Israel’s official and unofficial spokespeople are in damage control mode after a senior military official last week admitted that Israel accepts the death toll published by Gaza’s health ministry, which currently stands at more than 70,000.
This comes after two years in which Israel and its supporters took every opportunity to disparage and dismiss the health ministry’s figures, saying that they were overblown or fabricated by Hamas.
That prestigious list of repudiators, to name just a few, includes spokespeople for Israel’s government and military, then-US president Joe Biden, the US Congress, Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and any number of talking heads at influential thinktanks and policy centres.
Adding credibility to their denials were prominent media outlets around the world that often described Gaza’s health ministry as “Hamas-run,” thereby encouraging readers and viewers to treat the death toll with suspicion.
In truth, the reliability of the official death toll should never have been in doubt. For one thing, the UN has independently verified the accuracy of the health ministry’s figures after each of Israel’s previous bombardments of Gaza going back to 2008.
For another, the data published by the health ministry since Oct. 7, 2023, is extremely detailed: It includes a full name, date of birth, gender and ID number for all victims whose deaths were confirmed either by hospital morgues or by their relatives.
Naturally, mistakes were made amid the intensity of an Israeli onslaught that virtually destroyed Gaza’s entire health system, but these were remarkably few and promptly rectified: Sky News last year found that entries in the death toll list with missing or invalid ID numbers dropped from 2,769 in early April to just 313 by the end of July. As such, several external investigations of the published data found that it stood up to scrutiny.
Back in January 2024, my colleague Yuval Abraham reported that Israel’s military intelligence agencies had even surveilled health ministry personnel in Gaza to check whether their data were accurate; upon finding that they were, they subsequently began using it in internal intelligence briefings.
“In every status briefing, when everyone updates each other on what’s happening, there’s a slide that shows the current number of civilians killed in Gaza. And that’s based almost exclusively on the Hamas health ministry,” an intelligence source told him.
Yet still the denials continued, for two whole years. Even now, the Israeli army came out quickly after last week’s reports to claim that “the details published do not reflect official IDF [Israel Defense Forces] data” — despite Israeli media outlets clearly stating that this is what they were told by a senior official in a private briefing.
So are we about to see a wave of mea culpas, or at least a modicum of self-reflection, from all those who peddled the line that the death toll was not to be trusted? Do not bank on it. In fact, some of them already appear to be shifting the goalposts, arguing that while the overall death toll of 70,000 might be accurate, what actually matters is the ratio of civilians to militants among them, which they claim is comparatively low for urban warfare.
Throughout the war, Israeli leaders have cited a civilian casualty ratio as low as 1:1, or, more recently, 1.5:1, and now they allege that militants account for as many as 25,000 of Gaza’s dead. However, these claims, too, fall apart under basic scrutiny.
To understand why, you need only consider whom the Israeli army defines as a militant. After invading the strip in late 2023, the army began establishing militarized areas that it referred to as “kill zones” with arbitrary and often invisible boundaries, inside which they would automatically kill any Palestinian who entered, including children — and retroactively label them as terrorists. (This currently includes the roughly 60 percent of Gaza’s territory that the Israeli army still occupies despite the ceasefire.)
The army’s own data prove it. In August last year, +972 magazine (where I am deputy editor) and the Guardian published a joint investigation revealing the existence of a classified Israeli intelligence database that maintains updated information on the status of every Palestinian in Gaza whom, through a combination of mass surveillance and artificial intelligence algorithms, Israel suspects to be a militant belonging to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. According to data we obtained from this database in May last year, Israel had killed fewer than 9,000 militants at a time when the health ministry’s overall death toll stood at 53,000.
The database, therefore, indicated that 83 percent of Gaza’s dead were civilians, pointing to a civilian casualty ratio with few parallels in modern warfare that adds further weight to accusations of genocide leveled at Israel by the UN, human rights groups and leading genocide academics. (The army stated in response that “figures presented in the article are incorrect,” without denying the existence of the database and without specifying which data it disputed.)
And that is if we are going by the health ministry’s figures, which do not include the roughly 10,000 bodies still thought to be under the rubble; nor do they include “indirect” deaths from starvation, disease, hypothermia and treatable health conditions, which often exceed “direct” deaths in war zones. Indeed, various scientific studies conducted throughout the war have estimated that the true death toll from Israel’s onslaught might have gone well beyond 100,000.
While we will not know for certain how high the death toll since Oct. 7, 2023, really is until Israel stops bombing Gaza and preventing the local and international media from being able to report freely across the strip, there is one thing we can be sure of: the climate of denial regarding the health ministry’s figures helped Israel keep slaughtering Palestinians en masse with impunity.
Ben Reiff is deputy editor at +972 magazine
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