Figures from a classified Israeli military intelligence database indicate five out of six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza have been civilians, an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare.
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”, a joint investigation by the Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call has found.
At that time 53,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli attacks, according to health authorities in Gaza, a toll that included combatants and civilians. Fighters named in the Israeli military intelligence database accounted for just 17% of the total, which indicates that 83% of the dead were civilians.
That apparent ratio of civilians to combatants among the dead is extremely high for modern warfare, even compared with conflicts notorious for indiscriminate killing, including the Syrian and Sudanese civil wars.
“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. “If you single out a particular city or battle in another conflict, you could find similar rates, but very rarely overall.”
8,900
Named fighters listed as dead or ‘probably dead’ in Israeli database as of May 2025
In global conflicts tracked by UCDP since 1989, civilians made up a greater proportion of the dead only in Srebenica – although not the Bosnian war overall – in 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 dispute the data on Hamas and PIJ deaths when approached for comment by Local Call and +972 Magazine. When the Guardian asked for comment on the same data, a spokesperson said they had decided to “rephrase” their response.
A brief statement sent to the Guardian did not directly address questions about the military intelligence database.
It said “figures presented in the article are incorrect”, without specifying which data the Israeli military disputed. It also said the numbers “do not reflect the data available in the IDF’s systems”, without detailing which systems.
A spokesperson did not immediately respond when asked why the military had given different responses to questions about a single set of data.
The database names 47,653 Palestinians considered active in the military wings of Hamas and PIJ. It is based on apparent internal documents from the groups seized in Gaza, which have not been viewed or verified by the Guardian.
Multiple intelligence sources familiar with the database said the military viewed it as the only authoritative tally of militant casualties.
The military also considers the Gaza health ministry toll reliable, Local Call has reported, and the former head of military intelligence appeared to cite it recently, even though Israeli politicians regularly dismiss the numbers as propaganda.
52,928
Gaza health ministry’s overall death toll as of 14 May 2025
Both databases may underestimate casualty numbers. The Gaza ministry of health lists only people whose bodies have been recovered, not the thousands buried under rubble. Israeli military intelligence are not aware of all militant deaths or all new recruits. But the databases are the ones used by Israeli officers for war planning.
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, such as government administrators and police, even though international law prohibits targeting people not engaged in combat.
They probably also include Palestinians with no Hamas connections. Israel’s southern command allowed soldiers to report people killed in Gaza as militant casualties without identification or verification.
Cumulative recorded deaths and injuries as a direct result of Israeli aggression, thousands
“People are promoted to the rank of terrorist after their death,” said one intelligence source who accompanied forces on the ground. “If I had listened to the brigade, I would have come to the conclusion that we had killed 200% of Hamas operatives in the area.”
Itzhak Brik, a retired general, said serving Israeli soldiers were aware that politicians exaggerated the Hamas toll. Brik advised the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, at the start of the war and is now among his most strident critics. “There is absolutely no connection between the numbers that are announced and what is actually happening. It is just one big bluff,” he said.
Brik commanded Israel’s military colleges, and said he kept in touch with serving officers. He described meeting soldiers from a unit identifying Palestinians killed in Gaza, who told him “most of them” were civilians.
Even though much of Gaza has been reduced to ruins and tens of thousands of people killed, the classified database lists nearly 40,000 people considered by the army to be militants and still alive.
An aerial photo taken earlier this month of a suburb reduced to rubble in central Gaza. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Guardian
Casualty estimates from Hamas and PIJ members also indicated Israeli officials were inflating the militant toll in public statements, said Muhammad Shehada, a Palestinian analyst.
By December 2024 an estimated 6,500 people from the military and political wings of both groups had been killed, members told him. “Israel expands the boundaries so they can define every single person in Gaza as Hamas,” he said. “All of it is killing in the moment for tactical purposes that have nothing to do with extinguishing a threat.”
The ratio of civilian casualties among the dead may have increased further since May, when Israel tried to replace UN and humanitarian organisations that had fed Palestinians throughout the war. Israeli forces have killed hundreds of people trying to get food from distribution centres in military exclusion zones.
Now starving survivors, already forced into just 20% of the territory, have been ordered to leave the north as Israel prepares for another ground operation that is likely to have catastrophic consequences for civilians.
The scale of the killing was partly owing to the nature of the conflict, said Mary Kaldor, professor emeritus at the LSE, director of the Conflict Research Programme and author of New Wars, an influential book about warfare in the post-cold-war era.
International humanitarian law was developed to protect civilians in conventional wars, in which states deploy troops to face each other on the battlefield. This is still largely the model for Russia’s war in Ukraine.
In Gaza Israel is fighting Hamas militants in densely populated cities, and has set rules of engagement that allow its forces to kill large numbers of civilians in strikes on even low-ranking militants. “In Gaza we are talking about a campaign of targeted assassinations, really, rather than battles, and they are carried out with no concern for civilians,” Kaldor said.
Palestinians at a food distribution point run by a charity in Gaza City in July. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
The ratio of civilians among the dead in Gaza was more comparable to recent wars in Sudan, Yemen, Uganda and Syria, where much of the violence had been directed against civilians, she said. “These are wars where the armed groups tend to avoid battle. They don’t want to fight each other, they want to control territory and they do that by killing civilians,.
“Maybe that is the same with Israel, and this is a model of war [in Gaza] that is about dominating a population and controlling land. Maybe the objective always was forced displacement.”
Israel’s government says the war is one of self-defence after the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023, which killed 1,200 people.
But political and military leaders regularly use genocidal rhetoric. The general who led military intelligence when the war began has said 50 Palestinians must die for every person killed that day, adding that “it does not matter now if they are children”. Aharon Haliva, who stepped down in April 2024, said mass killing in Gaza was “necessary” as a “message to future generations” of Palestinians, in recordings broadcast on Israeli TV this month.
A man clasps the body of two-year-old Mila, who was killed with her baby brother, Mohammed, in an Israeli attack on the Nuseirat refugee camp in Deir al-Balah in August last year. Photograph: Anadolu/Getty Images
Many Israeli soldiers have testified that all Palestinians are treated as targets in Gaza. One stationed in Rafah this year said his unit had created an “imaginary line” in the sand and fired at anyone who crossed it, including twice at children and once at a woman. They shot to kill, not to warn, he said. “Nobody aimed for their legs”.
Neta Crawford, a professor of international relations at Oxford University and co-founder of the Costs of War project, said Israeli tactics marked a “worrisome” abandonment of decades of practices developed to protect civilians.
In the 1970s public revulsion about American massacres in Vietnam forced western militaries to shift how they fought. New policies were imperfectly implemented but reflected a focus on limiting harm to civilians that no longer appeared to be part of Israel’s military calculus, she said.
“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.”