War dashboard' Militant death tolls being inflated by Israelis, data suggests

Figures from a classified database suggest Israel's political and military leadership has for two years misled the country and the rest of the world about a war that has overwhelmingly killed civilians.

- Emma Graham-Harrison and Yuval Abraham Jerusalem

In May, Israel's military intelligence database of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters included 47,653 names. Of them, 8,900 were marked as killed, or probably killed, a joint investigation by the Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call has found.

That is less than one in five of the total, and far below figures given publicly by politicians and military commanders, who have given tolls varying between 17,000 and 20,000 for the same period.

An intelligence team reviewing militant casualties concluded the database was likely to have undercounted the total "by a little" but the significantly higher figures given publicly were "inaccurate", multiple intelligence sources said.

Killing a significant proportion of enemy soldiers is not always a military objective in war or a precondition for victory. But in the absence of a long-term strategy, Israel's military chose to make the militant toll a metric of success.

Soon after the start of the war, the then-head of the elite 8200 intelligence unit, Yossi Sariel, began sending a daily update on the toll in the form of a data graph, which was referred to as the "war dashboard", intelligence sources said.

The display was treated like "a football game, officers sitting around watching the numbers go up on the dashboard," one source said.

Sariel and other senior commanders presented the deaths of Hamas fighters as an objective in itself, sources said. There had been no discussion of how Gaza would be controlled or governed if Hamas collapsed, or what concessions Israel might try to force through the mass killing of individual fighters.

"We had a beautiful, interactive dashboard, but we didn't understand the goals of the war," one of Sariel's subordinates said. "It was very frustrating, the flattening of things into numbers." Asked about his focus on the number of militant casualties, Sariel declined to comment.