PROOF EXCLUSIVE: A Look Inside the October 7 Death Toll Yields Startling Results That Change Our Understanding of the Ongoing War in Gaza

After falsely accusing Gazan officials of inflating death tolls, Netanyahu confesses to overstating October 7’s death toll by hundreds. But was the error even greater than admitted—and does it matter?

ABOVE: Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a close friend of the Trumps who remains under criminal indictment for Bribery, Fraud and other major felonies.

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Introduction

The events in Israel on October 7, 2023 were a historic tragedy. Fortunately, according to Israeli government sources, at least half of the 3,000 Hamas terrorists who entered Israel on that day to commit historic war crimes—primarily if not exclusively against Israeli civilians—were killed by Israeli soldiers or police officers within 24 hours of the group’s initial invasion of the Jewish state. Another 200 or more were captured.

The remaining 1,300 Hamas terrorists escaped back into Gaza with approximately 250 civilian and military hostages—joining, in Gaza, the remaining (by unconfirmed IDF estimates) 47,000 Hamas combatants and combatant-adjuncts there. Those 47,000 or so presumptively valid Hamas targets represent 2.2% of the 2.048 population of Gaza.

{Note: Reuters reports that there were in fact only 38,300 Hamas fighters alive post-October 7, representing just 1.8% of the population of Gaza.}

While Israel has since October 7 committed itself to rooting out all those in Hamas who may have helped plan the October 7 attack, and indeed to avenge (and ensure no future recurrence of) the monstrous attack on that date by availing itself of its right to self-defense and to end Hamas’s governance of the Gaza Strip, there can be no doubt that nothing will erase the pain of the most deadly day for Jews since the Holocaust.

In contemporaneous reporting on October 7, establishing the death toll in Israel was of foremost concern, not simply because doing so is a basic component of breaking news coverage or because understanding the scope of the carnage in Israel was seen as central to contextualizing October 7 as a day that will rightly live in infamy forever.

The initial death toll for October 7 also fueled rhetoric (rather than reportage) attached to that horrible day, with Israeli prime minister and longtime Trump family friend Benjamin Netanyahu very quickly using the reported death toll and the approximate population of Israel to estimate for his U.S. allies how many September 11 terrorist attacks the events of October 7 equated to (it was “twenty”, he said, standing beside President Joe Biden at an international news conference).

All of which helps to explain why it is so significant that that initial death toll—1,400 “slaughtered civilians”, as so many of the initial reports framed it, and more recent reports in many media outlets still have it—was wrong. And not just wrong, but (a) considerably so, and (b) in a way that is so problematic that the leading newspaper in the United States, the New York Times, has issued something like a mea culpa over it.

A Growing Scandal Over Disparate Reporting of White and Nonwhite Casualties

This admission below by the New York Times is unsettling—indeed even more so than its attempts to remedy its coverage of the al-Ahli Hospital explosion in northern Gaza on October 17 (especially as the latter self-realignment was made in error, with subsequent evidence indicating that the blast at the hospital had indeed, as the Times initially reported, clearly citing the Palestinian Ministry of Health for the claim, been caused by a munition fired from inside Israel):

Israel’s original estimated toll from the attacks was subject to less scrutiny than the death toll compiled by the Hamas-controlled authorities in the Gaza Strip, where thousands have died in weeks of heavy Israeli bombardment and a ground invasion.

Some news outlets—including The New York Times—occasionally used those Israeli figures without attributing them to Israeli officials or noting that they were an initial estimate and subject to change.

{Emphasis supplied.}

What’s so stunning about this admission is that, unlike the death toll in Gaza, which has led to outcry for a ceasefire in the 2023 Gaza War, the Israeli death toll—the one now known to been inflated—has been used for weeks not to seek an end to violence in the Middle East but to legitimize apparent war crimes against the civilian populace of Gaza.

We now know, from their own admission, that the New York Times and other Western outlets participated in this morally suspect legitimization by (1) failing to apply their usual journalistic scrutiny or fact-checking to the death toll repeatedly cited by the Netanyahu administration; (2) simultaneously applying an outsized level of scrutiny to the Palestinian death toll (and getting that reporting wrong); (3) never emphasizing that the Israeli death toll had received no independent corroboration and was merely a claim made by a wartime partisan without (unlike the PMH, per the Washington Post) a long history of accurate casualty counts; and (4) never telling readers that the “1,400” figure cited by hundreds of Western media outlets was just an “estimate” subject to subsequent dramatic amendments.

Now the first such amendment has been made—and more importantly, shown itself to be as problematic as the early estimate it replaced. While Netanyahu has reduced the October 7 death toll inside Israel by more than 14%, from 1,400 to 1,200, he has also cleared his administration to concede to international media that this number “could continue to fluctuate”, an apparent acknowledgment that it’s likely to continue to go downward. And as this Proof report details, the new data from Netanyahu also has the effect of calling into question the process Israel has thus far used to generate its death toll, and whether this politicized process has had the foreseeable side-effect of mischaracterizing what occurred on October 7.

And yet, why should this matter? 1,400 deaths is a historic tragedy, but so too is 1,200. So too would be 1,000 deaths, or 800, or 500. Indeed, beyond the incalculable human toll of so many people losing their lives (and loved ones), any of these figures could still readily be used as rhetorical fodder to justify a years-long war in the Gaza Strip.

But reportage and rhetoric—or for that matter, simply honoring the innocent dead—aren’t the only reasons to want an accurate October 7 death toll. International law uses the doctrine of “proportionate response” to determine whether war crimes have been committed, so understanding the precise scope of the tragedy Hamas visited on Israel on October 7 could eventually have profound legal implications. Just so, even beyond the rhetoric they enable and implicitly authorize, death tolls have a necessary political component: as already noted, we saw this after the October 17 tragedy at al-Ahli Hospital, which experienced a massive explosion originally thought to be the result of a failed Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket launch. It now appears to have been caused by either an Israeli Tamir interceptor or an Israeli 155mm howitzer shell fired from near Nahal Oz in Israel; after the explosion, the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) was keen to discredit the casualty figures released by the historically reliable Palestinian Ministry of Health (PMH) as a way of both minimizing the seriousness of the tragedy at al-Ahli Hospital and underscoring to Western media (as it turned out, falsely) that none of the casualty figures emanating from the Gaza Strip could be trusted.

