In the grisly math of the Israel-Hamas war, conflicting counts of combatants and civilians killed in Gaza are emerging — with the ratio perhaps more important to shaping international opinion of the monthlong conflict than any final toll.
The United Nations and rights groups operating in Gaza say about three-quarters of the nearly 1,900 Palestinians killed were civilians, including 450 children, with many perishing in strikes that killed several family members at a time.
Israel estimates that 40-50 percent of those killed in Gaza were fighters.
While the overall count is not in great dispute, those doing tallies use different methods and standards to make that all important determination of who is a civilian.
The U.N. and human rights groups rely on witness accounts and community contacts of field researchers to distinguish civilians from combatants.
Mahmoud AbuRahma, of the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, said his researchers require at least two sources and count on their local ties to determine if someone were a combatant or civilian.
For its part, Israel has said it uses its own intelligence reports to determine who among the dead belonged to Hamas or other militant groups.
The ratio of civilians to combatants could be used by either side to promote their narrative of what took place in the conflict.
Israel faces growing international criticism over the large number of civilians killed in Gaza, with President Barack Obama and U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon both saying Israel could do much more to prevent harm to noncombatants.
Ban said this week that “the massive deaths and destruction in Gaza have shocked and shamed the world.”
In explaining the civilian casualties, Israel has accused Gaza fighters of launching attacks from crowded residential areas.
Brig. Gen. Mickey Adelstein, a senior Israeli army commander, said forces under his command “avoided attacking many, many targets” because civilians were present and that “Hamas took advantage of that issue.”
Adelstein told reporters Thursday the military estimated that between 1,700 and 2,000 Palestinians had been killed, but that Israel didn’t have the names of all the dead yet.
He said the number of dead militants was being underreported.
In one set of 300 names classified as civilians, “at least 50 percent were … members of the Hamas terrorist movement,” he said, declining to give further details on exactly who made that classification.
Hamas has a military and a political wing, along with thousands of civil servants who worked in the outgoing Hamas government in Gaza.
Adelstein said he was referring to those who are involved in Hamas military activities, not civil servants. He said the Hamas military wing also has reservists, who have full-time civilian jobs.
The initial source of information about deaths in the war has been the Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza. The ministry has become more efficient in collecting data over the years, learning from two previous rounds of fighting in 2008-2009 and in 2012, said Ashraf al-Kidra, the keeper of the statistics.
Overall, there has been little discrepancy between al-Kidra’s count and that of the human rights groups, which say they check his figures against their own research.
About the Author