Israel is facing growing global concern over the number of civilian deaths in Gaza, after at least 30,000 Palestinians were reported dead in the Strip. Pressure is also mounting for him to show that he is eliminating Hamas, as he promised after October 7.
The BBC Verify team has examined Israel’s claims about how many of the dead were combatants.
The Israeli military says it has killed more than 10,000 fighters in its aerial bombardments and ground operations in response to the Hamas attack that killed about 1,200 people.
But there are concerns about whether it is able to distinguish combatants from ordinary civilians.
The president of the United States, Joe Biden, who in December said that Israel had the support of the world and the United States, has recently admitted that that country is “beginning to lose that support due to the indiscriminate bombings they carry out.”
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have consistently defended their tactics, emphasizing that they are trying to be precise in attacking Hamas fighters and infrastructure, while seeking to minimize civilian deaths.
Hamas, for its part, does not provide figures on its casualties.. The news agency Reuters reported that a group official admitted they lost 6,000 fighters, but Hamas denied this figure to the BBC.
The toll of at least 30,139 dead provided by the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health has been described as reliable by the World Health Organization (WHO) regional emergencies director, Richard Brennan.
The WHO assures that the ministry has “good capacity in data collection” and that his previous reports have been credible and “well developed”.
But its overall death count does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The Ministry of Health’s latest demographic breakdown, dated February 29, indicated that more than 70% of those murdered were women and children.
So, with figures suggesting that less than 30% of the dead were men – some of whom were probably past fighting age – experts have raised questions about how Israel arrived at its claim of having killed 10,000 fighters.
BBC Verify has repeatedly asked the IDF for details of its methodology for counting Hamas fighter deaths, but has received no response.
The BBC attempted to reconstruct a complete x-ray through statements and videos published by Israel.
The IDF has issued press releases and social media posts since October, making claims about the outcome of its operations in Gaza.
References to numbers of dead fighters in these reports are sporadic and less precise than the periodic assessments carried out by the Hamas-led Ministry of Health.
An IDF estimate before the war suggested that Hamas had some 30,000 fighters in Gaza.
In December, the Israeli military estimated that they were killing two civilians for every Hamas fightersomething they described as “tremendously positive,” given the challenges they face on the battlefield.
On December 29, IDF spokesman Major Doron Spielman told Sky News Australia that 8,000 Hamas fighters had been killed, stating that the figure was based on intelligence information, interrogations and examinations of satellite photographs.
In mid-January, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated that Israel had “destroyed” two-thirds of Hamas combat regiments in Gaza.
On February 19, the newspaper Times of Israel reported that the IDF had said 12,000 fighters were killed.
We communicated that figure to the IDF, from where they offered two different responses. On the one hand they said the figure was “approximately 10,000” and then “more than 10,000.”
Israel’s embassy in Britain, for its part, said it believes the total number of Hamas fighters killed is “between 10,000 and 12,000.”
But they stated that it is difficult to distinguish between civilians and combatants since many of them do not wear military uniforms and Hamas also has 16 and 17 year old fighters.
Operations in Hamas’ tunnel network are other factors cited by experts as obstacles to counting combatant casualties.
BBC Verify reviewed all 280 videos posted on the IDF’s YouTube channel from October 7 to February 27 and found that very few contained visual evidence of killed fighters.
Of these recordings, only one (published on December 14) purports to show corpses of combatants. A handful of other videos appear to show fighters being shot.
We also attempted to count the number of dead Hamas fighters reported by Israeli forces on their official Telegram channel.
There we found 160 publications that claimed to have killed a specific number of combatants and, when adding the different reports, it gave as total 714 dead.
But there were also 247 references that used terms like “several,” “dozens,” or “hundreds” of deaths, making a meaningful global count impossible.
Indiscriminate attacks
Since the beginning of the IDF incursion into Gaza, the army has accused Hamas of using the civilian population as human shields.
But some experts are concerned that the IDF may be counting some non-combatants as combatants simply because they are part of the administration of Hamas-run territory.
Andreas Krieg, senior lecturer in security studies at Kings College London, said: “Israel has taken a very broad approach towards ‘Hamas membership’which includes any affiliation with the organization, including officers or administrators.”
Data from the Gaza Ministry of Health on fatalities from the current conflict show a sharp increase in the proportion of women and children killed compared to previous wars.
This “indicates a much higher civilian mortality rate,” according to Rachel Taylor, executive director of Every Casualty Counts, a UK-based organization that aims to record victims of violent conflict.
Almost half of Gaza’s population is under 18 years old and around 44% of war deaths are also childrenaccording to demographic data from the Ministry of Health on February 29.
Taylor said the fact that the deaths closely track the demographics of the general population “indicates indiscriminate killings.”
“On the contrary, in 2014 there was a fairly high percentage of men of fighting age among the dead, but this is much less evident today,” he noted.
Fewer deaths per day
The pace of killings appears, at first glance, to have slowed, from about 330 deaths a day in the first month of the conflict to approximately 110 a day for the past month.
But some experts told the BBC that the true magnitude of the death toll from the Israeli offensive is likely to be significantly higher, as many hospitals, where deaths are normally recorded, are no longer operational.
These figures also only include deaths from military attacks, and not from hunger or disease, which are of increasing concern to international humanitarian organizations.
B’tselem, a Jerusalem-based human rights organization, said the current war is much deadlier than previous conflicts between Israel and Gaza.
“These are numbers we have never seen in previous wars and attacks in Gaza or other territories,” said the group’s spokesperson, Dror Sadot.
*Additional reporting by Maryam Ahmed and Aidan McNamee.
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