Israeli Intelligence Reveals 83% of Palestinians Killed in Gaza Were Civilians

Gaza, August 20, 2025 – A joint investigation by Israel’s *+972 Magazine*, its Hebrew-language partner *Local Call*, and the UK’s *The Guardian* has revealed shocking details from Israeli military intelligence, indicating that 83% of Palestinians killed in Gaza were civilians. The report, based on internal Israeli military data, highlights the staggering toll of civilian casualties in the ongoing conflict.

According to the investigation, as of May 2025, the Israeli military’s classified intelligence database listed 8,900 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) fighters as either killed or “potentially killed.” During the same period, Gaza’s Health Ministry reported approximately 53,000 Palestinian deaths due to Israeli attacks. This suggests that only 17% of those killed were combatants, leaving the vast majority—83%—as civilians. The report notes that the Israeli military did not dispute the existence of this database or the number of Hamas and PIJ fighters killed when contacted by *+972 Magazine* and *Local Call*. However, when *The Guardian* raised similar questions, an Israeli military spokesperson claimed the figures were inaccurate but failed to clarify which data was incorrect, stating only that they did not reflect the military’s internal records. No explanation was provided for the differing responses to the media outlets. The database reportedly contains the names of 47,653 Palestinians identified by Israeli intelligence as active members of Hamas or PIJ, based on internal documents allegedly recovered from Gaza. Of these, 34,973 were listed as Hamas members and 12,702 as PIJ members, with 8,900 confirmed or suspected as killed. Among them, 7,330 were confirmed dead, while 1,570 were categorized as “potentially killed.” Notably, most of those killed were lower-ranking members, with only an estimated 100 to 300 of the 750 senior operatives in the database believed to have been killed. The investigation also suggests that the civilian casualty rate may be even higher than 83%, as Gaza’s Health Ministry figures only account for recovered bodies, excluding thousands potentially buried under rubble. Furthermore, Israeli intelligence may have labeled some civilians as combatants based solely on alleged affiliations with Hamas, including police officers or administrative workers, who are not considered combatants under international law. In some cases, civilians with no connection to Hamas or PIJ may have been misclassified as fighters. An Israeli intelligence officer quoted in the report remarked, “People are declared terrorists after they are killed. If I only listened to brigade reports, I’d think we’ve killed 200% of Hamas’s fighters!” Since May 2025, civilian deaths in Gaza are believed to have risen further, particularly after the controversial *Gaza Humanitarian Foundation*, backed by Israel and the US, took over aid distribution from international agencies. Gaza’s Health Ministry reports that nearly 2,000 Palestinians have been killed while waiting in aid distribution lines. The report underscores that such a high civilian casualty rate—83%—is rare in modern warfare, surpassing even the prolonged civil wars in Syria and Sudan. *The Guardian*’s research indicates that, since 1989, only the Srebrenica massacre, the Rwandan genocide, and Russia’s siege of Mariupol in Ukraine have seen comparable civilian death tolls. Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Israel’s own B’Tselem, have labeled Israel’s actions in Gaza as genocide. In December 2024, Amnesty International became the first major organization to make this claim, followed by others. Francesca Albanese, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Palestine, and renowned Holocaust and genocide scholar Omer Bartov have also described the situation as genocide, a conclusion shared by several prominent Israeli and Jewish researchers.