Tehran – The date by the Israeli military reveals that 83% of Gaza’s deaths are civilians, contradicting official claims.
According to classified intelligence data from the Israeli occupation system itself, joint investigations by Guardian, +972 magazines and Hebrew outlet local calls revealed that the majority of people killed in the US-backed Gaza massacre were civilians.
The investigation challenges nearly two years of public claims by Israeli officials who strongly stated that most of the people killed were resistance fighters. No evidence emerged from the occupation regime to support the allegations.
An Israeli military database discovered during the investigation shows that as of May 2025, intelligence sources identified as dead or “probably dead” from 8,900 identified fighters and Palestinian Islamic jihads. The use of the term “probably dead” brings additional uncertainty.
At the same time, Gaza’s Ministry of Health reported about 53,000 deaths. If the number of 8,900 resistance fighters in the Israeli regime itself is accurate, it means that more than 44,000 deaths were civilians, and about five were civilians for every six people killed.
This level of civilian death is very high in modern warfare. According to Therese Petterson of the Uppsala Conflict Data Programme (UCDP), which tracks civilian casualties globally, civilian death rates in Gaza are higher than almost every major war in modern history.
The Occupation Forces did not deny the existence of the classified database when asked by +972 magazine and local call.
The Guardian says he received a vague response that Israeli forces had decided to “parse” their previous statement.
However, the Israeli military has previously acknowledged that the figures of the victims of Gaza Health Ministry, although frequently published by Israeli politicians, are treated as reliable in operational plans.
Research shows that Israeli forces use this classification database compiled from documents seized in Gaza as the most accurate measure of the deaths of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic jihad fighters.
The secret database includes 47,653 people identified as active on the armed wings of both resistance movements. Still, only 8,900 people were estimated to have died by May.
Nevertheless, Israeli officials repeatedly claimed that 20,000 resistance fighters had been killed, often offering a 1:1 ratio of civilians to combatants.
However, these figures are misleading and often bulging, according to data-savvy analysts and sources. In some cases, Israeli commanders allowed them to report unidentified people killed in Gaza as armed members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic jihad without evidence.
According to one source, “After death, people are promoted to the rank of terrorist.”
Former Israeli General Ishhak Blik, who once advised Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, criticized the widespread misinformation and government handling of the war on the war of massacres.
Brick says he knows the truth that most of the people killed on the ground are civilians, and he called the public the number of victims who released “one big bluff.”
Further questions about the Israeli regime’s claims come from Palestinian sources. By the end of 2024, estimates shared with Palestinian analyst Muhammad Shehada suggested that Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad members had only about 6,500 members had died. “Israel will expand its boundaries so that everyone in Gaza can be defined as Hamas,” Shehada said she described the strategy as justification for “killing at this moment” with little consideration of long-term outcomes.
While most of Gaza was reduced to Kura Rub, killing tens of thousands of people, the Israeli military believes that around 40,000 identified fighters are alive, according to its own database. This undermines the proposal that the stated goal of dismantling the armed Palestinian resistance is close.
The civilian casualties may have been worse since May. The occupying regime’s military targets so-called food distribution centres and controls the UN humanitarian efforts to use hunger as a “weapon of war.” A significant number of civilians were killed while trying to get food or when they died as a result of hunger.
Meanwhile, civilians who have already displaced only 20% of Gaza’s territory have been ordered to evacuate again as the government prepares for further ground operations.
Many professional soldiers spoke anonymously about the regime’s military approach to targeting in Gaza. A person stationed in Rafa said his forces had established an imaginary line in the sand. Anyone who crossed it, such as a child or an unarmed woman, was shot without warning. “No one was aiming for their feet,” he told the Guardian. “We shot to kill you.”
The investigation supports the arguments of many military experts that ground conditions contradict the narrative that the Israeli war with Gaza targets resistance fighters but is equivalent to genocide to wipe out civilians.