The debate about Gaza’s death count and human shields

The Debate about Gaza’s Death Count and Human Shields – by Robin Collins

Editor’s Note:

We are pleased to host another guest blog by RI Board member Robin Collins. This thoughtful commentary seeks to carefully and fairly analyze one of the most frequent Israeli justifications for its attacks on innocent civilians in Gaza – the alleged use by Hamas of human shields.

(Note that the numbers [1] to [10] in square brackets in the article correspond to footnotes contained in a PDF document available HERE.)

RI President Peggy Mason comments:

Robin Collins demonstrates not only that Israel routinely fails to provide sufficient evidence of the use by Hamas of so-called “human shields” but that, even if there were such evidence, it would not justify Israel’s deliberate or indiscriminate attacks on civilians.

For most people the death and casualty tolls in Gaza are a horror without comparison in modern times. However, given what is happening in Sudan, a conflict we seem to ignore, this is a questionable assumption. By late last year at least 61,000 people have died in Khartoum State alone, about 40% a direct result of the violence. About 9 million have been internally displaced and more than 3.5 million refugees have left Sudan. Unlike in Gaza, however, neither of the contending sides of the conflict in Sudan is being shielded from accountability by, in particular, the United States.

The flattening of Gaza, where about 70% of buildings have been damaged or destroyed, is seen in photographic detail above. And 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents were forcibly displaced.

The Gaza Numbers

On the casualty side of the ledger, there is some debate, although most acknowledge that now at least 58,573 Palestinians (as of July 16, 2025) have been killed and over 139,607 additionally injured. That there has been a massive death toll, the majority being civilians, is agreed by major credible institutions, including the United Nations, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, and many others.

In April this year, a joint statement, “World must act with urgency to save Palestinians in Gaza,” was issued by the heads of United Nations humanitarian agencies OCHA, UNICEF, UNOPS, UNRWA, WFP and WHO. Even Canada, together with Britain and France, asserted in May 2025: “We will not stand by while the Netanyahu Government pursues these egregious actions.” The next month, Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Norway also imposed sanctions against two far right ministers in the Israeli government. One of them, Bezalel Smotrich, has called for the depopulation of Gaza and full annexation of the West Bank.

To place these impacts in context, journalist Gwynne Dyer has argued,

About four times as many civilians have been killed in Gaza, in half the time, out of a population less than one-tenth as big [as Ukraine].

At Honest Reporting Canada,[1] a website purportedly devoted to “fairness and accuracy in Canadian media coverage of Israel,” Robert Walker claims Dyer, the “perpetual Israel critic”, made “many methodological and factual errors” because he relied on exaggerations and Hamas’ Gaza Health Ministry (GHM) data. The death and injury toll is very hard to verify precisely, but Walker thinks sources such as the British medical journal, The Lancet, cannot be counted on, whereas Israeli government sources are trustworthy.

Unreliable Sources?

There is therefore a “growing consensus that the [Gaza Health Ministry] figures are broadly reliable.” – One Name, Two Lists

Walker believes that GHM and others conflate Palestinian civilians with fighters, include natural deaths, and overreport women and children’s deaths. He describes Human Rights Watch as a “fanatically anti-Israel group”, and peer-reviewed The Lancet as a “publication with a longtime animus towards Israel.”[2] Walker and others reference skeptics such as Andrew Fox of the Henry Jackson Society[3] and Abraham Wyner, a University of Pennsylvania professor of statistics.

Fox argues that uncritical reporting is “shaping public opinion and international discourse on the conflict in ways that may not reflect the reality on the ground.” Thereby, the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) are “portrayed” as disproportionately targeting civilians.[4] Wyner argues that if estimates prove to be “even reasonably accurate”, then the ratio of noncombatants to combatants is “remarkably low” by historical standards.[5]

The Lancet research report on Gaza published in February 2025, titled “Traumatic injury mortality in the Gaza Strip from Oct 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024: a capture–recapture analysis,” on the other hand, shows that the GHM numbers are likely underestimates of the actual casualty toll.  The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA) keeps a running “snapshot” tally that is regularly updated and reflects the calculations agreed by most observers.

One reason Gaza Health Ministry numbers can be trusted — historically the case — is that their data are relied upon by both U.S. and Israeli intelligence. There is therefore a “growing consensus that the [GHM] figures are broadly reliable.”[6]

Human Shields

Here, the debate turns from the numbers killed and injured, to the responsibility for those casualties.