After al-Ahli, as this Proof report establishes, Western partisans sympathetic to the Israeli cause echoed IDF disinformation by misstating post-explosion PMH press releases to artificially inflate and/or distort the numbers they included beyond reason, thereby eliding from the historical record all the evidence of the PMH’s caution in circumscribing the scope of what happened at al-Ahli. For instance, whereas the IDF and Netanyahu’s first estimate of October 7 deaths was, we now know, at least 14.2% too high, the Ministry’s first estimate of the death toll at al-Ahli—“dozens”—turned out to be 88% below the death toll the United States Intelligence Community (USIC) later reported out, which was “100 to 300”).

The result of all the above were rather ghoulish attacks on casualty figures put out by a leading nonwhite institution in Gaza, even as the largely white administration of Benjamin Netanyahu was trusted implicitly by not just partisans but, it appears, all of Western corporate media.

The course of subsequent public debate in the United States over these death tolls only served to underscore that (a) only the death tolls published by the Palestinians were broadly seen as worth debating, and (b) these death tolls were then separately subjected to a second, garish threshold inquiry Americans never seem to apply to white populations: namely, the idea that if nonwhite deaths resulting from an event fail to cross a certain threshold, they can more or less be ignored (in the way, say, that many in the GOP papered over Black deaths in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005).

The al-Ahli tragedy was a particularly fraught example of his maxim, as based on the now-confirmed death toll resulting from what looks to have been an Israeli munition striking the hospital on October 17, that event was actually many more September 11’s—to use the truly grim math urged upon us by Netanyahu—than October 7 had been.

But even taking all of the foregoing into account, why does it matter in particular that the Israelis got their death toll wrong? Can we really learn anything, or glean any new insight, in tracing Israeli officials’ struggle to deal with a national tragedy by getting a critical count correct (putting aside that Western media eagerly, if falsely, attacked the PMH for admirably meeting an identical challenge under more trying moment-by-moment circumstances)? Should it change anything about how the West perceives what happened on October 7, or how Israel responds to it, if in fact far fewer than 1,400 unarmed Israeli civilians were slaughtered on October 7? Obviously it won’t—but the question remains, should it? There’s some reason to think the answer is “yes.”

Why Death Tolls Matter

As a journalist and former journalism professor, I know that death tolls can and do matter for many reasons. As someone who reported extensively on Hurricane Katrina, I know that the staggering civilian death toll in Louisiana back in 2005 (1,836 U.S. civilians dead) helped Americans understand the scope of the local, state and national political failures that led to New Orleans being so unprepared for an event that in retrospect—and ex ante, too—was inevitable. The Hurricane Katrina death toll was also invaluable in helping the federal government determine the scale of the emergency funds needed to aid Louisiana in the short-, medium-, and long-term. It helped, too, to relaunch a conversation about whether America values nonwhite lives the same way it does white ones. (It doesn’t. Or, better said, it didn’t in 2005 in New Orleans, and it still does not in 2023 in the Middle East.)

But there is an even more compelling reason for journalists to care about death tolls, and oddly enough that reason has been inadvertently hinted at by some of the most irresponsible demagogues within the Netanyahu administration: death tolls are in most instances not just a post hoc declaration but also an extremely telling account of the processes that go into documenting a tragedy in real time. While the lie that the PMH immediately declared a death toll of “500” after the al-Ahli blast was little more than a libel and slander—a mistranslation caused the PMH’s fifth (not first or second or third or fourth) “victim” count, a “casualty” count that under the long traditions of wartime includes wounded persons, to be reported in the West as a “death toll”, when in fact the death toll independently confirmed by non-Hamas Gazan doctors following the al-Ahli explosion (“250”) was squarely in the range deemed probable by the USIC—the conversation these lies occasioned about how the PMH operates should have been a useful one. Had it been conducted honestly, it would have charted (as Proof did here) how the PMH not only has historically been regarded as a reliable reporter of civilian casualties, but how the PMH carefully amended its casualty count following October 17 with six distinct press releases that got more accurate as new data rolled in.

In other words, while news consumers may be obsessed with the seeming finality of a death toll, journalists are more likely to be invested in the processes that the creation of a death toll reveals. Meanwhile, politicians and partisans will cynically use death tolls in whatever ways benefit them most: if a death toll is useful in producing a particular political outcome, it’s paraded about international media; if it’s embarrassing to some particular group of partisans, those partisans will invariably deride it as both false and despicably manipulated. It’s for this reason that those in the West who now claim to be obsessed with Gaza casualty counts invariably seem not to even know the definition of “casualty,” which has always included wounded persons (as well as other categories of war victims, besides). After October 7, for instance, the Israelis correctly accounted missing and kidnapped and wounded persons as casualties.

{Note: Missing and/or kidnapped persons of course occupy a special place in casualty counts, as tallies of such persons necessarily change over time—with those who were missing and are later found alive and those hostages who are returned to freedom eventually leaving the count.}

So what does the process of establishing a casualty count, or for that matter a more narrow figure like a death toll, tell us about what was going on in Israel on October 7?

And what does it tell us about what’s going on in Israel and Gaza now?

A lot, actually.

For instance, if the purportedly false casualty data emanating from the PMH was said by the IDF to reveal the PMH as a detestably calculating, inhumane group of militants rather than the civilian, public-service-oriented administrative component of Hamas it has been seen as by the broader international community for many years, what does (or could) it mean to the current Israeli war effort if the death toll from October 7 soon comes to be seen as not just inflated by the Netanyahu government but wildly inflated?

Proof doesn’t present this as an easy question with easy answers. Indeed, there may be no useful answer at all—as Hamas was a terrorist organization richly deserving of total destruction before October 7 and it remains precisely that today, whatever the scope of its war crimes on October 7 itself. Just so, while the death toll in Israel on October 7 would be horrific even at a fraction of what was reported by Netanyahu, it also would pose problems for any future International Criminal Court (ICC) accounting of proportionality—given that Israel now appears to have killed over 20,000 Palestinians, most of them women, children, and the elderly—even if that 1,400 figure had turned out to be correct. And as the death toll in Gaza rises each day (as it has been and will continue to do), the “proportionality” argument gets only harder for Netanyahu and the IDF to make—with real consequences for Netanyahu’s political standing inside Israel, the likelihood of other Arab groups or nations entering the war, humanitarian aid for the region, Israel’s standing in the international community, the prospects for continued regional peace negotiations under the Abraham Accords, and much more.

