Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Reexamination of the Israel-Hamas War from October 7, 2023 to June 1, 2025

Summary

Orbach, Boxman, Henkin and Braverman argue, on historical and quantitative-statistical grounds, that the allegation that Israel committed genocide in Gaza between October 7, 2023 and June 1, 2025 rests on erroneous data, circular citation and flawed methodology by UN agencies, human rights organisations, media and scholars, and that Israel in fact delivered more food than before the war up to March 2025, did not systematically massacre civilians or bomb indiscriminately, and that Gaza Ministry of Health casualty data were manipulated (Debunking the Genocide Allegations: A Reexamination of the Israel-Hamas War from October 7, 2023 to June 1, 2025, PDF p.7-16). Part 1 covers the front matter, Executive Summary, Introduction and Chapter 1 sections A-I (PDF p.1-49). Part 2 completes Chapter 1 (Hamas aid diversion, northern Gaza and the laws of siege, intention to starve, Hamas police, the Flour Massacre and the post-March 2025 claims), gives Chapter 2 on urban warfare and Hamas’s human-shields strategy in full, and opens Chapter 3 with its summary and sections A-C, ending with the Tel al-Sultan paramedics shooting (PDF p.50-87). Part 3 completes Chapter 3 (sections D-K and the chapter tally), gives Chapter 4 on indiscriminate bombing in full, and opens Chapter 5 on casualty counting with its summary and sections A-F and the opening of section G (PDF p.88-127). Part 4 completes Chapter 5 (the “reliable media reports” mechanics, removals from the lists, natural-death inclusion, the speculative alternative estimate and the assessment of the Spagat and Shikaki undercount survey), gives Chapter 6 on Iraq and the Humanitarian bias in full, and gives Chapter 7’s summary, its Jenin 2002 section in full and the opening of its Second Lebanon War section (PDF p.128-168). Part 5 completes Chapter 7 (the Second Lebanon War assessment in full, Operation Cast Lead and the Goldstone Report with the direct-participation-in-hostilities controversy, and Operation Protective Edge), gives Chapter 8 on the inverted funnel and the proposed war-crimes investigation methodology, the Summary and Conclusions, and Appendix 1 on injury patterns and the PAMA allegations (PDF p.169-193), closing the work.

What the file is

Mideast Security and Policy Studies No. 213, published by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University. The PDF is 193 pages, printed pagination running 1 behind PDF pagination (PDF p.3 is printed p.2). The English edition is a revised and updated version of a Hebrew edition published July 4, 2025; its preface is dated 24.7.2025 (PDF p.6). The file supplied is the updated file dated 12.5.2026 at the publisher URL above. The text copy has page markers for every PDF page; some Hebrew references and URLs are garbled in it, and several tables and figures are scrambled or present only as captions, as noted in the reading notes. Appendix 1 is stated in the Introduction to have been published in late December 2025, the other appendixes to appear later (PDF p.21); in this file Appendix 1 (PDF p.189-193) is the only appendix present, and the document ends with it.

Section by section

Front matter (PDF p.1-6)

Cover, title pages and author affiliations (PDF p.1-3): Danny Orbach, Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Jonathan Boxman, independent scholar and quantitative analyst; Yagil Henkin, Shalem College and Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security; Jonathan Braverman, Israeli bar member and IHL lawyer. Galileo epigraph on reasoning over authority (PDF p.4). Table of contents listing eight chapters and seven appendixes (PDF p.5). Preface to the English Edition (PDF p.6): the English edition is revised, corrected and updated, not a mere translation, and its scope is deliberately not extended beyond June 1, 2025.

Executive Summary (PDF p.7-17)

