By Matthew Mpoke Bigg
Israel’s military has said that it had killed or captured around 14,000 combatants in the Gaza Strip since the war there began more than nine months ago, an unverifiable and ambiguous number that gives a measure of Israel’s assessment of its progress toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated goal of destroying Hamas.
In a statement on social media Tuesday, the Israeli military also said that it had eliminated half the leadership of Hamas’ military wing, the Qassam Brigades, and that among those killed were 20 commanders of battalions, the largest grouping of Hamas’ forces, and 150 company commanders.
It said that it had struck 37,000 targets in Gaza from the air and more than 25,000 sites that it described as terrorist infrastructure and launch sites during the war. That figure did not appear to equate to the number of airstrikes, since some targets have been struck multiple times.
Israel has only occasionally released overall numbers for the toll the war has taken. It has previously said that it has killed more than 14,000 of Hamas’ estimated 25,000 fighters, and in March, Netanyahu was quoted in an interview with Axel Springer, the parent company of Politico, as saying that some 13,000 “terrorists” had been killed.
In its latest report, the military gave little detail about the 14,000 people it called terrorists who it said were killed or captured through late June.
A military spokesperson gave no additional details when asked how many of the 14,000 had been apprehended and how many killed. The military also did not say how it had arrived at that number or how it had distinguished combatants from civilians.
Critics of the war contend that Israel is too quick to identify any man killed as a fighter.
Throughout the war, there has been heated debate about how many people have died in Gaza, what proportion of those were fighters, and how many combatants Hamas has left.
The Gaza Health Ministry on Tuesday said that more than 38,000 people had been killed in Gaza since the start of the conflict, and nearly 90,000 others had been injured. The ministry does not offer separate counts of fighters and noncombatants, but it has said consistently that most of the dead have been civilians.
Just as with the numbers cited by Israel, there was no way to independently confirm the ministry’s. Those numbers also showed that the rate of deaths in the war had slowed in recent months.
While the health ministry’s tally is broadly accepted, its ability to keep records has been undermined by the severe damage to the health sector caused by Israeli airstrikes and fighting, and some experts have questioned elements of the ministry’s methodology and data. The ministry has periodically cautioned that there are doubtless bodies under the ruins of collapsed buildings that have not been found and added to the toll.
The ministry has at times published names of the dead, and in April, it listed nearly 25,000 people it said it had identified, which showed that 60% of those killed were women, children and the elderly. In December, Israeli news media quoted military officials as saying that two-thirds of the dead in Gaza were civilians.
Hamas has taken advantage of the urban areas in Gaza to provide its fighters and weapons infrastructure with an extra layer of protection, running tunnels under neighborhoods, launching rockets near civilian homes and holding hostages in city centers. Ghazi Hamad, a senior Hamas official, has said that the group tries to keep Palestinian civilians out of harm’s way.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken this week expressed “serious concerns” about civilian casualties to two top Israeli officials and said that while they have come down as a percentage of the overall total, they still remain “unacceptably high.”
In a separate graphic, the military named the Hamas battalion commanders it said it had eliminated. Military experts say Israel has been largely successful in degrading the main units of Hamas’ fighting force. The dead included Marwan Issa, the deputy commander of Hamas’ military wing in Gaza and a presumed mastermind of the Oct. 7 attack, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in March.
But it did not include as a confirmed casualty Muhammad Deif, the elusive leader of Hamas’ military wing, whom Israel targeted with airstrikes Saturday. Gaza’s Health Ministry said that at least 90 people were killed, about half of them women and children, and 300 were wounded in the attack.
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