Guardian '83%' civilian death toll claim is farcical

A Guardian cover story promoted a claim so clearly false that even those of us who are rarely shocked anymore by what’s published at the anti-Zionist project are scratching our heads over the failure of editors to do the most basic fact-checking.

The Aug. 21 report, which is described as a “joint investigation by the Guardian, the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call”, was written by Emma Graham-Harrison, the Guardian’s chief Middle East correspondent, and Yuval Abraham from +972.

The claim in the headline, which was used as the cover story both in the print and online versions, alleges that Israeli data shows that “83% of Gaza war dead are civilians“, which is based on the text in the opening paragraphs:

Figures from a classified Israeli military intelligence database indicate five out of six Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in Gaza have been civilians, an extreme rate of slaughter rarely matched in recent decades of warfare.

As of May, 19 months into the war, Israeli intelligence officials listed 8,900 named fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as dead or “probably dead”

At that time 53,000 Palestinians had been killed by Israeli attacks, according to health authorities in Gaza, a toll that included combatants and civilians. Fighters named in the Israeli military intelligence database accounted for just 17% of the total, which indicates that 83% of the dead were civilians.

That apparent ratio of civilians to combatants among the dead is extremely high for modern warfare, even compared with conflicts notorious for indiscriminate killing, including the Syrian and Sudanese civil wars.

The investigation, replete with charts and other visuals purportedly illustrating that “the apparent ratio of civilians to combatants among the dead” is one of “the worst in modern warfare”, is based on a truly absurd calculation: asserting that the 8,900 listed names of terrorists killed necessarily represent every terrorist death. So, by subtracting 8,900 from the Hamas ministry’s tally in May, which was 53,000, the article insists, we learn that the ratio of civilians killed by Israel is at 83%.

The 8,900 figure, however, based on the language used in their own report, narrowly represents the terrorists whose names are known to the IDF – not, crucially, the total number of terrorists killed since Oct. 7, 2023.  In other words, their logic depends upon the bizarre premise that if a Palestinian killed in Gaza is not marked as dead on a particular IDF list of named terrorists killed, they are necessarily a civilian.  The Guardian ignores the fact that thousands of other fighters from Hamas, PIJ and other armed groups of largely lower ranks who have NOT been named by the IDF have also been killed.

Tellingly, the Guardian omits a key paragraph from +972’s version of the story, which conveys this very point:

The intelligence sources explained that the total number of militants killed is likely higher than the number recorded in the internal database, since it does not include Hamas or PIJ operatives who were killed but could not be identified by name, Gazans who took part in fighting but were not officially members of Hamas or PIJ, nor political figures in Hamas such as mayors and government ministers whom Israel also considers legitimate targets (in violation of international law).

The Guardian version, by contrast, published a truncated version of that key information, writing that “Israeli military intelligence are not aware of all militant deaths or all new recruits”.  However, even those fourteen words reveal a self-evident and intuitive admission which undermines the entire premise of their article.

As Eylon Levy observed, it’s amazing that the IDF can name nearly 9,000 combatants it’s killed during the war, before expressing his skepticism that anyone in the media ever asked members of the international coalition fighting ISIS if they knew the names of thousands of dead jihadists.

However, the Guardian doesn’t stop with the 83% civilian to combatant lie. They go further, writing that “the Gaza ministry of health lists only people whose bodies have been recovered, not the thousands buried under rubble.”.  The accusation, which the Guardian presents as a fact, that thousands of Palestinians killed during the war are still “buried beneath the rubble”, promoted by Hamas and the UN, has been bandied around for well over a year – a claim bereft of evidence.

The outlet also omits publicly available information which would contradict their desired take-away, such as an IDF statement, which was reported a day before the Guardian article, that roughly 22,000 Gaza terrorists have been killed thus far.  So, given that the Hamas-run Gaza health ministry (MOH) puts the total death toll at 62,000, that puts the civilian to combatant death ratio at roughly 2 to 1.  According to John Spencer, Executive Director of the Urban Warfare Institute, this ratio would represent an unprecedentedly low civilian casualty rate for such dense, urban fighting – particularly in light of Hamas’s human shield strategy.

Indeed, as even Hamas’s (MOH) detailed casualty figures show, most of those killed have been combat-aged males.

“Rather than the hack approach taken by +972, a credible civilian/combatant ratio”, the HJS’s Andrew Fox wrote on his Substack site, “would (1) publish definitions of “combatant” up front (police, auxiliaries, political cadres), (2) triangulate the denominator (MoH rolls plus grave/morgue records and missing‑under‑rubble estimates) with intervals, (3) build a fighter numerator that goes beyond named lists such as unit after‑action reports, group obituaries, detainee interrogations, and probabilistic matching to capture unnamed militants, and (4) publish a replication scaffold so others can audit the pipeline.”

That, he observes, “is the difference between scholarship and activism”.

Indeed, a real media outlet whose journalists possessed professional integrity would at least have mentioned the alternative civilian to combatant death toll ratios we cited.  Once again, however, the outlet, whose coverage of the war, we’ve repeatedly demonstrated, has been effectively pro-Hamas, decided instead on another propagandistic tale of Israeli villainy – normal standards of Western journalism be damned.