There are, therefore, a range of arguments either defending or challenging the civilian casualty figures. But one of the more complex controversies is a legal and ethical one – whether Palestinian militants use civilians to shield their military actions and to protect themselves while in tunnels or structures. Here, the debate turns from the numbers killed and injured, to the responsibility for those casualties.

The conclusion drawn by Swedish philosopher Per Bauhn in Just war, human shields, and the 2023–24 Gaza War[7] is that “unjust warriors” such as Hamas, by using human shields are culpable for “any number” of deaths resulting from an Israeli response. A ‘human shield’ refers to a civilian placement such that his or her non-combatant status will deter the enemy from attacking a military objective. The use of human shields is unequivocally forbidden in law. But so must intentionally targeting civilians similarly be avoided.

The worst version of the vindication argument is that “because Hamas started this war,” therefore everything that follows, whether intentionally or otherwise, is Hamas’ fault. Anything goes.

Bauhn argues Hamas is “morally responsible for the absolute majority of the Palestinians killed in IDF attacks on targets in Gaza.” And further, the IDF has taken “every reasonable precaution” and so accusations of war crimes or genocidal intent by Israeli forces are “groundless.” He goes on to claim that proportionality limits should be subordinated to the requirements of achieving the complete defeat of Hamas.

In a recent debate between Matthew Cockerill, a graduate student at the London School of Economics, and veteran reporter Eli Lake of The Free Press,  there was agreement that Hamas has been using human shields, which is a violation of the laws of war. Lake (defending Israel) argued that after the October 7 atrocities, Israel changed its policy from low level counterterrorism to the eradication of Hamas as a political and military force. Perhaps the IDF and the entire Israeli society were initially suffering from PTSD, he speculates. This, he argues, would explain the severity of disproportionate attacks on civilians.

But the evidence also reveals that the “overwhelming majority of deaths are caused by bombing non-militarized homes”, maintained Cockerill, who reviewed a major study of the conflict.[8] More than 90% of women and children were killed through IDF “reckless disregard” of the impact of bombing and artillery on Palestinian civilians. This shows murderous intent. At least three-quarters of casualties have been non-combatants.

Not only is Hamas obliged to abide by Article 58 of Protocol 1 of the Geneva Conventions prohibiting using civilians as shields, but Israel is similarly obliged to take precautions to avoid civilian casualties.

Limits in International Law

Per Bauhn insists that human shields make “IDF retaliation without violating the rules of war impossible or very difficult” particularly in pursuit of the goal of bringing the war to a just end. His insinuation is that almost any unavoidable deaths of innocents are legally justified.

However, while International Humanitarian Law (IHL) accepts incidental civilian casualties, there is no unlimited allowance. IHL does not permit the flouting of the obligation to respect proportionality and to distinguish soldiers from civilians. That still applies in the legitimate pursuit of national security and protection of civilians (assuming that self-defence is the actual goal) while fighting in densely populated areas, including Gazan cities and villages.

But Bauhn goes further, arguing that “the mere number of non-combatant casualties is not enough to constitute a justified charge of disproportionality.” In other words, because a terror attack initiated by Hamas needs to come to a just end (as defined by the Israeli government), there are no limits to accidental killings or collective punishments. And it follows, therefore, that there is no requirement to distinguish between the intentional and the accidental.[9]

This also means the use of civilians – whether consenting to be shields (as civilian combatants) or coerced, or inadvertently or unknowingly used as shields – is immaterial in his view. Palestinians alone are responsible for their own casualties. Hamas “could have laid down its weapons, released the Israeli hostages, and handed its terrorists over to an international war tribunal.”

Mirror Image

Israel’s own extremists, some currently ministers in the Knesset, want to establish a purely Jewish state by way of ethnic cleansing, also encompassing the entire historic Palestine. – Omer Bartov

 However one characterizes the nature of Israel’s right under international law to respond to the October 7 terror and hostage-taking attack (which is contested legal territory), holocaust and genocide scholar Omer Bartov of Brown University makes some convincing contextual points.

