A classified military intelligence database listed 47,653 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad fighters, with 8,900 marked as killed or probably killed. That represents less than one in five of the listed names and is far below publicly stated tallies of 17,000–20,000. An internal intelligence review judged the database may slightly undercount militant casualties, but concluded that the much higher public figures were inaccurate. The overwhelming majority of deaths and injuries in the Gaza war have been civilians. Israeli military leadership prioritized counting militant deaths as a metric of success, using a daily 'war dashboard' that officers watched like a football match.
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.
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.
Collection
[
|
...
]