The October 7 Death Toll

As already noted, the “1,400” death-toll figure for October 7 has been used by Israeli partisans to justify the IDF’s response to that horrible day. But it is necessary to take an even deeper dive into exactly how this rhetorical use has been framed. Specifically, those seeking to show their support for the current conduct of the war in Gaza have said all of the following (and all of the following has likewise been found in almost every news report about the war, or at least this was the case up until 24 hours ago):

1. 1,400 Israeli civilians were killed on October 7.

2. All of those killed were slaughtered, meaning killed outside of a combat scenario and in a wanton fashion.

3. All of these killings were conducted by Hamas.

4. The manner of nearly all these killings was especially brutal.

5. The intention of Hamas on October 7 was to kill even more civilians than it did.

All these statements appear to be untrue, but all have been blithely—and therefore, we must say candidly, cynically and even ghoulishly—deployed for political purposes by those who say they take the matter of innocent lives being lost extremely seriously.

What Proof aims to do here, as delicately and respectfully as possible, is consider each component of the October 7 death toll as it stands now, and in doing so assess how or whether the component in question shades our understanding of the scope of the war crimes committed on October 7 and the rectitude of the ongoing Israeli response to it.

(1) 1,400 civilians did not die on October 7.

Even when the non-Hamas death toll from October 7 inside Israel was still believed to be 1,400 rather than the current 1,200, both figures were profoundly misleading and often misstated in press reports.

Under the terms of the undeclared state of war that has existed between Hamas and Israel for decades—with discrete events, this century, that could be deemed “wars” in all of 2008, 2012, 2014, 2021, and now 2023—deaths of soldiers and law enforcement on both sides of the conflict have not been deemed “civilian” casualties for the simple reason that soldiers and police officers are categorically not mere civilians in wartime.

According to the most recent New York Times reporting on this subject, at least 278 of the Israeli deaths on October 7 were Israeli soldiers, while another 44 deaths were police officers.

In consequence of this, the Israeli death toll from October 7 includes 878 civilians, not 1,400, meaning 27% of the now-1,200 Israeli death toll comprises non-civilians.

(2) The tragic events of October 7 saw gunfights as well as massacres.

One of the things this non-civilian death toll percentage (nearly 30%) reminds us is that while the Hamas attack was very much a “surprise attack”—particularly at the Nova Music Festival a couple miles from the Israel-Gaza border, which is discussed in much more detail below—it was fairly quickly detected because its initial offensive included 2,200+ rockets, para-gliders, motorcycles, and heavy weapons. And since all Jewish Israelis over 18 must serve in their nation’s military (with only rare exemptions for certain ultra-Orthodox Jews), in Israel we find a level of readiness for paramilitary operations far beyond what we would expect in the United States. While only 2% of Israelis owned guns as of early 2023, that number has been steadily rising—possibly even more than doubling, per the BBC—over just the last nine months, an indication that the Israel-Hamas conflict had been gathering new steam even before October 7.

To be clear, we must presume, based on the limited evidence we have so far, that the great majority of civilians killed on October 7 were indeed massacred while unarmed.

But as we learn from accounts like this one by Reuters, which tracks the minute-by-minute brutality of Hamas’s killing of civilians at the Be’eri kibbutz, kibbutzim do have civilian security forces, armories, and a network of residents who don’t possess weapons but have sufficient wartime experience to assist local security forces in a gunfight. In Be’eri, that security force numbered fifteen persons, plus a few more willing and able to assist them in an emergency. If similar forces existed at the other twelve kibbutzim attacked by Hamas on October 7—and we have every reason to believe this is so—it means well over 180 Israeli civilians engaged Hamas terrorists with small arms fire along the Israel-Gaza border during the October 7 invasion.

Needless to say, it does a disservice and dishonor to the memory of these volunteers (almost all of whom would have been veterans of the IDF) to blithely say that they were “slaughtered” or “massacred” by Hamas as unarmed noncombatants. Virtually all those in this subgroup died while executing their obligations to their kibbutzim as armed civilian security personnel or willing adjuncts to same. All of them are heroes.

{Note: We must remember, too, as we consider all the above, that the Israeli government deems Gazans who take up arms for any reason to be “combatants”; such individuals are not deemed “civilians” simply by virtue of not being formally inducted members of Hamas.}

Of the 878 civilian dead in Israel, we don’t know how many died in gunfights, but given the size of kibbutzim security details and the fact that these details actively engaged heavily armed Hamas terrorists while their fellow villagers understandably hid from the fighting, it’s almost certain that this number is at least 100—reducing unarmed civilian casualties to approximately 778.

(3) New reporting has adjusted even the new 1,200 figure.

According to this recent report by the New York Times, the original civilian death toll acknowledged by the Netanyahu administration was actually 846, not 878, meaning that the adjusted death toll—that is, the one that excludes armed civilian security personnel who were neither IDF troops nor in law enforcement—is 746, not 778.

(4) Many of those killed were not Israelis.

Does it matter that scores of those killed on October 7 weren’t Israeli? As a human matter—in terms of assessing the scope of the tragedy—no, not at all, even if we must acknowledge the irony in this admission, as Israel’s government rather infamously adjudicates the value of its own citizens significantly higher (even more than is already common in contemporary geopolitics) than the lives of non-citizens.

But this aside, yes, it does matter as a legal, geopolitical, and military matter. Nations don’t avenge the dead of other nations, even when and as they do mourn those dead.

So how many non-Israelis died on October 7? Well, we know from the New York Times that 31 Americans died on that horrible day, along with 39 French citizens and at least 34 Thai citizens. Meanwhile, using now-outdated figures, France 24 reported that, per an early Agence France-Presse tally, “around 200 foreigners have been confirmed dead by their national authorities, many of them also holding Israeli nationality.” The use of the term “many” here, rather than “most,” seems to indicate that at least 100 foreigners who don’t hold dual Israeli citizenship died on October 7, along with some number of dual citizens whose deaths we’d expect Israel to avenge.

But given the updated New York Times figures, which put the number of deceased foreign nationals at 104 considering only nationals of three nations, it is far more likely that the foreign-national death toll from October 7 is over 150 rather than a hundred.