The study addresses starvation, deliberate massacre and indiscriminate bombing claims, aiming at factual identification rather than legal or ethical discourse (PDF p.7). Chapter 1 findings: starvation claims before March 2, 2025 rest on three false assumptions — the 500-trucks/150-food pre-war baseline (OCHA 2022 data give 292 trucks daily in total, 73 food), the 44 percent local-production share (at most 12 percent of caloric intake), and wartime entry totals (a maximum of 82 food trucks daily were needed to equal pre-war supply, and Israel on average exceeded that up to the January 2025 ceasefire) (PDF p.8-9). The authors strongly criticise the March 2025 aid halt, support alternative distribution such as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation from May 24, 2025, and defer judgment on its compounds (PDF p.9-10). Chapter 2: Hamas’s human-shields strategy and its tunnel network of over 500 kilometres and 5,700 shafts are presented as the missing context for assessing IDF conduct (PDF p.10). Chapter 3: deliberate-killing incidents with evidence in one major database account for only 61 fatalities out of 50,021 GMOH-reported casualties, and no credible forensic evidence of close-range mass killings is presented, with the March 2025 Tal al-Sultan paramedics attack given as a possible atrocity with credible evidence (PDF p.11). Chapter 4: no evidence of deliberate bombing or a fixed collateral-damage quota; only 2-3.5 percent of GMOH fatalities May 2024-January 2025 were in the relatively safe zones (PDF p.12-13). Chapter 5: GMOH data are said to be manipulated since 2014, with all fallen combatants classified as innocent citizens, and the 70 percent women-and-children claim false from the start (PDF p.13). Chapter 6: the Iraq sanctions child-mortality narrative, based on an FAO survey giving infant mortality rising from 40.7 to 198.2 per 1,000, was entirely false, a case of what the authors term the humanitarian bias (PDF p.13-14). Chapter 7: Jenin 2002 and the 2006 Lebanon War are given as earlier failures of human rights casualty assessment (PDF p.14). Chapter 8: the inverse information funnel, burden of proof fallacy, certainty mirage and catastrophic proclamations with muted retroactive corrections are named as methodological failures, closing with concern at the inflation of the term genocide (PDF p.14-16). Figures 1-2 are captioned at PDF p.16-17.

Introduction (PDF p.18-21)

Genocide allegations began, the authors state, almost immediately after the October 7 massacre and before Israel regained control of the overrun communities; South Africa brought its ICJ case on December 29, 2023, and the ICC issued warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant without a genocide charge (PDF p.18). The study uses Lee Mordechai’s database of allegations as a principal compilation of the claims it reviews, is provisional and anchored in data as of June 1, 2025, and acknowledges possibly criminal misconduct by Israeli soldiers warranting investigation, which it treats as the tip of an iceberg whose small verified size it reads as surprisingly limited (PDF p.18-19). Chapter previews follow (PDF p.19-21), including the Chapter 5 figures that women and minors constitute 50.7 percent of casualties on updated records (PDF p.20). Acknowledgements name, among others, Eitan Shamir, Michael Spagat and Francesco Checchi, and state that William Bollinger funded the English translation (PDF p.21).

Chapter 1: The Question of Starvation — Summary and sections A-C (PDF p.22-34)

The chapter summary restates that IPC/FRC projections implied a cumulative total exceeding 78,582 hunger-related deaths by January 17, 2025 and approximately 30,000 over the four assessed months alone, none of which materialised on GMOH or Spagat and Shikaki data — the Spagat and Shikaki child-mortality point being carried at PDF p.32 with the authors’ own caveat that questions remain regarding the survey’s methodology and findings and that the data indicate this assuming the responses are honest and representative — and that the IPC acted with a self-acknowledged absence of indirect mortality data (PDF p.22). Section A (PDF p.24-25): Israel authorised up to 100 trucks a day from October 23, 2023 and 200 from November 24, with no daily limits from November 15, 2023 on UNRWA’s reports; actual entry never approached the limits; WFP’s Carl Skau demanded a minimum of 300 trucks a day in March 2024 against the supplied 500-truck pre-war baseline. Section B (PDF p.25-30): the 500 figure is traced to António Guterres’s October 27, 2023 statement and to IPC, HRW and Amnesty repetitions; it is a per-working-day figure including fuel and construction materials, against 2022 OCHA totals of 106,449 trucks, 291 a day, 73 food a day; COGAT food entry for January-March 2024 (109, 77, 119 a day) already exceeded pre-war levels; Amnesty quietly shifted to the working-day wording in May 2024 and omitted the figure in June 2024, while the BBC, Washington Post, CNN, Guardian, a UN press release of April 2025 and WHO continued the daily form (PDF p.27-29). Section C (PDF p.30-34): IPC protocols are said to prohibit the famine projections made without representative non-trauma mortality evidence; Table 2 in the original gives a grand total inferred mortality of 86,312 (Current 27,480 plus Projected 58,832, each the sum of its rows), against the text figure of 78,582 projected starvation deaths by January 17, 2025 (see Open questions), and Table 3 tabulates COGAT food trucks rising to 167.2 a day in May 2024, 2.29 times pre-war, alongside IPC Phase 5 populations; the February 2024 Scenario-Based Health Impact Projections (6,550 / 58,260 / 74,290 excess deaths) and the Lancet 186,000 estimate and its inflation by the Special Rapporteur to 15-20 percent of the population are recorded (PDF p.31-36).

