of the number of terrorists that the IDF killed in Gaza and the percentage they make out of the total number of casualties in the Strip. However, to refine the calculation a bit more, I will adopt two additional assumptions. First, I will assume that 10% of the minors killed in Gaza were Hamas members killed in combat. As mentioned, this estimate is higher even than the one suggested by Israeli Hasbara advocates. I decided to adopt this assumption in order to make a conservative assessment and to head potential arguments that the figures might be biased in favour of the Palestinian side.

The other assumption I decided to adopt is that the number of innocent men killed in the Strip is lower than that of women. This is not an obvious assumption. Because of the IDF's methods of operation, there is reason to think that the number of innocent men killed is higher than the number of women. On the other hand, because in some cases the IDF killed Hamas operatives along with their families, there are reasons to believe that the number of innocent men killed is lower than the number of women. For example, if the IDF killed an entire family of two parents and three children, and the father was a Hamas terrorist, then in that attack, three children, one woman, one Hamas fighter, and zero innocent men would have been killed. Therefore, as mentioned, there are reasons to think that the number of innocent men killed in Gaza is lower than the number of women. Given that arguments can be made on both sides of this issue, the correct thing to do would have been to assume that the number of innocent men killed in Gaza is similar to the number of women. Nevertheless, here too, for the sake of making a conservative assessment, I decided to adopt an assumption that benefits Israel [see comment below - BK], namely that the number of innocent men killed is 10% lower than the number of women.

To calculate the final number, I will rely on data from the Gaza Ministry of Health, which, as mentioned, is preferable for Israeli claims over the calculations of Israeli Hasbara activists. Based on this data, about 16,200 men, 7,500 women, 13,100 minors, and 3,400 elderly people have been killed in Gaza so far. Given the assumptions above, approximately 6,750 innocent men have been killed in the Strip, which means that the remaining men who were killed (9,450) were Hamas combatants. If we add 10% of the total number of minors killed in the Strip to this number, we reach 10,760 dead terrorists, and to err on the conservative side, we round this number up to 11,000.

If 11,000 Hamas fighters have been killed in Gaza, the percentage of dead terrorists out of total casualties in Gaza stands at about 27.5%. Again, for conservatism’s sake, we can round this number up to 30%. In other words, under a series of assumptions that favour Israel, about 70% of the casualties in Gaza are innocent civilians. And these are only the deaths caused directly by IDF fire. This does not include all those who have died, and will still die, from hunger, disease, and lack of medical care, whose number could exceed 100,000. These are horrifying figures. Just to put things in perspective: less than 13% of those killed by the coalition forces in Iraq were civilians, in contrast to the claims sometimes made by Israelis that the war Israel is conducting is as deadly as past wars by Western countries in the Middle East—wars that were also extremely destructive. It is also worth noting that, on average, 50% of casualties in wars over the past three centuries were civilians, including those who died from hunger and disease. As mentioned, in Gaza, 70% of the dead are civilians, excluding those who died from hunger and disease.

In summary, contrary to the claims of the IDF spokesperson and the Israeli government, the percentage of civilian casualties in Gaza is likely very high and indicates a reckless and disproportionate style of fighting and a systematic violation of the laws of war by Israel. Beyond the fact that this is a terrible injustice that will haunt Israeli society for years to come, in the long term, the severe harm to Gaza’s civilian population will not only fail to break the cycle of violence but will expand and perpetuate it, condemning both Israelis and Palestinians to decades of bloody conflict, caught in an unrelenting downwards spiral of violence.

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