This data would place the number of unarmed Israeli civilians killed on October 7 at approximately 596.

(5) “Friendly fire” may have killed a number of unarmed Israeli civilians.

It is essential that this possibility not be exaggerated, as every claim along these lines made by fringe websites has thus far turned out to be demonstrably false. But Israeli daily Yedioth Ahranoth has indicated at least the possibility of “friendly fire” in the early days of the war, and certain October 7 eyewitness accounts from Israelis suggest at least the possibility that a number of such incidents could have occurred.

It’s impossible to gauge how many incidents answering to this description might have happened while Hamas militants were in close engagement with—sometimes even in custody of—Israeli nationals, but it’s evident from the irresponsible conduct of the IDF with respect to civilian life from October 7 on that civilian casualties caused by the IDF were almost inevitable on October 7, enough to put a responsible estimate of the Israeli civilians killed by Hamas on October 7 closer to 550.

It is known, for instance—as it was reported by The Guardian—that IDF tanks did in fact shell Be’eri kibbutz, causing the destruction of buildings in a location where 108 Israeli dead were ultimately found. While this does not confirm that any of the Be’eri civilians who died in their homes were killed by friendly fire, it’s unconscionable that the IDF would fire on a civilian settlement, let alone under circumstances as chaotic and fluid as those of October 7.

One Be’eri kibbutz resident taken hostage by Hamas on October 7, Yasmin Porat, was later interviewed by CNN about her experience and said that when police arrived at the kibbutz that day—in response to her own phone call to them to plead for their help—officers didn’t follow the protocol one might have expected (hostage negotiations) but instead “shots start[ed] to happen between…the sides. One, two, three [shots], then—wow—one hundred [shots]. The hostages and the terrorists were all lying down [to avoid the Israeli gunfire], and I realized that I was going to die. Because it was not possible to get [out] alive from this situation.”

This certainly sounds like an environment in which innocent Israelis could have been killed by friendly fire, and if such conduct was repeated at other locations along the Israel-Gaza border on October 7, the number of Israeli civilians accidentally killed by fellow Israelis could be significant indeed.

In fact, Yasmin Porat herself—at just the one kibbutz whose invasion she was an eyewitness to on October 7—indicates she saw many unarmed Israeli civilians killed by the IDF. In an interview with Israeli State Radio, she stated unambiguously that a number of Israeli hostages were “killed by crossfire” between the IDF and Hamas militants, and that “undoubtedly” the IDF was responsible for the deaths of some Israelis. “They [the IDF] eliminated everyone, including the hostages”, she said.

{Note: Because Proof can’t as yet get an independent translation of Porat’s radio interview, it urges some caution about using it.}

Porat’s radio-interview account, including her reference “two [IDF] tank shells fired into a [Be’eri kibbutz] house” and “insane crossfire” during the fighting there, is both consistent with what she told CNN and with what The Guardian says of Be’eri. Porat even names a neighbor of hers who she says “undoubtedly” was killed by IDF fire, “Hadas.” Yet Hadas and other Israelis killed at Be’eri under similar circumstances would have been added to the Israeli death toll as victims of Hamas.

Meanwhile, Israeli media stalwart Haaretz reports that at one Israeli military base attacked on October 7, “The division was prompted to request an aerial strike against the base itself in order to repulse the terrorists.” Did this strike kill any civilians working on the base at the time? Were similar airstrikes ordered for locations besides IDF bases? We don’t know, but this Haaretz report gives us some indication of the desperation behind Israeli lines on October 7, and the ordinarily unthinkable methods Israeli forces were willing to employ to repel Hamas militants.

If, in light of all the above, the number of unarmed Israeli civilians killed on October 7 was in fact 550 rather than 1,400, this is an unthinkable number—a shocking tragedy—especially given the relatively tiny population of Israel and the brutal way in which some of these deaths occurred. Yet it must also be said that 550 is not 1,400, and that it’s deeply problematic that both in Israel and the West the killing of over 20,000 civilians in Gaza has now repeatedly been justified by increasing by 255% the number of Israeli civilians killed by Hamas.

And given that Netanyahu concedes this 550 figure could continue to “fluctuate”, it would be little surprise if long after the number of Gazan civilians killed in the 2023 Gaza War has topped 25,000 we learn that the commensurate number of Israel dead was 500.

(6) While the IDF has used public confusion about the definition of a “casualty” as a means of discrediting accurate Palestinian Ministry of Health casualty figures, we mustn’t commit that libel against the Israelis.

As The Times of Israel reports, over 4,300 Israelis were wounded on October 7. Those are October 7 casualties, by the conventional definition of that term used in wartime.

Just so, 240 hostages are being held by Hamas, a number that includes many foreign nationals but certainly at least 150 Israeli citizens. This means the full casualty count from October 7—with respect to Israeli civilians whose casualty status was caused by Hamas—nevertheless approaches 5,000 casualties in total. This “5,000” figure is not, of course, properly set against the 20,000 “death toll” in Gaza; while we do not have a full “casualty count” for Gaza at the moment, as a general rule—and as we see inside Israel—the number of wounded persons for every deceased person in a war is usually between two and six, putting the “casualty” figure for the Gaza Strip perhaps as high as 100,000. Given that even this figure would “only” represent 1 out of every 21 Gazan civilians having received any injury at all over a month-plus of fierce bombardment by the world’s fourteenth-strongest military, it would not be so very surprising.

(7) The word “massacre” is ill-applied to many Israeli civilian deaths on October 7.

This is by far the hardest part of this journalistic assessment to write, as it requires an very close look at harrowing events of the sort that we just heard about from Reuters.

Yet the story of what happened at the Be’eri kibbutz is telling. Many residents were killed by gunfire as attackers who could not see them tried to get to their safe rooms; other residents taken alive as hostages from safe rooms were later found deceased but still in handcuffs, with their manner of death still unclear (meaning that friendly fire upon Hamas militants traveling with hostages is still very much a possibility). Some residents of Be’eri were killed inside their homes after militants seeking to take them hostage set fire to their houses to try to induce them to leave them. Armed civilian security personnel were in many instances killed, as already noted, but so too were unarmed civilians who engaged in paramilitary resistance operations in support roles (acts of bravery that must not be papered over with deliberately inciting political rhetoric like “massacre” or “slaughter”). And of course there were many instances of militants firing indiscriminately into homes or throwing grenades where they believed civilians were hiding; these acts—ones that indubitably meet the definition of a “war crime,” and thus a “massacre” or “slaughter”—must likewise be understood as central to the horrifying events of October 7, 2023.

