Israel has maintained for months that its bombing raids on Gaza were “precise,” that “half the dead were combatants,” and that civilian casualties were “unavoidable.” Evidence from the Bearing Witness Project, independent casualty audits, and epidemiological modeling show that Israel has lied about all three. Israel has always known exactly who it was killing.
Internal audits of Gaza’s public health data revealed the scale of Israel’s murderous campaign of annihilation. When the Israeli Defense Forces quietly investigated the fatality list published by the Gaza Ministry of Health in January, their findings demonstrated that ‘most names on the list were in fact real people.’ Their very existence disproves claims that Gaza’s figures are inflated.
Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) has independently audited the 40,717 names on that list and found that ‘at least 74% are civilians,’ a figure that almost certainly understates the actual number.
A breakdown of these casualties reveals why this does not support the claim that ‘half the dead were combatants.’
Since more than half the dead were women, girls, young boys, and elderly men, who are officially categorized as non-combatants, there can be no justification for Israel’s bombardment of Gaza
Independent epidemiological modeling of the war’s death toll also challenges Israel’s central claim. According to a study published in late 2024 in Frontiers in Public Health, ‘only 12.7% of the deaths… would be combatants… during the 2023 conflict.’ In other words, nearly 9 out of every 10 casualties in Gaza were civilians, including a frightening number of children. ‘The index of killing civilians,’ the study noted, ‘peaked at 7.01,’ meaning that, for every combatant killed in the war, 7.1 civilians died, most of them at the hands of the Israeli military. These figures reveal that Israel was not simply committing “collateral damage” in its war on Hamas; it was deliberately targeting civilians with its bombing raids, seeking to kill as many Palestinians in Gaza as possible.
This conclusion is supported by the Bearing Witness Project’s meticulous review of Israel’s documentation of the war, much of which will almost certainly be presented as evidence before any war crimes tribunal. In its research for this project, Bearing Witness found that ‘Israel greatly exaggerated the number of Hamas militants killed in attacks in order to improve the ratio of combatants to civilians killed’ in its bombing raids. It also found that ‘Israel dismissed the Gaza Ministry of Health’s official list of deaths as misleading’ because Israeli planners used this very list to determine the number of civilians and combatants who had been killed in airstrikes.
Israel’s desire to portray its war on Hamas as “precise” was a reaction to its overwhelming use of mass bombardment to end the Hamas-led attack on Israeli civilians. By inflating the number of “combatants” in its cross-border strikes, Israel attempted to disguise its policy of annihilating entire neighborhoods as “humane”—to hide from the world the true scale of its massacre of innocents and defend itself from scrutiny at home and abroad.
According to Bearing Witness research, as of mid-2025, Israeli strikes on Gaza have killed at least 57,012 Palestinians, including 17,121 children.
The number of Palestinians killed in Israel’s “precise” airstrikes is far higher than the number of combatants actually present in Gaza, which means that Israel committed one of the most horrific massacres in modern memory. Even more concerning is the fact that these numbers—documented by Israel itself and accessible to its policymakers—are only part of the tragedy. According to the Bearing Witness data, 1,206 Palestinian families were killed, with children among the victims. This stream of death and destruction, which has devastated thousands of families, would have been known to Israel’s military planners, who persist in their claims that “half the dead were combatants.” Israel violated not only the humanitarian principles but also the international laws of war by committing this massacre. And now it must answer for its crimes. Not only did Israel commit one of the largest massacres in modern history, it has shown the world its true, calculating nature. Israel deliberately committed tens of thousands of civilian casualties in its bombing raids on Gaza, including a frightening number of children, in an effort to obscure its crimes by claiming that half the dead were combatants.
