As the IDF enters Gaza City for another new and major stage of the war, what does it mean that Herzi Halevi, who ran the vast majority of the war as IDF chief from October 2023 until March of this year, has admitted that to more than 200,000 Gazans - around 10% of the population - have been harmed by the war?
“This has not been a gentle war,” he said.
In context, Halevi seemed to be reassuring the Israelis he was speaking to off the record that the IDF had not held back against Hamas due to objections by military lawyers.
However, the comments take on a different character in the global debate about Israeli legitimacy and the IDF’s conduct of the war.
The Hamas Health Ministry’s latest numbers are around 65,000 killed and around 164,000 injured, meaning it sounds like Halevi is not far off.
IDF sources have said that Hamas’s numbers are biased and exaggerated – which they probably are – and that they also do not differentiate between Palestinian civilians and Hamas fighters or terrorists.
First, we can subtract around 22,000 Hamas forces killed by the IDF from the total.
Second, we can also subtract probably at least a few thousand Palestinian civilians who were killed by Hamas rocket misfires from October 2023 to January 2024.
By early 2024, The Jerusalem Post was also told that 15,000-20,000 Hamas fighters were injured. That number has doubtlessly grown quite a bit.
How many Hamas terrorists are left?
However, at the start of the war, the IDF said that Hamas had 24,000 fighters.
As the war developed, the military said that the terrorist group had 30,000 or maybe even 40,000 fighters.
In late 2024 and early 2025, it also said that Hamas had recruited thousands more.
In May 2024, one of the UN’s units said that other units were using numbers of deaths that were 10,000 more than the number of confirmed dead bodies.
All of this leaves an extremely unclear picture.
But even if 22,000 of those killed were Hamas, and a few thousand were killed by Palestinian misfires, and 20,000-30,000 of the wounded were also Hamas - at some point one runs into the ceiling number of 40,000-45,000 Hamas fighters.
Even if Hamas and the UN’s count were 10,000 off in May 2024 and maybe are 20,000 off now, the picture that comes out is roughly what Halevi said it is.
This would mean over 200,000 harmed Palestinians, of which up to 40,000-45,000 were Hamas, while the rest would be civilians.
The numbers are “better” in the killed category where, for much of the war, 40% of those killed were Hamas, though in recent months the numbers have been worse on that count as well.
The numbers of wounded Palestinians are much worse, with the vast majority being civilians.
Of course, what wounded means could vary a lot, with Israelis often counting an elderly person tripping and breaking a bone on the way to a bomb shelter running from an enemy rocket as injured.
But as Halevi said, this has not been a gentle war.
What we do with these numbers is a separate question.
Were legal procedures followed in terms of targeting military objects and proportionality and were civilians evacuated where feasible? If so, then the operations would be legal despite the carnage, especially in light of Hamas’s systematic human shields strategy.
Forgetting about law, were there alternatives to the IDF’s conduct?
Could the war have been ended and better achieved the IDF’s goals 1) in summer 2024, as much of the defense establishment thought it would then, or 2) in early 2025 when much of them opposed returning to hostilities and supported continued negotiations over the hostages or 3) last month when Hamas accepted another partial ceasefire deal and IDF chief Lt-Gen. Eyal Zamir loudly opposed the current invasion – which he is now stuck commanding?
These are even harder questions that may never be answerable – certainly not without knowing how the story ends in terms of defeating Hamas, the fate of the Israeli hostages, the fate of the fighting Israeli soldiers, what happens to Palestinian civilians from this point on, and what happens to Israel’s severely endangered legitimacy.
But Halevi has made it clear that the war has not been gentle – and the numbers demonstrate that – and likely the current new phase of the war will not be either.