But what the large number of Israeli civilian deaths that occurred on October 7 under something other than these latter circumstances indicate to us is that the Hamas plan for October 7 may not have been what the Israeli government says it was.

Consider this CNN report, which looks at documents retrieved from Hamas militants’ bodies as one indicator of what the terrorist group intended to accomplish in invading Israel. Per CNN, the invasion plans found in the possession of dead Hamas militants in Mefalsim kibbutz included orders to “capture soldiers and civilians and to keep hostages [for negotiation].” This is bewildering new information for those who have only been exposed to the rhetoric of Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as it has Hamas militants not only intending to capture rather than kill Israeli civilians but even to avoid killing Israeli soldiers in the interest of taking them as political leverage (leverage that could only be maintained if the hostages were well-treated pre-release).

In the same report, CNN reveals that invasion plans held by the Hamas militants who enter the Sa’ad kibbutz at first appeared to have very different orders—attackers were told, per found documents, to “inflict[ ] the maximum possible human casualties”—but once again there appears to be a translation issue here, as “casualties” very much includes “hostages” and, in the event, “no residents died inside Sa’ad.” This latter fact could either indicate a failed plan or one that never aimed at a massacre. Given that Sa’ad never experienced an attack on October 7 and therefore it is impossible to know what Hamas would have done had it entered the kibbutz as originally planned, we can look instead for guidance from the CNN revelation that in the attacked Melfalsim, where we know the plan was for kidnapping rather than murder, “no one was killed” either—a notional echo of what might have been the result of any attack upon Sa’ad kibbutz.

But in journalism we search for more than notions, and indeed there’s an additional piece of Hamas’s aborted Sa’ad battle plan that lends additional credence to the idea that its primary goal there would in fact have been to take hostages rather than kill innocents (emphasis added to feature the full quote provided only in excerpt above):

The [Hamas planning] document [found at Sa’ad], which was first reported by NBC News, says that Hamas fighters’ mission [there] was “controlling the kibbutz and inflicting the maximum possible human casualties on it, and holding hostages.”

While this translation requires significant follow-up from Western media, readers can likely already spot the contradiction in the current translation: “maximum” casualties, if casualties means “murder,” means taking no hostages at all. The word “maximum,” as translated here from the Arabic, only makes sense if the word “casualties” means “woundings” and/or “kidnappings” rather than killings. And indeed, this is the actual definition of “casualty.” Moreover—not to restate the obvious—but the fact that there were no murders at Sa’ad, per CNN, does undercut the idea that Hamas urgently wanted to cause the maximum amount of carnage there (whereas if the goal with respect to Sa’ad had always been hostage-taking, simply taking sufficient hostages from another location would have obviated the need to enter Sa’ad, consistent with what occurred).

But that’s not all. As CNN further reports as to the plans given to the Hamas militants tasked with “inflicting the maximum possible casualties” inside the Sa’ad kibbutz,

One group of [Hamas] fighters was directed to breach the [Sa’ad] kibbutz fence and destroy the guard room before “gathering hostages in the dining room and preparing to transfer a number of them to the [Gaza] Strip.” A second group was directed to “collect hostages and hand them over to the first group.”

No mention of murder is made here—only hostage-taking. This is consistent with the above-cited Reuters account of what happened at a third kibbutz, Be’eri, where it appears many of the civilian deaths were caused by Hamas militants recklessly trying to execute what appears to have been a hostage-taking plot. Indeed, Be’eri hostage Porat told Israeli State Radio that she and all the other hostages taken at Be’eri were treated “humanely”, even as “undoubtedly” some of those killed there were killed by the IDF or panicked local police. (To be clear, there’s significant evidence that Hamas killed innocents at Be’eri, though how many were killed in hostage-taking attempts or gunfights and how many were killed in wanton fashion remains unclear at this point.)

And indeed this distinction matters. CNN reports that the primary evidence Israeli intelligence officials are using to conclude that Hamas mainly intended to kill Israeli civilians on October 7 is the very Sa’ad battle plan that, as we’ve seen here, seems to imagine, instead, “only” a hostage-taking plot. Moreover, CNN goes on to note that

Hamas officials have claimed that its fighters were told not to kill women and children—and that such killings were the result of other unaffiliated militants who streamed across the Gaza border during the chaos of the attack.

But Israeli officials and experts have argued that the [Sa’ad] planning documents show that inflicting civilian casualties was a central part of the group’s mission.

Notice the deliberate mis-definition of “casualty” here to mean “murder” rather than what the term actually means.

Considering the October 7 Death Toll Without In Any Way Trusting Hamas

While Hamas militants are by no means—ever—to be trusted, given CNN’s report that Hamas leadership had said no women or children were to be killed on October 7, and given CNN then adding that, per these Hamas leaders, such deaths may have been caused in part by non-Hamas-sanctioned militants, it is worth considering at least the possibility of this claim being true as an explanation for (1) what we now know is a far smaller than expected civilian death toll; (2) the fact that in Be’eri and elsewhere, many of the deaths that occurred appear to have been part of a brutally botched hostage-taking plot; (3) a large percentage of the October 7 dead were Israeli combatants or adult-male-civilian combatant-aides or non-combatants; (4) the number of hostages taken by Hamas, at first thought to be “only” 120, turned out to be much higher (250, with some having now been released); and (5) the possibility of friendly fire accounting for more deaths than expected, as many of the Hamas militants were transporting Israeli hostages when they were confronted by late-arriving IDF forces.