Chapter 1, sections D, F-I (PDF p.36-49, first part)

Section D (PDF p.36-38): in Yemen the IPC treated crude mortality of 0.28 and under-five mortality of 1.03 per 10,000 a day as below the emergency threshold, and Sudan’s Phase 5 rested on a validated Zamzam camp rate of 1.9, whereas no comparable mortality study was conducted for Gaza even during the January-March 2025 ceasefire; GMOH starvation deaths are given as 41, then a further 57 in May 2025, and only 440 for the entire war even after the later food crisis (PDF p.38-39). No section E appears in Chapter 1 as printed; D is followed by F. Section F (PDF p.39-42): Gaza infant mortality fell and life expectancy rose 1997-2019 in line with the West Bank and unaffected, the authors argue, by blockade phases or truck numbers since 2006, on US Census Bureau data (Figures 6-8). Section G (PDF p.43-45): Gaza cultivated land was 115,000 dunams in 2011; 2005 production was 388,880 metric tons and 2011 production 112,778 tons; the Amnesty 44 percent figure derives from PCBS supply-and-use tables of household expenditures, ignoring UNRWA grants amounting to 42 percent of the Strip’s needed caloric intake in 2022. Section H (PDF p.45-47): the maximum needed is computed as 82 food trucks a day after allowing for about 100,000 Gazans who fled to Egypt; COGAT transferred 1,011,575 tons between October 7, 2023 and January 17, 2025 on the text figure, 1,010,613 tons in Table 5, an average of 102 food trucks a day, 23 percent more than the authors calculate was required. Section I (PDF p.47-49, continues in part 2): the May 2024 Rafah operation, delayed three months and restricted by an ICJ order, coincided on GMOH figures with fewer deaths (3,465, April 30-June 30, against 4,500, February 29-April 30); UNRWA’s reported 70 percent decline in May aid is shown, on updated UN data of March 15, 2025, to have been 3,714 food trucks in May (about 120 a day, against 53 reported at the time and COGAT’s 166), 2,891 in June (about 96.1 a day, against 30 reported) and 4,133 in July.

Chapter 1 completed: Hamas aid diversion, northern Gaza, siege and intention (PDF p.50-63)

