IDF accepts 70,000+ killed in Gaza campaign

Dr Brian Brivati, Executive Director, Britain Palestine Project

On January 29, 2026, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) privately briefed Israeli journalists that about 70,000 Palestinians were killed in Gaza during the war – a figure that aligns with the Gaza Health Ministry’s tally. Throughout the over two-year conflict (sparked by Hamas’s October 2023 massacre of Israelis), Israeli officials had dismissed the Gaza ministry’s death counts as “Hamas propaganda,” often deriding these numbers as wildly exaggerated or unreliable. Pro-Israeli groups even published “research” seeking to debunk the figures. A senior IDF official acknowledged the same numbers were accurate. This figure excludes thousands more buried under rubble and missing – and the IDF said they are still researching how many of those killed were combatants. Previously the IDF has only offered counts of Hamas combatants killed. The Gaza Health Ministry’s latest records listed 71,667 killed (not including over 10,000 missing under debris) – a toll the IDF now concedes is “largely accurate”. The IDF’s own prior claims indicate more than two-thirds of the dead were non-combatants. This new acceptance refutes the IDF’s previous claims of seeking to minimise civilian casualties and supports the allegation that a much higher level of civilian causality was built into the battle plan for Gaza.

One might expect such a horrific death toll – now confirmed by the Israeli military itself – to trigger national soul-searching or at least front-page headlines. But the news barely registered in Israel. Haaretz was the notable exception: their headline “The IDF Admits It Killed 70,000 Gazans. What Other Accusations Could Turn Out to Be True?” and urged the public to ask what this “belated recognition” says about the government’s credibility. Haaretz’s editorial directly challenged Israelis to reckon with the mass killing done in their name. But most major Israeli Hebrew and English outlets downplayed or ignored the story. Most outlets attended the briefing but, Haaretz aside, initially ignored the story. Yedioth Ahronoth, a leading Hebrew newspaper, mentioned the 70,000 number only in passing deep inside an article on diplomatic maneuvers. Ynet (its online platform) published a short piece late at night, and TV news shows did not feature the story as a headline.

Gaza’s Civilian Toll in Global Context

Since October 2023, a central legal and ethical debate has emerged over what level of civilian harm the IDF has treated as “acceptable” in Gaza. Investigations revealed that immediately after 7 October the IDF loosened its rules of engagement, allowing strikes on lower-level Hamas targets even where commanders anticipated the deaths of up to 20 civilians, a threshold far higher than those typically used by US or UK forces, before partially tightening these rules again under international pressure (New York Times, reported in Times of Israel, Dec 2024). While Israel argues this complies with international humanitarian law (IHL) because proportionality weighs civilian harm against concrete military advantage and because Hamas embeds itself among civilians, legal scholars dispute this interpretation. Academic analysis stresses that proportionality is not about aggregate “kill ratios” but about ex-ante judgments for each attack, and argues that strikes such as Jabaliya indicate a tolerance for civilian casualties far exceeding accepted allied practice . UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese and other legal scholars further contend that Israel’s expansive classification of “military-age males” as combatants and rhetoric emphasising “maximum damage” blur the civilian–combatant distinction and risk violating IHL’s core protective purpose. Together, this literature suggests that while the IDF claims legal compliance, a substantial body of peer-reviewed and expert legal analysis views its post-October 2023 civilian casualty tolerance as pushing – and potentially exceeding – the lawful and ethical limits of proportionality. By accepting the +70,000 deaths figure, which includes 20,000 children, the IDF has also now confirmed that the IDF was exceeding the lawful limits of proportionality.

Moreover, the human cost in Gaza is not only enormous in absolute terms – it is disproportionately higher than in other recent conflicts, whether measured by the share of civilians among the dead or by the percentage of the population killed. comparing kill ratios is a gruesome business but the IDF claims, as discussed above, that its kill ratio is low so it matters. It is absurd to compare civilian to combatant kill ratios to World War Two, as some Israeli politicians have tried to do, because of obvious contextual differences. Recent conflicts do provide some comparative validity in trying to grasp the scale:

• Gaza (2023–2025): Over 70,000 Palestinians killed, and counting, out of 2.3 million people (~3% of the population). By Israel’s own estimates, over two-thirds of those killed were civilians, and other data indicate the civilian percentage may be even higher. This civilian toll (tens of thousands of women, children, and non-combatant men) is unprecedented in such a short span for a territory of this size.

• Syria (2011–2021): The UN Human Rights Office estimates 306,887 Syrian civilians were killed in the first decade of war – about 1.5% of Syria’s pre-war population. Even including fighters on all sides, the total death toll in Syria (perhaps 500,000–600,000) amounts to roughly 2–3% of the population after ten+ years of fighting. The civilian share of Syrian casualties (on the order of 70%) is grievous, yet still proportionately lower than Gaza’s slaughter.

• Iraq (2003–present): In 20 years of conflict since the 2003 invasion, approximately 187,000–211,000 Iraqi civilians have been documented killed by the Iraq body count project. Their data indicates civilians comprise roughly two-thirds of ~300,000 total violent deaths (including combatants) in that period. Iraq’s population is much larger; the civilian death toll equals well under 1% of Iraq’s population, and total war deaths about 1% as well.

• Afghanistan (2001–2021): The 20-year war in Afghanistan caused an estimated 46,000 civilian deaths, out of ~176,000 total people killed (including Afghan soldiers and insurgents) according to the Costs of War project Afghanistan’s population (~35–40 million) means civilian fatalities were on the order of 0.1–0.2% of the populace, and about 25–30% of total deaths.

