Ramallah (TIP)- Even as the United Nations on Friday officially declared a famine in Gaza, a joint investigation by the Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call has revealed that five out of six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza have been civilians.
The figures are from a classified Israeli military intelligence database. The database is reportedly managed by the Military Intelligence Directorate known by the Hebrew acronym “Aman.”
According to +972 Magazine, multiple intelligence sources familiar with the database said the army views it as the only authoritative tally of militant casualty figures. In the words of one of them: “There’s no other place to check.”
The 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, the investigation revealed.
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.” 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, the Guardian report said.
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, Therése Pettersson from the Uppsala Conflict Data Program has been quoted as saying by the Guardian.
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.
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.
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.
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, has been quoted as saying by the Guardian that Israeli tactics marked a “worrisome” abandonment of decades of practices developed to protect civilians.
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