Hamas’s own numbers have quietly demolished the “mostly civilians” narrative
In early February 2026, the Hamas-run Ministry of Social Development announced it would pay stipends to roughly 50,000 widows of men killed in the “Al-Aqsa Flood” war. At the same time, the Gaza Health Ministry’s total death toll stood at about 72,000. In a population as young as Gaza’s, roughly 12,000 – 14,000 people would have died of natural causes over the 28 months since October 2023, leaving ~58,000 – 60,000 excess deaths attributable to the war.
To those claiming that not all the 50,000 payments will go to direct combatants, armies aren’t just combatants. They are mostly behind-the-lines personnel working on their behalf. I find it hard to believe these intended payments aren’t going to combatant *personnel.*
The widows figure sharply constrains how many of those deaths could plausibly be civilians. Polygyny in Gaza exists but is limited, on the order of single-digit percentages of marriages, typically two wives. That implies an average of roughly 1.03 wives per married man, meaning 50,000 widows corresponds to about 48,500 married men killed. And that number captures only married combatants. Gaza’s fighting forces are disproportionately young; many fighters — especially those in their late teens and early twenties — would not yet be married. Those unmarried fighters generate no widows at all, yet still count as combatant deaths. In other words, 48,500 is a floor for married fighters, not a ceiling for fighters overall.
Once you subtract ~48,500 married combatants, ~12,000 – 14,000 natural deaths, and allow for additional unmarried fighters, what remains for non-combatant deaths is on the order of only a few thousand — roughly 3,000 – 10,000 at most. That corresponds to a civilian-to-combatant casualty ratio in the range of roughly 1 : 5 to 1 : 10. For dense urban warfare — against an enemy that deliberately embeds itself among civilians — that ratio is exceptionally low by historical standards, far outside the norm.
Moreover, not all remaining civilian deaths can be laid at Israel’s feet. Hamas itself is responsible for a nontrivial share — through misfired rockets, through deliberately fighting from civilian centers, and through the execution of internal dissenters and counter-voices. We know how little time it takes an Islamist regime to slaughter its own civilians when it chooses to do so — the Islamic Republic of Iran massacred tens of thousands of Iranians in just two days. Hamas would not need much time — or much force — to do the same on a smaller scale.
The low civilian-to-combatant ratio did not happen by accident. It reflects a wide array of unprecedented civilian-harm-reduction mechanisms — advance evacuation warnings; phone calls, texts, and leaflets; humanitarian corridors; roof-knocking; strike cancellations when civilians re-entered target zones; real-time ISR cross-checks; and repeated decisions to absorb military risk rather than level neighborhoods indiscriminately.
Why, then, does the opposite perception persist? Social mania, in which repetition substitutes for analysis. Misattribution of blame, when combatants fight from civilian centers and the consequences are assigned to the responding army. And images of Gaza reduced to rubble, which are emotionally overwhelming but analytically misleading. Hamas embedded itself under cities in hundreds of miles of tunnels, inside civilian buildings, and booby-trapped large numbers of structures. Those buildings were emptied long before they were destroyed. They are dead buildings, not mass graves.
Over two years, Israel fought an enemy army that initiated the war and fought from civilian centers, yet still limited civilian casualties to the low thousands. The Islamic Republic of Iran, by contrast, mowed through tens of thousands of its own civilians in a matter of days.
The same people who began crying “genocide” by the end of October 7 — before the blood had dried — did so without evidence, without arithmetic, and without waiting for data. Now that the data are in — including Hamas’s own internal numbers — they point not merely to no genocide, but to one of the most combatant-targeted wars in modern history.