• Ukraine (2022–present): Russia’s full-scale invasion has been extraordinarily bloody, but the brunt has been borne by soldiers. As of early 2025, roughly 12,700 civilians have been killed in Ukraine (UN-verified)– that is about 0.03% of Ukraine’s population. By contrast, military fatalities on both sides likely number in the tens of thousands each.

Based on the figures cited here, Gaza’s war stands out for an extremely high civilian-to-combatant “kill ratio”: roughly 3:1 or higher, with civilians estimated at ~74–83% of those killed (about five in six at the upper end). That proportion exceeds even Syria’s early-war pattern (~71% civilians, about 2.4:1) and contrasts sharply with conflicts where combatants made up most deaths—Afghanistan (~25–30% civilians, roughly 0.3:1) and especially Ukraine (~4–5% civilians, around 1:20).

The “Contract of Mutual Indifference”

How could a civilised society, the “only democracy in the middle east” with the most “humanitarian army in the world”, absorb the massacre of 70,000 people next door and mostly look away? To political philosopher Norman Geras, this disturbing phenomenon reflects what he termed the “contract of mutual indifference.” Geras coined this concept after studying bystander inaction during the Holocaust. It describes an unspoken social pact in which people agree not to intervene in others’ suffering so long as their own group remains safe. In Geras’s words: “If you do not come to the aid of others who are under grave assault… you cannot reasonably expect others to come to your aid in a similar emergency; you cannot consider them so obligated to you… I call this the contract of mutual indifference.”. In other words, each society tacitly consents to ignore atrocities befalling other people, effectively saying: “Your pain is not my problem – just as mine, if it comes, will be no concern of yours.”

In Geras’s formulation, this unspoken contract is “reciprocal and dark”: it is essentially a pact of mutual abandonment, maintained not by overt hatred but by habit, distance, and denial. During the Holocaust, Geras noted, most people were neither perpetrators nor rescuers; they were bystanders who “accepted that what was happening was not their concern.” A vivid wartime testimony from the Warsaw Ghetto captures this indifference: “And the people?… For me they all had one face, an empty one… Behind the wall. It just did not concern them.”. The “wall” – in that case literal, in other cases metaphorical – enables atrocity to be observed yet remain abstract and tolerable. So long as suffering is kept on the far side of a wall, physical or mental, the bystander can acknowledge people are dying “over there” while feeling no obligation to intervene. In Geras’s words, the bystander “does not deny that people are dying; [they] deny that this death imposes a duty.”

Gaza can be seen as a contemporary embodiment of this bystander’s comfort. It is a sealed territory, cordoned off by concrete barriers and decades of blockade, and subjected to intensive surveillance and bombardment – all while the world watches from a distance. The wall around Gaza is not only physical; it is juridical, political, and psychological. It allows global spectators and two thirds of Israelis to see the carnage yet tell themselves it is “not our concern” or indeed to support it. Civilian casualties were not exactly a secret – the Gaza Health Ministry’s daily reports of mounting dead, including thousands of children, were widely available and galvanised much global public opinion– but for months these numbers were treated as “contested” or “politicised,” . That manufactured doubt served as “moral insulation,” postponing any pressure to respond. As long as the toll was debated, liberal conscience could remain intact: one must not interfere without certainty, and certainty was conveniently elusive. In Geras’s analysis, modern liberal individualism can provide an “alibi of non-interference.” By elevating personal autonomy and insisting that helping others is supererogatory unless one is directly responsible, liberal culture often normalises indifference to distant suffering. The plight of “strangers” – however extreme – is treated as “someone else’s problem” unless a clear duty can be established. This mindset has characterised by the Israeli response to Gaza’s agony. It can be equally applied to the West Bank and to the system of apartheid within Israel itself.

Many western governments have also tried to view Gaza’s agony as a remote spectacle even as unprecedented numbers of citizens have refused to be indifferent to what has happened. But the silent public response in Israel to Gaza’s mass casualties shows the level of post-7^th October moral inertia. Israelis, for the most part, did not feel personally implicated by Palestinian deaths beyond the wall as they do not feel it for the many 100s killed by settlers in the West Bank. This mutual indifference – a pact to not feel obligated by the extreme suffering of others – helps explain the lack of outrage in Israel when the 70,000 figure was confirmed. It is ironic that Geras warned that such indifference was endemic in modern liberal democracies, allowing even massive crimes to go unchallenged so long as they happen to “them” and not “us”. Ironic because the citizens of many liberal democracies have not been indifferent to Gaza, while 70% of the citizens of Israeli’s supposedly liberal democracy supported the war of revenge after the Hamas massacres of 7^th October and seem to have taken their own militaries confirmation of the killing of over 50,000 civilians in their collective stride.

Breaking out of this moral apathy, Geras argues, requires more than just knowledge of the facts – it requires embracing an obligation toward strangers in peril. He suggests that only by asserting a universal “duty to bring aid” to people in extreme need can we escape the contract of indifference. In the Gaza context, this would mean Israelis (and all of us) recognising responsibility for civilians under bombardment and acting (or at least speaking out) accordingly. Sadly, absent that sense of duty, even the most horrifying truths can be met with collective silence. As long as society at large feels no moral obligation to the victims, the mere revelation of mass death changes nothing – a dynamic Geras chillingly captured.