‘We didn’t understand the goals of the war’: Israel’s inflated Hamas death toll shows lack of strategy in Gaza | Israel-Gaza war

As Israel gears up for a new offensive in Gaza, figures from a classified database suggest the country’s political and military leadership has for two years misled their country and the world about a war that has overwhelmingly killed civilians.

In May this year, Israel’s military intelligence database of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters had 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 more than double that number, varying between 17,000 and 20,000 for the same period.

An intelligence team reviewing militant casualties concluded that the database probably undercounted the total “by a little” but the significantly higher figures given publicly were “inaccurate”, several 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 their success.

Soon after the start of the war, Yossi Sariel, then the head of the elite 8200 intelligence unit, began sending a daily update on the toll in the form of a data graph, which was dubbed the “war dashboard”, several intelligence sources told the Guardian.

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 was 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.

Several sources said that inflating militant death tolls, figures frequently reported and amplified by the Israeli media, was seen by some in the military as a way to restore their standing in the eyes of the Israeli public after the failures of 7 October 2023.

But from a strategic perspective that attempt to measure military progress through a militant body count, amid an extremely high rate of civilian killing, was tactically unsound and self-defeating, a senior western military source said.

“They are just measuring the wrong statistic. They will never be able to kill everybody who is associated with Hamas, so what is the definition of victory?”

For nearly two years, Benjamin Netanyahu has said Israeli forces are in Gaza to “destroy Hamas”, an objective so vague it could be pursued almost indefinitely.

The military capacities that allowed the group to massacre 1,200 people in Israel in 2023 have been destroyed. All bar one of the leadership group who planned the 7 October attacks have been killed, as have many of their replacements.

Israel has reduced much of Gaza to a flattened wasteland, killed or injured one in 10 of the prewar population and forced the starving survivors into just 20% of Gaza’s area.

In that apocalyptic landscape, after intensive bombings and ground operations that have killed tens of thousands of civilians, most of the people listed in Israel’s database as Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters are still alive.

Israel defines and targets as militants many people who do not participate in combat, and are protected civilians under international law.

A specific piece of intelligence is attached to every operative on the list whom the army is sure it killed, justifying that designation, intelligence sources said. The Guardian, +972 and Local Call obtained figures without names or additional reports.

“Anybody that we have knowledge of their death, in any way whatsoever, will be documented there,” one source said. The document notes the confirmed deaths of 7,330 militants and records 1,570 as “probably dead”. There were 750 senior Hamas operatives in the database; 300 were labelled as certainly or probably killed.

Comparing the military database with the casualty list compiled by the Gaza health ministry indicates Israel killed five civilians for each militant inside Gaza. Mass killing is one factor cited by scholars, lawyers and rights groups, who say Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.

True death toll is higher

Both the military database and the health ministry casualty list are underestimates.

Israel’s military intelligence teams are aware they had not identified all militants and do not know of every death, sources with knowledge of the database said. But their estimates still indicated that “for each militant, four civilians were killed”.

The casualty list published by the health ministry includes only those whose bodies have been recovered, not the thousands buried under the rubble. Peer-reviewed international research also indicates a significantly higher toll.

Yet Netanyahu, who is wanted by the international criminal court over allegations of war crimes, is promising that another ground operation in Gaza City – which would inevitably bring further mass killings of Palestinian civilians – will allow the military to “seize control of the last terrorist strongholds” and defeat Hamas.

The western military source said: “What we are seeing now is another throw of a losing dice. Because this is not going to work. It’s going to be more of the same.

“There is no way that any of this is going to lead to any situation where you could possibly apply the word victory. It’s gratuitous violence for no military point at all.”

Hamas now has just a handful of rockets that it would struggle to deploy and its fighters would not easily get near the border fence, much less through it. It does not pose an existential threat to Israel, according to Israeli and Palestinian experts.

“They have lost the ability to threaten Israel itself for the next one to two decades minimum,” said Muhammad Shehada, an analyst at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

But if fighting continues in Gaza, Hamas could have time and manpower on its side. Israel’s military is structured to fight conventional armies in short wars, mobilising from reserves. Growing numbers of reservists are now refusing to report for duty, and the military is considering an appeal to the diaspora.

“Hamas can maintain a long-term insurgency in Gaza, because it doesn’t take much: all they need is rifles and anti-tank weapons,” Shehada said. “If they recycle the Israeli bombs that didn’t explode there is an endless supply of explosives, and the genocide provides an infinite recruiting pool for new members.”

American intelligence estimates suggest Hamas has recruited 15,000 operatives during the war, about twice as many as Israel has killed.

Public claims of a death toll approaching 20,000 have also been criticised by rightwing figures inside Israel. The retired general Itzhak Brik, a confidant of Netanyahu at the start of the war but now a fierce critic, believes even the 8,900 figure is an exaggeration.

The focus on the death toll offered a dangerous incentive to lie, he said, describing the much higher toll as “one of the most serious bluffs” in the country’s history.

In April 2024, several members of the Knesset’s foreign affairs and defense committee questioned militant casualty figures presented to them by the army, the rightwing daily Israel Hayom reported.

After examining the military’s data, the committee members found public estimates had inflated the number of militant casualties “in order to create a 2:1 ratio” between civilian and militant deaths.

Their findings echo numbers in the militant database seen by the Guardian. The list is based on Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad documents from before and after 7 October and extensive research. It includes thousands of militants the army believes were recruited after the start of the war.

The Israeli military did not dispute the existence of the database or the casualty data when approached for comment by Local Call and +972. When the Guardian asked for comment on the same data, a spokesperson said they had decided to “rephrase” their response.

In a statement to the Guardian the military did not directly address questions about the intelligence database. It said “figures presented in the article are incorrect”, without specifying the data it disputed. A spokesperson did not respond when asked why the military had given different responses to questions about a single set of data.