{Note: It is worthwhile, here, to cite the Reuters account of Tom Hand, whose daughter Emily was taken hostage by Hamas on October 7 but who he originally thought had been killed on that day. In a startling revelation, he admitted to international media that when he learned, it turns out mistakenly, that Emily had been killed by Hamas, “I was relieved. I was relieved that she was dead and it was all over, it would have been pretty quick.” Proof must wonder if this sentiment—that it’s better for Israeli hostages to be killed in Israel than taken alive to Gaza—was shared by the IDF and local police as they engaged Hamas militants in custody of Israeli civilians. In America, the lives of such civilians would always be privileged above the killing of any hostiles; in Israel, there is some evidence that cultural differences might have made Israeli forces less gun-shy about engaging hostage-takers than would have been the case in the West.}

But above all, we must keep in mind that it’s not only Hamas that says Gazans not affiliated with Hamas entered Israel on October 7 and committed atrocities Hamas didn’t orchestrate or sanction. The IDF that also says this. Per the Times of Israel, veritable “waves” of non-Hamas zealots entered Israel on October 7, with many of them committing murders that would later be added to the death toll the IDF chose to attribute to Hamas. (Such miscalculations are not dealt with in this report because we have no means of accessing their scale. But certainly such errors could reduce the unarmed, non-combatant Israeli death toll attached to Hamas to 400 or even 300.)

The late arrival by the IDF on October 7 is also worthy of significant discussion, as it is the chief complaint reported by Israeli survivors of October 7—who expect a known terrorist group like Hamas to be brutal, but were shocked by the inability of the IDF to show up on-scene in time to properly protect them on October 7. Indeed, this is one of the reasons that Netanyahu now has the lowest approval ratings of his career (with only 4% of Israelis—that’s not a typo—now saying they trust him). Prior to October 7, Netanyahu had moved much of the IDF to the West Bank to aid the far-right zealots there who, with the support of his Likud Party, were simultaneously working to both kill Palestinians and erect new settlements that would scuttle the “two-state solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis that Netanyahu opposes (note that from October 7 to today, 178 Palestinians in the not-governed-by-Hamas West Bank have been killed).

Indeed, for all that Reuters and other news agencies note the excellent intelligence the October 7 terrorists appear to have had as to the civilian communities they invaded, there also appears to be little doubt that the militants were as surprised at the absence of IDF soldiers as the residents of these kibbutzim were. Reuters reports that there are IDF installations both 15 minutes north and 15 minutes south of Be’eri, by way of example, suggesting that Hamas militants—whose plans appeared to be fixated on the timing of the arrival of Israeli troops in villages along the Israel-Gaza border—would have expected to begin facing the Israeli army within 30 to 40 minutes of infiltrating at least one of the kibbutzim they targeted.

Instead, what ensued post-invasion was hours and hours of Hamas militants apparently seeking to take hostages back to Gaza via a frenzied, brutally mismanaged effort that killed many of the would-be hostages both in their homes and in the fields near Gaza (once the militants had finally come under IDF attack). It remains possible that the Hamas plan for October 7—to kill Israeli combatants and (primarily, but not by any means exclusively) to kidnap Israeli civilians—may have been thrown into chaos by the very failures of the IDF that all Israeli citizens and specifically October 7 survivors are now loudly complaining to their government about.

None of these details render even a single moment of what happened on October 7 okay. October 7 was a carefully orchestrated, large-scale war crime. But they do cut against the prevailing narrative put out by the Netanyahu administration, which insists that Hamas sought mainly to murder civilians—particularly women and kids— and took hostages only as a last, desperate resort. That doesn’t appear to be the case, and the fact that it doesn’t appear to have been the case also explains why the civilian death toll from October 7 was much lower than Netanyahu told the world it was.

The problem is that none of this explains what happened at the Nova Music Festival.

The Nova Massacre

The idea that about 500, rather than 1,400, unarmed Israeli civilians were massacred by Hamas on October 7 causes a complication as to our understanding of the purpose of the October 7 attack—especially if some significant percentage of those 500 were killed in the midst of hostage-taking attempts. This said, we know that many of those 500 dead were massacred, as approximately a third of unarmed Israeli civilians killed on October 7 were killed while fleeing from a single site: the Nova Music Festival.

What happened at the festival is a mystery not only for its outsized contribution to the civilian death toll on October 7, but (a) for the fact that Hamas would attack a major international event at all, and (b) for the fact that the Nova Music Festival also saw the lion’s of the October 7 hostage-taking by Hamas, not just more than its share of the civilian carnage. So what orders were the Hamas militants who attacked the festival actually under—to take hostages or kill civilians? Or was the festival attacked by two different groups at once: Hamas, which took many hostages from the festival, and the unaffiliated Gazan radicals identified by the IDF, who did most of the killing? Either way, Hamas’s unusual focus on the festival appears to have left several of its initial targets—e.g., Sa’ad kibbutz—surprisingly untouched, per the CNN report cited above.

What happened at the Nova Music Festival begs too many questions to count, but at a bare minimum it presents us with these four:

1. Was this music festival a primary focus of the Hamas invasion. If so, why?

2. Was the international character of the festival seen as beneficial to Hamas?

3. Why was a site of such carnage simultaneously the site of so many kidnappings?

4. What orders had Hamas militants been given pre-October 7, as to the festival?

Every major-media report on October 7 confirms that Hamas somehow had amazing intelligence about the areas it planned to invade, so it seems certain Hamas knew a multi-day international music festival was happening in the middle of its invasion route. In any case, Hamas could have avoided the festival altogether if it wished—for instance, had it not wanted to turn its dispute with Israel into an international event that might needlessly galvanize some of the most powerful nations (and militaries) on Earth against it. Yet it chose to do the opposite, even seeming to target the festival in lieu of other locations.

This might be explained by a battle plan that privileged hostage-taking over killing—as the music festival had no armed security, whereas every kibbutz in Hamas’s battle plans not only had armed security but on-site armories—or it could be explained by the opposite: less security at the festival meant more opportunities to kill civilians, if that’s what Hamas (or, if non-Hamas militants who came through the wall into Israel alongside better-equipped and better-trained Hamas soldiers) wanted to see happen, instead.

It’s worth noting here that Hamas does have a less sophisticated and worse-trained rival in Gaza, the previously mentioned Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ). Certainly, we know from videos of the October 7 attacks that many of the attackers weren’t dressed in the way their apparent Hamas compatriots were; moreover, the attackers at times bickered among themselves; and some of the attackers clearly gleefully killed civilians—one video of a militant tossing a hand grenade into a packed bomb shelter comes to mind, horrifying—whereas others were obviously focused on taking hostages, instead.

