Gaza civilian deaths may be 95% of the total killed
Shocking statistics based on an IDF report about militants killed, and other research establishing the true scale of the death toll: over 300,000, or over 450,000, or even more.
My header image features a photo from a press conference by doctors, led by Dr. Ghassan Abu Sitta, outside Al-Ahli Hospital on October 17, 2023, after the first hospital massacre undertaken by Israeli forces.
My latest article on my website, Gaza Horror: IDF Admits 83% of Those Killed Were Civilians, But the True Total May Be 95%, which I hope you have time to read, follows up on a joint investigation, published last week by +972 Magazine and the Guardian, into an Israeli military intelligence database from May this year.
That database indicated that 8,900 militants had been killed in Gaza since October 7, 2023, a figure that, based on the official health ministry death toll of 53,000 at the time, meant that over 83% of those killed were civilians.
This is a startling statistic, but as the investigations also established, and as I discuss, although these figures are considerably lower than figures touted by senior Israeli figures, including Benjamin Netanyhu, even the figure of 8,900 may be too high, as Israel has consistently demonstrated a cynical and deliberate indifference to distinctions between civilians and militants.
Of particular interest, I think, are comments made by Maj. Gen. (Res.) Itzhak Brik to Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine. A fierce critic of the Israeli government’s conduct over the last 22 months, Brik said, with reference to the military’s gathering of statistics, “They lie non-stop — both the military echelon and the political echelon. In every raid, the IDF Spokesperson’s announcements said, ‘Hundreds of terrorists were killed.’ It’s true that hundreds were killed, but they weren’t terrorists. There is absolutely no connection between the numbers they announce and what is actually happening.”
Brik also explained that, in discussions with soldiers whose job was to examine and identify the bodies of those killed in Gaza, they told him, “Everyone the army says it killed, most of them are civilians. Period.”
In addition, as another investigation, by Adam Rzepka for CounterPunch, has explained, the true death toll is also considerably higher, with researchers having established a 41% undercount in the ministry’s figures, and with “indirect deaths” added to those caused by traumatic injury, exceeding direct deaths many times over, as analyses of conflicts over the last 30 years have shown.
This means that the final death toll will be, at the very minimum, over 300,000, and possibly over 450,000, or even more, and, as a result, a conservative estimate of the number of civilians killed suggests that it is at least 95% of the total, rather than 83%.
This is a death toll that, as I describe it, “is almost beyond comprehension”, and is “so grotesque” that the genocidal entity responsible “will, henceforth, be shunned as a deadly pariah state, engaged in the slaughter of civilians on such a significant scale that it will be forever compared to the Nazis.”
Please support my work if you can
Please consider supporting my work if you appreciate it, as I am a reader-funded journalist and activist, and entirely dependent on your generosity. If you can’t afford a paid subscription here (just $8 a month, or $2 a week), you can make a one-off donation via Paypal or via Stripe, where I’ve just established a new donation page.
My new article, linked to above, is the 60th full-length article that I’ve written about Israel’s genocide since it began nearly 23 months ago. You can find all those articles here, and I hope they fulfil my intention to, at the very least, bear witness to these ongoing horrors that have done so much to undermine the very basis of our shared humanity, and which none of us must ever forget, as we still wait to see how this unforgivable situation will be brought to an end.