He believes Israel’s far right government and settler movement are equivalent – “a mirror image” – to the extremism found both in Hamas’s original 1987 Charter which called for an Islamic state in all of Palestine, and during its horrific attacks on Israeli civilians in 2023. Israel’s own extremists, some currently ministers in the Knesset, he maintains, want to establish a purely Jewish state by way of ethnic cleansing, also encompassing the entire historic Palestine.

Under international law, Bartov says, this is a plan to remove a people from their land (forcible displacement and destruction of a group – to which could be added the use of famine as a weapon of war) and constitutes both crimes against humanity and possible genocide.[10]

This can be reversed, if it is stopped, Bartov believes, but it requires both an international initiative to rebuild Gaza and a permanent political resolution to the conflict. “That can’t be done with Hamas” nor with the Netanyahu government, he says.

There are no rules of engagement. You shoot everybody. – Omer Bartov

Meanwhile, once the Palestinians are told to leave, and the warning leaflets are dropped, and the deadline has passed, Bartov observes, “anyone who moves is a dead person. You don’t take any chances whatsoever…. It tells you what the rules of engagement are: There are no rules of engagement. You shoot everybody.”

[End of article by Robin Collins]

ISRAEL-PALESTINE

Latest Israeli Plan for Gaza

Writing in the Guardian, Middle East correspondent Emma Graham-Harrison describes plans “laid out” by Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz to force all Palestinians in Gaza into a camp on the ruins of Rafah in a scheme that legal experts and academics described as a blueprint for crimes against humanity.

Leading Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard comments:

(Katz) laid out an operational plan for a crime against humanity…. It is all about population transfer to the southern tip of the Gaza Strip in preparation for deportation outside the strip.

Ehud Olmert, a former Israeli Prime Minister, was even more blunt:

It is a concentration camp.

Whither Canada?

Time is running out for Canada to act on its declared intention to impose consequences on Israel for its conduct in Gaza. In their joint statement of 19 May 2025, Canada, France and the UK stated:

Permanent forced displacement is a breach of international humanitarian law.

The three countries also decried the “wholly disproportionate” escalation of hostilities by Israel in Gaza, an operational mode which has only accelerated in the ensuing weeks, with the skyrocketing number of Palestinians killed while seeking food at distribution points operated by the US- and Israeli-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.

The sanctioning of two extremist Israeli cabinet ministers for their egregious actions in the West Bank was an important step, but equally decisive action is now required against Defence Minister Israel Katz and in favour of a Palestinian state.

We call on the Government of Canada to immediately sanction Israeli Defence Minister Katz and to announce its intention to recognize the State of Palestine forthwith. 

UPDATE NATO AND GLOBAL MILITARY SPENDING 

Nowhere is NATO’s strategic drift more glaring than in its embrace of Trump’s demand for members to spend 5% of GDP on defence by 2035 – an arbitrary, unaffordable, and unsubstantiated benchmark that will predictably undermine, rather than enhance, security and stability. – Cesar Jaramillo

For a searing critique of NATO’s capitulation to Trump’s spending fiat, see NATO Goes MAGA (Cesar Jaramillo, sanepi.org, 8 July 2025).

2025 Global Peace Index

For an innovative analysis on “measuring peace in a complex world”, see the Global Peace Index 2025. In the 2025 Global Peace Index Briefing describing this report, its authors at the Institute for Economics and Peace write:

The world is at an inflection point. While the number of conflicts is higher than at any time since World War II, they are also becoming unwinnable and increasingly expensive, yet global investment in conflict prevention [has] dramatically reduced.

RI President Peggy Mason comments:

We will be looking further into this welcome data on the economics of peace as part of our ongoing Rideau Institute Common Security Project, Phase One.

UPDATE ON TRUMP’S GOLDEN DOME DELUSION

The space-based elements of “Golden Dome” would also ensure the weaponization of outer space, a condition that Canada and other states have worked to prevent for decades. – Paul Meyer

For more astute commentary on why Canada should steer clear of Trump’s “Golden Dome” – a supposed shield over America against any form of missile attack from any quarter – see Canada Shouldn’t Buy into the Mirage of “Golden Dome” (Paul Meyer, cips-cepi.ca, 25 June 2025).

Former Canadian career diplomat Paul Meyer summarizes the “fatal flaws” in the Trump proposal under three headings: intractable technical problems, a further destabilization in strategic stability, and the “financial black hole” it represents in terms of cost.

Photo credit: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license (Gaza); Wikimedia Commons (Rafah).