Israeli media has reported that a senior security source has admitted that the IDF accepts the Gaza Health Ministry’s death toll figure, which reports more than 70,000 Palestinians have been killed during Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
The Israel authorities, the Israel Defence Force (IDF), and pro-Israel lobbyists in the West have all previously cast doubt on Gaza’s figures which they say have been greatly exaggerated by the “Hamas-run health ministry.”
But the ministry’s figures have been deemed reliable by the United Nations and many other human rights organisations throughout the entire conflict, meaning that the Gaza death toll remains widely cited across international media despite relentless Israeli complaints.
Tel Aviv’s stance on the figures was cited before last year’s ceasefire, with its claim that around 23,000 Palestinian combatants had been killed in the war. The IDF had previously claimed two or three civilians had been killed for every dead “militant.”
But now a senior military source has indicated to Israeli journalists, including those from Haaretz and the Times of Israel, that the total number given by the Gaza Health Ministry is largely accurate, even though they have not been able to break down how many were combatants and how many died as a direct result of the fighting.
Following the latest Israeli media reports, a military official said the details published did not reflect official IDF data. “Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels,” the IDF official said.
Israeli leaders, including senior military figures, have always denied targeting civilians on purpose despite overwhelming evidence of war crimes and long running accusations of genocide.
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Genocide apologists exposed
For the past two years, pro-Israel forces in the media and on social media have attacked the alarmingly high death toll figure as a vicious antisemitic “blood libel” invented by activists trying to bolster claims of a genocide.
Hamas is a proscribed group in several Western countries which makes it easier for Israel lobby groups to smear critics of Israel as antisemites or “terrorist sympathisers.”
A UK-based Islamophobic think tank, The Henry Jackson Society, argued early on via a “study” claiming that the numbers from Gaza are not only “unreliable but also deliberately misleading.”
The health ministry “has systematically inflated the death toll by failing to distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths, over-reporting fatalities among women and children and even including individuals who died before the conflict began,” the report said.
According to Andrew Fox, the report’s lead author, nearly half of those killed in Gaza are combatants, directly contradicting claims that the vast majority of casualties are civilians.
“You can’t say it’s a genocide when half the people that have died are combatants who are still fighting,” Fox told The Algemeiner in 2024.
Another prominent example would be Natasha Hausdorff, Director of UK Lawyers for Israel, who has been a vocal sceptic of the Gaza Health Ministry’s casualty figures.
She argued during an interview with the Jewish Independent that the ministry failed to correct inflated initial casualty reports, such as over deaths in the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital explosion, and noted that the ministry does not distinguish between civilians and combatants which, she claims, to obscure combatant deaths within the total tally.
In late October 2023, President Biden publicly questioned the credibility of Gaza death toll figures because they derive from the “Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza,” saying he had “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”
The new admission reported in Israeli media will be seen as further evidence among pro-Palestine experts and activists that Israel supporters are waging a war of misinformation online amid global outrage over their crimes against the Palestinian people.
The revelation with likely further damage the credibility of Israel’s claims and fuel the rising mistrust global of Israeli approved narratives.