A recent Times of Israel report may help answer some of the questions above. Broadly, it points to the possibility of the October 7 Hamas invasion of Israel being more of a badly botched military operation than a terrorist plot. According to the Times report,

• The evidence suggests Hamas wanted to attack military installations;

• the evidence suggests Hamas wanted to seize territory to hold it long-term;

• the evidence suggests Hamas wanted to fight its way through to the West Bank;

• the evidence suggests Hamas wanted to attack major cities (locations in which taking hostages at scale would likely have been logistically impossible); and

• the evidence suggests Hamas used Palestinian day-laborers—Gazans allowed access to Israel for work—to gather intelligence on border communities.

Apart from the last of these action-items, Hamas’s plan doesn’t seem consistent with (a) taking hostages in any appreciable numbers, or (b) focusing on civilian settlements nearby the Gaza-Israel border. What it suggests is that Hamas may have targeted the Nova Music Festival precisely because it was an international event that would draw international attention, and also the number of civilian casualties in the October 7 attack—however smaller than the Israeli government first claimed it to be—may be partly attributable (though of course in no way at all justified by) the terrorists’ failure to get to the IDF military targets or landmarks that they had initially intended to access.

The Times of Israel writes the following of the Hamas militants’ presumed objective:

According to current and former intelligence and counterterror experts, Hamas expected the Israeli response and was willing to make the sacrifice in order to sabotage efforts at normalization between Israel and the Arab world, such as with Saudi Arabia.

What’s unclear here is what “Israeli response” Hamas was hoping for on October 7 (putting aside, for a moment, the longer-term response it apparently anticipated).

For instance, as noted above it has now been universally reported that Netanyahu put the bulk of IDF forces in the West Bank in the days before the October 7 attack as part of a scheme to make Israeli control over the enclave permanent, irreversible, and contrary to every hope for peace held by other nation-states (including the United States but, tellingly, I Netanyahu’s favored 2024 POTUS candidate, Donald Trump).

Netanyahu’s dangerous redeployment of IDF forces aided religious zealots seeking to build new Israeli settlements in the West Bank and thereby destroy the potential for a two-state solution—leaving the towns near the Gaza border, which Hamas might have expected would be filled with Israeli soldiers and law enforcement officers, filled instead with almost exclusively civilians.

While Netanyahu’s pre-October 7 decision to ignore Egyptian intelligence about a coming attack originating from Gaza, to do all he could to secretly bolster Hamas, and to aid and abet the mass murder of Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli “settlers” hardly matters from a war-crimes prosecution standpoint with respect to the October 7 invasion itself. Hamas did what it did, for whatever reasons it did it, and none of these political schemes by Netanyahu reestablish Hamas’s October 7 crimes as something else. But Netanyahu’s clandestine complicity in the scope of the October 7 tragedy does suggest, coupled with the Times of Israel report above, that Hamas was far more interested in engaging the Israeli military as part of wartime operations on October 7 than dealing with civilians. Moreover, Netanyahu’s actions, and the IDF failures they engendered, may have been responsible for Hamas encountering primarily civilians, rather than soldiers, during its invasion. While the Nova massacre may have been a planned international incident—we don’t yet know—there’s no evidence that Hamas could have or did expect to meet primarily civilian resistance in the kibbutzim near the border, or that it anticipated its hostage-taking operations would have to be as sprawling as they ultimately were (keeping in mind that all the pre-October 7 Hamas battle plans we’ve seen so far appear to have urged taking civilians alive as hostages).

Once again, none of this justifies even an iota of what Hamas did on October 7. That can’t be emphasized enough. What it does do is explain why civilian casualties were actually much lower than Netanyahu claimed; why Netanyahu and his agents would have wanted that number to be far higher than it was during their initial declarations about Netanyahu’s war plans; and why Hamas ended up taking as many hostages as it did and in the places it did. Simply put, in some instances Hamas fighters, presented with civilian targets rather than the military ones they had obviously planned for, opted to kidnap civilians rather than kill them. Certainly this wasn’t an act of charity—but it does put in context why the October 7 casualty count breaks down as it does.

Conclusion

Proof will be writing much more, shortly, about the block-quoted assessment from the Times of Israel above. The extent to which October 7 was foreseeable and was caused, in the first instance, by certain events in the Middle East and—yes—the United States is worthy of more analysis.

What we can say, for now, is that the unarmed Israeli civilian death toll from inside Israel on October 7 is likely to be around 550, with the armed Israeli combatant death toll likely to be around 450. This means that about 45% of those Israelis killed on October 7 were combatants, and for every two unarmed Israeli civilians killed by Hamas, one unarmed Israeli civilian was taken back to Gaza as a hostage instead.

Given that this 45% figure comes in the absence of Hamas finding the IDF targets it expected and seemingly hoped to find, there’s reason to believe that had Netanyahu not engaged in the political games he did, the “percentage combatant” figure in the October 7 death toll might have been closer to 70% or 80%—making the invasion look much less like a terrorist operation and much more like a military operation. Compare one noncombatant dying for every four combatants to what we have seen from the IDF, for instance; in the Israelis’ wartime operations thus far, we have seen over ten noncombatants die for every one combatant. This despite the fact that Hamas has been and remains a terrorist group and the IDF is a well-resourced, well-resourced, well-respected conventional armed force. This despite the fact that the IDF has had Hamas surrounded from the beginning of this war—rather than the other way around—and thus is positioned to create the “percentage-combatant” death toll in Gaza it wishes.

Indeed, what’s far more opaque than the purpose and scope and scale of the October 7 Hamas invasion is the Israeli response. Given the reports from October 8 and October 9 to the effect that most of the Hamas terrorists who invaded Israel on October 7 were killed or captured within 24 hours of their arrival in Israel, and virtually no reliable accounting from the IDF yet on the question of how many Hamas terrorists have been killed since October 7, the international community is left with the above “20,000” figure for how many Palestinian civilians Israel has killed to avenge the deaths of the approximately 550 Israeli civilians Hamas killed—a disparity made more troubling by the fact that the majority of the 20,000 were children, women, the elderly and the sick.

