A leaked military report suggests only 17 percent of those killed in Gaza were fighters.
Israel has been bombing Gaza for nearly two years, killing more than 62,000 people, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza says, but the real number is likely much higher.
Israel claims it is targeting fighters from Hamas, not civilians, but a leaked military report reveals a different story.
The report says 83 percent of the Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza were civilians.
How many people has Israel killed? And what did Israel say about killing them? Why is this latest report so important? Here’s what we know:
The report was based on an internal Israeli intelligence database that records the deaths of fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ).
The database estimated that Israel has killed 8,900 fighters throughout its war on Gaza, according to data from May. That is an estimate because, of that number, 1,570 names are listed as “probably dead”.
The 8,900 figure is out of 47,653 people whom the database lists as active fighters – 34,973 Hamas, and 12,702 PIJ.
Let’s put that against the total number of people Israel has killed in Gaza, which was 53,000 in May, according to +972 Magazine. That means 16.8 percent of the people Israel killed or “probably” killed were fighters.
Many of the bodies of those killed by Israel are incinerated during bomb or missile strikes, left rotting in areas occupied by the Israeli military or remain crushed under the rubble of destroyed buildings with rescuers unable to reach them.
The high civilian death toll makes Israel’s assault on Gaza City, which it said has already begun, even more frightening.
Israel has repeatedly claimed that it does all it can to limit civilian casualties and regularly disputes the Health Ministry’s numbers.
What did the report say?
In September, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu bragged that Israel had the “lowest ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in the history of modern urban warfare”, claiming the army was killing one civilian for every fighter it killed.
But this was months after Local Call and +972 reported on an Israeli army AI targeting system codenamed Lavender, which, according to sources in Israeli intelligence, marked tens of thousands of people in Gaza as potential fighters and eligible to be killed.
Speaking on Israeli radio last month, Heritage Minister Amichai Eliyahu said: “The government is rushing to erase Gaza, and thank God we are erasing this evil. All of Gaza will be Jewish.”
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich told a settlement conference in May: “Gaza will be entirely destroyed,” and what remains of its people would be exiled to a narrow strip of land in the south.
They do not.
Throughout the conflict, media has reported on numerous accounts of civilians being massacred while seeking food, the dropping of heavy ordnance on displacement camps, the systematic destruction of Gaza’s healthcare system and the deliberate killing of its medics as well as the use of starvation as a weapon of war.
“I think anyone who has closely observed the genocide in Gaza can’t have been surprised by the report,” Orly Noy of Local Call told media.
“Everything we knew about the war suggested that the mass killing, destruction and brutality there was indiscriminate. That is the nature of this war. This is its logic. Israel has created a mechanism for genocide that it’s deploying indiscriminately across Gaza.”
When approached by Local Call and +972, the Israeli military confirmed the existence of the database on which the report was based.
