Revealed: 83% of Gaza war dead are civilians, Israeli data suggests

Attacks 'are carried out with no concern' for non-combatants

- Emma Graham-Harrison and Yuval Abraham Jerusalem

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 [PIJ] 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 17% of the total, which indicates that 83% of the dead were civilians.

That apparent ratio 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."

In global conflicts tracked by UCDP since 1989, civilians made up a greater proportion of the dead only in Srebenica - though 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.