Indeed, the IDF has struck hospital after hospital after hospital without providing any hard evidence that militants are in any of them, and (even more notable) without any Western aid workers who have returned to their home countries after being in those hospitals confirming that there are indeed Hamas bases beneath them—something they surely would have noticed or at least heard tell of while virtually living in these hospitals full-time for weeks. While none of this, even the IDF willfully bombing hospitals without sufficient evident that they are military targets, does anything to exculpate Hamas, what we’re learning about the October 7 invasion makes the initial IDF and Netanyahu death toll seem more like manufactured political cover, or even part of the execution of an ongoing plot to retake Gaza and end the United Nations’ two-state peace plan, than to exact vengeance for dead Israeli civilians. If Netanyahu or the IDF cared as much about the Israeli dead as they say, they would have exercised the same caution in reporting on those deaths as the Palestinian Health Ministry has in detailing Gazan deaths—recalling here that the PMH has understated such deaths by 45% (11,000 reported, 20,000 actual) even as Netanyahu and his allies in the IDF have overstated Israel deaths by approximately the same percentage. It does seem that the party to the current war who has committed the most consistent and egregious war crimes also has the greatest motive to lie about the deaths it says it is avenging.

The point of all the foregoing is that death tolls matter. Getting the data right matters. Not falsely accusing others of inflating numbers matters. Breaking down the numbers by casualty category and demographic category matters. Distinguishing with clarity between civilian and non-civilian casualties matters. Finding out how and where and when and why and by whom casualty counts are being developed matters (especially as the IDF has now placed under siege the PMH headquarters at al-Shifa Hospital, the very epicenter of the Gazan death-toll reporting the IDF so despises). Trying to consider the track record of the entities creating casualty counts matters. Tracking the ways that military and civilian entities that consider themselves inalterably “the good guys” use casualty figures—sometimes false ones—to justify atrocities matters.

And it matters, too, that looking into all of these questions gives us a degree of insight into what really might have been going on in the “fog of war” on October 7, 2023.

The story told by the Israeli government is that Hamas invaded Israel to kill civilians. The story now being told by Israeli media is that Hamas’s aim was largely military and geopolitical, and this is confirmed in part by the revised casualty figures we now have (especially how they break down by category). Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s rhetoric about how many “9/11s” October 7 represents was not only false mathematically—though that’s less important, of course, as mass death is mass death—but also now creates an environment in which journalists like myself are obligated to observe that whatever the scope of the tragedy the 9.364 million Israelis experienced on October 7 was, it’s hard to see how the much broader tragedy that the 2.048 million Gazans have experienced since then isn’t categorically disproportionate under international law.

Consider that on September 11 of 2001, 2,997 unarmed American civilians died at the hands of terrorists in a nation of 331.9 million. On October 7, 2023, a maximum of 575 unarmed Israeli civilians died from terrorist violence in a nation of 9.364 million, making the latter event the equivalent of 6.8 population-adjusted 9/11s (as opposed to the “twenty” claimed by Netanyahu). But what the Gaza Strip has now experienced, despite the fact that almost no one alive there today voted for Hamas when elections were last held in Gaza in 2006, is 20,000 unarmed civilian deaths from apparent war crimes in a locale housing just 2.048 million people; that’s the equivalent of 1,080 population-adjusted 9/11s.

It’s more like twice the total U.S. death toll from COVID-19 than a single terrorist attack.

There’s simply no comparison between the scope of the tragedy in Gaza and the scope of the tragedy in Israel, and not just because the one in Gaza is currently slated to continue indefinitely whereas the nation of Israel was made safe within a day of what increasingly looks like a failed Hamas paramilitary operation. Moreover, Netanyahu has admitted that the Israeli death toll may be further adjusted—downward, it seems—in the days to come, whereas every new discovery about the death toll in Gaza reveals it to be much larger than was previously thought.

Frankly, Netanyahu has as little excuse for how he has reacted to October 7 as former American president George W. Bush ever located for his actions after September 11.

President Bush reacted abominably to September 11, knowingly invading a country (Iraq) that had nothing to do with it and then ruinously seeking regime change in a second country (Afghanistan) where the primary American interest had in fact been a counterterrorism operation aimed at capturing and bringing to justice Osama bin Laden. As despicable as Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist Party regime was—and as richly deserving of being toppled as it was—using 9/11 as a justification for doing so, let alone doing so with an eye on Iraqi oil, was deeply wrong. Just as wrong as Netanyahu planning a massive land grab in Gaza and the West Bank under the cover of seeking justice for Israeli war dead.

While America’s Afghan War was far more justified than the Second Iraq War, it nevertheless was finally misguided. It turned a needed counterterrorism operation into an inapt military one. What Netanyahu is doing now, given what we’re learning about the respective death tolls in Israel and Gaza, is an entirely different order of magnitude from what America did in the 2000s. It’s more like getting attacked by Country A at a scale of “x” and responding by nuking Country B at a scale of “100x.”

Netanyahu is well aware that half of all Gazans (1.024 million of them) weren’t even alive when Hamas was “elected” under the shadow of widespread sectarian violence, and a huge percentage of the other 1.024 million Gazans were alive but too young to vote in 2006. He knows, too, that of all the remaining Gazans—that is, all those alive today and old enough to vote in 2006 (maybe 512,000 people, based on what we know about Gazan demographics)—nearly half of them voted for Fatah rather than Hamas.

And even some percentage of those who voted for Hamas in 2006 did so out of the widespread fear Hamas generated in advance of that election, which it falsely cast as the first of many such democratic rituals. That leaves us with maybe 250,000 people in Gaza who happily voted for Hamas in 2006, out of a total population of 2.048 million. That’s 12%? Is the idea in Tel Aviv that killing these 12%—many of whom must surely (current polling estimates the number at 70%) have turned against Hamas during its now-seventeen-year reign of terror—justifies killing much of the population of Gaza?

And not to put too fine a point on it, but if 70% of the 12% of Gazans living today who voted for Hamas seventeen years ago have since recanted that vote, it means that only 75,000 Gazans currently in Gaza actually support Hamas—about half of whom, or 38,300, are believed to be active members of the terrorist group, according to Reuters.

How many women, children, infants, elderly, bed-ridden, and non-combatant public servants (like doctors, nurses, police officers, social workers, and judges) must die in Gaza to eradicate these 38,300 combatants (1.8% of the population of Gaza) or even the other 37,000 or so noncombatant Hamas boosters (who it’s a war crime to kill, anyway)?

While America certainly doesn’t have clean hands in critiquing how other countries respond to terrorist attacks, our moral standing—or lack of moral standing—doesn’t change the fact that what Benjamin Netanyahu is having his IDF do in the Gaza Strip is a systematic war crime more on the order of ethnic cleansings in the Balkans or Sudan than anything the United States has been involved with over the last 100 years.

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