On August 21, 2025, a Guardian-led investigation reported that a classified Israeli military intelligence database listed 8,900 named fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as dead or probably dead in May, when Gaza's health authorities said the overall Palestinian death toll had reached 53,000. On that arithmetic, fighters accounted for roughly 17 percent of the dead, implying that about 83 percent were civilians.
The database, according to the report, was one of the main internal tools used by Israeli officers for wartime planning. It listed 47,653 Palestinians considered active in the military wings of Hamas and PIJ and was based on internal documents seized in Gaza. The journalists said those documents had not been independently verified, but intelligence sources familiar with the database told them the military treated it as the authoritative tally of militant casualties.
The Israeli military's public response did not clarify the matter. The Guardian said the army did not dispute the existence of the database or the Hamas and PIJ death figures when first approached through Local Call and +972 Magazine. When asked again, the military said the numbers were incorrect, but it did not specify which figures it disputed. It also said the numbers did not reflect data in IDF systems, without identifying those systems or explaining the discrepancy.
The investigation argued that the ratio was unusually high by modern-war standards. Therése Pettersson of the Uppsala Conflict Data Program said that such a proportion of civilians among the dead would be unusual over a long war, even if similar numbers could appear in a single battle or city. The report compared Gaza's civilian toll with conflicts in Syria, Sudan, Srebrenica, Rwanda and Mariupol, where civilian death rates were also extreme.
The piece also noted that both data sets could undercount casualties. Gaza's health ministry records only bodies that have been recovered, while Israeli intelligence may not know about every militant death or every new recruit. Even so, the report said the databases were the ones used in military planning, and that soldiers in Gaza could report kills without identification or verification. One intelligence source said people were often promoted to terrorist status after death, while another former general argued that public figures had little connection to battlefield reality.
Taken together, the report showed how far apart official Israeli claims and internal intelligence records may be. It also exposed the limits of public casualty debates in Gaza: one side's military estimates can be overstated, the other side's health ministry numbers can be incomplete, and the gap between them can shape the war's politics, its legal debate and the way the conflict is understood outside the battlefield.
