Are almost all the Palestinians killed in Gaza innocent civilians?

“Israel has killed tens of thousands of Palestinians, almost all innocent civilians.”

The lie is in the last words: “almost all innocent civilians.” A large share of the dead were armed fighters. Before the October 2025 ceasefire the IDF had killed at least 22,000 Hamas and Islamic Jihad combatants in Gaza, besides about 1,600 more terrorists killed inside Israel on October 7, a category the Gaza health ministry’s raw count never separates out. On the total there is little dispute: by early 2026 an Israeli military assessment put the war’s dead near 70,000, close to the ministry’s figure. The argument is the civilian-to-combatant ratio, and urban-warfare experts call Israel’s historically low: West Point’s John Spencer puts it near one combatant to one or two civilians, against a modern urban-war norm that Colonel Richard Kemp sets near nine civilians per combatant. For two years of war in one of the most crowded places on earth, against an enemy that fights from homes, hospitals and schools, that toll is a fraction of other wars in the region: Syria’s civil war killed well over half a million. And it is the toll of an army that works to lower it: before striking, the IDF drops leaflets, sends mass texts and recorded phone calls, and uses non-explosive “roof-knock” munitions to warn people to leave first. And the sheer firepower makes the point by itself: US intelligence counted about 29,000 air-to-ground munitions dropped in the war’s first months alone, and far more since, on one of the densest strips of land on earth. Bomb a place that crowded meaning to kill civilians, and the dead run to the hundreds of thousands, as the Second World War’s area bombing did: Tokyo lost about 100,000 in a single night, Dresden roughly 25,000. Instead, after two years, the toll is near 70,000, a third of them fighters. You cannot drop that much ordnance and kill that comparatively few unless you are aiming. And though nearly half those munitions were unguided “dumb bombs” that critics call proof of recklessness, unguided is not unaimed: a bomb still falls where the plane points it, and were Israel not aiming, the toll would be far higher.

Origin of the claim

The phrase traces to a bureaucratic fact, not a single speech. From the war’s opening days in October 2023 the Gaza health ministry, a Hamas government body, released a running death toll with no breakdown between fighters and non-combatants. Wire services republished that undifferentiated number in daily updates, and within weeks it was being treated as a civilian count by default. Washington Institute researcher Gabriel Epstein documented the pattern as early as January 2024, showing the ministry’s figures undercounted military-age men relative to demographic norms, exactly what you would expect if fighters were folded into the “civilian” total rather than tallied apart. By 2025 the ministry began publishing a partial combatant breakdown under pressure, but Epstein’s follow-up assessment that May still found the civilian share had been overstated in the earlier reporting that had already shaped public opinion.

The evidence, examined

Stated at its strongest, the claim rests on the ministry’s own published total, and Israel does not dispute the broad death count, only its composition. That much is worth conceding: the scale of death in Gaza is not in serious dispute. Where the claim fails is the leap from “here is the total” to “and it is almost all civilians.” Israel’s own tally, cross-checked against Hamas’s own martyrdom announcements for its slain operatives, put combatant deaths above 22,000 by the October 2025 ceasefire, a figure the ministry’s headline number never subtracts. West Point’s Urban Warfare Project, run by retired US Army officer John Spencer, calculated a combatant-to-civilian ratio near one-to-one or one-to-two, a figure Spencer has called without precedent for modern urban combat, against historical norms that British colonel Richard Kemp puts near one combatant for every nine civilians. Set beside that norm, and beside the volume of ordnance dropped on one of the densest strips of land on earth, the ratio argues against, not for, an indiscriminate campaign.

Who repeats it today, and where

The line appears most in UN human rights statements, NGO reports, and campus and social-media activism, usually stripped of the ministry’s methodology or the combatants embedded among Gaza’s civilians. It is load-bearing for the broader genocide accusation: genocide requires intent to destroy a civilian population as such, so erasing the combatant share does necessary work for that charge. Wire coverage through 2023 and 2024 routinely labeled the ministry’s total “civilians killed” in headline and caption even when the story text hedged, and the framing had circulated for a year before outlets began appending combatant estimates. It also survives as an honest mistake: a large round number reads as a civilian count by default, because that is what death tolls conventionally mean, and the ministry’s releases did nothing to correct it.

The strongest objection, and where it fails

The best version of the objection: the IDF’s combatant count is a military assessment, not an independently audited figure, and identifying “combatants” in an irregular war fought by an organization that issues no uniforms is harder than counting a total.

That objection does not touch the claim under review. Even at the low end of the civilian estimates, tens of thousands of non-combatant Palestinians, including children, are dead, and no ratio erases that toll. But the question was never whether the war cost civilian lives. It is whether “almost all” of the dead were civilians, and whether the toll shows a campaign aimed at civilians rather than at an enemy fighting from among them. On that question, the ratio, the proportionality record and the IDF’s own warning campaign point the same way: this was not a campaign that targeted civilians.

An army trying to kill everyone does not warn them first

Civilian deaths in this war are real and many, and every one is a tragedy; Israel does not dispute the broad total. But the slogan breaks on two facts: more than twenty thousand of the dead were armed combatants, and an army bent on genocide does not text and leaflet the enemy’s civilians to get out before it strikes. Genocide turns on the intent to destroy a people; warning them out, at the cost of surprise and the lives of your own soldiers, is the proof of the opposite.