Israeli intelligence services have studied civilian casualty figures released by the Hamas-run Ministry of Health in Gaza and concluded the figures were generally accurate, despite earlier public claims by U.S. and Israeli officials that the ministry’s statistics are manipulated.
According to a story in Mekomit by Yuval Avraham, who last year broke news about the Israeli military’s use of AI for targeting purposes, the numbers were accepted for inclusion in briefings to senior Israeli officials after intelligence services conducted operations and analysis to monitor the health ministry’s information collection methods and its internal communications and determined the statistics were credible. An Israeli intelligence official confirmed the Israeli government’s use of the Gaza ministry numbers to VICE News, while two officials from European intelligence services said they were widely used in official briefings internationally.
Videos by VICE
“The numbers are heavily relied up for official briefings on civilian casualties because with the exception of strikes on high-value targets, where senior officials are briefed on collateral damage, no civilian casualty figures or estimates are collected,” said the Israeli official, who cannot be identified in the media. “A lot of targets have been hit without prior analysis or estimates and there’s never any follow up collection.”
“You don’t know exactly how many you killed, and who you killed,” an IDF military targeter told Mekomit.
The Israeli official told VICE News that in the current military operation, which has destroyed most of Gaza’s infrastructure and displaced about two-thirds of its population, the rules of engagement for IDF’s artillery and airborne assets have been loosened, leading to thousands more strikes than typically conducted in past Gaza operations.
“The secret services looked at the health ministry’s collection methods and determined the numbers were generally credible, so instead of collecting their own information they decided to use the [Hamas] numbers.”
“There’s no possibility of collecting exact data in this situation but their system is generally transparent and credible,” said the Israeli official. “But only with civilian deaths, Hamas deaths simply aren’t reported.”
According to the Ministry of Health, which reports to Gaza’s Hamas-led government, at least 27,500 civilians have been killed and more than 63,000 wounded since Israel began military operations in response to the Oct. 7 attacks, which killed at least 1100 Israelis and left more than 250 people hostage.
In the first weeks of the invasion, as civilian casualty figures began to rise to levels never seen in prior Arab-Israeli conflicts, the numbers of dead and wounded released by the health ministry became a focal point of criticism because of the association with Hamas. Pro-Israeli political interest groups and even U.S. President Joe Biden questioned the impartiality of the toll.
On Oct. 27, he told reporters that he had “no confidence in the number that the Palestinians are using.”
The top UN health agency defended its use of the data in a statement to Reuters.
”We continue to include their data in our reporting and it is clearly sourced,” the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in a statement in October.
In response to Biden’s claim, the health ministry released a list of 7,000 names of the dead that human rights researchers and journalists determined were credible.
Two intelligence officials from NATO countries told VICE News that privately the civilian casualty numbers released by the ministry in Gaza were accurate enough to be widely used in intelligence briefings throughout NATO.
“We brief these numbers… [Europe] plays a major funding role in the Gaza health system so we have visibility into these operations,” said one official on background. “The numbers cannot be perfectly accurate and there’s two caveats. First, [they] hold no insight into Hamas or other militant casualties. The second is that of course the true casualties are higher than any health ministry figures because there’s unrecovered bodies, half the strip is flattened by air strikes and there’s more dead under that rubble.”
The second official, who analyzes the Middle East for a NATO military intelligence service, said the use of open source health ministry data was “commonplace.”
“I’d be shocked if the Americans weren’t using the same data in all their briefings, everyone understands these numbers are our only way to judge the scale even if we know they won’t be precise,” said the official.
A senior U.S. official speaking on background refused to discuss the specific contents of top level briefings for U.S. officials on the situation in Gaza, but said intelligence analysis on the conflict used “all available data as part of the process.”