Figure 11 gives the updated OCHA truck record for May-July 2024 (PDF p.50). The section headed H, Hamas Aid Diversion (the letter H is used again, after the Interim Summary at PDF p.45-46, as printed): the Muhammad Halabi World Vision case (arrested 2016, convicted by the Be’er Sheva District Court in 2022), said to illustrate “Hamas’s determination—and success—at infiltrating aid organizations and taking them over from within, as well as the danger faced by Gazan whistleblowers”; UNRWA cement sacks filmed in a Hamas tunnel in February 2024; armed militants taking over 47 aid trucks in Rafah on October 10, 2024; a September 2024 recording in which Hamas members admitted their warehouses were so full “there is no more space”; Hamas archive documents released by the IDF in June 2025 giving direct theft by the military wing alone as 25 percent of aid before April 2024 and 15 percent afterwards, besides taxation and extortion; testimony by freed hostage Eli Sharabi to the UN Security Council on March 20, 2025, former General Gadi Eizenkot’s February 2024 claim that 60 percent of aid was diverted, Mahmoud Abbas’s May 4, 2025 statement that “Hamas-related gangs are stealing aid”, and WHO special representative Michel J.J. Thieren’s report blaming systematic looting by armed groups (PDF p.50-52). The section headed I, Northern Gaza, Local Hunger, Siege and International Humanitarian Law (the letter I is also used again): the Netzarim corridor was seized on November 6, 2023 and aid was allowed into the north only after the November 24, 2023 ceasefire; on Checchi et al.’s Wartime Food Availability study, despite its four alleged flaws (pre-war truck overestimate, exclusion of non-UNRWA aid, a 2,800-calorie assumption, and Egyptian Red Crescent pallet weights of 653 kg against UNRWA’s roughly 1.2 tons), southern and central Gaza showed shortages only in two brief periods in February-March 2024 at over 2,100 calories per person per day, while the north fell to about 1,000 calories per person over eight weeks, January 9-March 6, 2024, a level the authors correct upward by approximately 21 percent (PDF p.52-55). I.2, Laws of Siege: siege aimed at a military objective is not inherently illegal; Mosul 2017 and Basra 2003 are given as state practice, and the US and UK combat manuals and Article 23 of Geneva Convention IV, with Pictet’s 1958 commentary, are quoted for the besieger’s right to withhold supplies from an area whose civilians may evacuate and where diversion is reasonably feared; Israel’s Supreme Court is noted to have rejected the occupation-law framework for northern Gaza (PDF p.55-57). The authors add the caveat that starving enemy forces is permissible in the US and UK manuals “even if customary law interpretations might challenge the practice”, and the Rule 53 passage quoted in note 124 ends: “States denounced the use of siege warfare in Bosnia and Herzegovina. It was also condemned by international organizations.” (PDF p.55). Section J, Intention to Starve: specific intent under Article 30 of the Rome Statute cannot be shown, there being no GMOH or Spagat and Shikaki indication of widespread non-traumatic deaths; Gallant’s October 9, 2023 “human beasts” statement is said to be a misquotation referring only to Gaza City, and Netanyahu’s October 18, 2023 statement not to imply blocking aid from Egypt via Rafah or water, which Israel resumed pumping before the statement; the ICC prosecutor’s claim of a total siege closing Rafah is answered that Israel did not control Rafah until May 2024 and its later closure was Egypt’s decision; Hamas had destroyed the Erez and Kerem Shalom crossings and nine of ten power lines on October 7, water flowed again by October 15 and Kerem Shalom was restored by October 21, 2023; rocket fire on Kerem Shalom killed four soldiers on May 5, 2024 (PDF p.57-60). Section K: Hamas police, armed and directly subordinate to Hamas’s military leadership, should not have been required to be allowed to escort and manage aid — aid organisations rejected Assad regime and coalition-supported Iraqi and Afghan escorts — and many police officers, especially senior officers, are also members of Hamas’s military wing; Lee Mordechai’s adoption of Hamas’s claim that Shifa Hospital served as an aid distribution center is answered with the senior Hamas figures arrested or killed inside it in the IDF raid (PDF p.60-61). Section L, Securing Aid Convoys and the “Flour Massacre”: aid was lost to theft by Gazan aid workers, seizure by Hamas, “taxes” to local families and criminal organisations and unofficial looting; on the Flour Massacre of February 29, 2024, Mordechai is said to omit the Daghmesh clan heads’ murder by Hamas after their March 2024 meetings with Israeli representatives and the arrests and executions of Palestinian Authority officials who came to secure convoys, and to fail to distinguish those trampled while fleeing Israeli fire, those killed by unknown gunmen and those killed by IDF fire; Mousa Abu Marzouk is quoted: “We are not responsible for Gaza’s civilians. Israel and the UN are responsible.” (PDF p.61-62). A further section headed I, Claims of Starvation after the End of the Second Ceasefire in March 2025 (the letter I used a third time): the January 18-March 2, 2025 ceasefire brought 25,200 trucks carrying 447,538 tons, 77.8 percent food, and 345,947 tons of food on COGAT’s figures, enough on the WFP’s 116,000-tons-for-one-million-for-four-months estimate to sustain about 1.95 million people for at least 183 days, until late July or early August 2025; Israel blocked aid from March 2 to May 19, 2025 while maintaining water and electricity, resuming under international pressure and IDF warnings; the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation began distribution on May 24, 2025, distributing 16 million meals as of June 11; the total aid denial is called a grave mistake; aid organisations’ denial of diversion is set against stock depletion reported as early as April 2025 and the sale of donated commodities in Gaza’s markets; UN official Tom Fletcher’s claim that 14,000 children would die within 48 hours is given as false even on the IPC forecast it rested on, which covered April 2025 to March 2026 (PDF p.62-63).

Chapter 2: The Missing Context — Urban Warfare and Hamas’s Human Shields Strategy (PDF p.64-80)

The summary states the thesis: Hamas combined a regular army’s resources with irregular tactics in a deliberate plan built over more than a decade, collocated within civilian infrastructure to exploit the population as Human shields; historical urban battles (Grozny, Mosul, Marawi, Bakhmut, Fallujah and others) show all armies, Western included, resorting to heavy bombing and massive destruction of entire cities; the defender’s strategy and the civilian population’s own decisions may matter more than the attacker’s care — Russian forces in Ukraine are said to have inflicted proportionately fewer civilian casualties than Coalition forces in Iraq or Afghanistan, primarily because Ukraine evacuated its citizenry, while in Grozny thousands died because neither side heeded civilians (PDF p.64). The general account of urban warfare follows: since 2008 a majority of the world’s population lives in cities; urban terrain is three-dimensional (“volume, not area”), approximately 90 percent of firefights occur within 50 metres, tanks are vulnerable in dead space, and a six-to-one superiority norm developed after World War II (PDF p.64-66). Cases: Berlin 1945, Grozny 1994, Baghdad 2003, Ar-Raqqa, Mosul and Nahr al-Bared; Paris was besieged rather than captured by the Prussians in 1870 and not stormed by the Allies in 1944 for fear of diverting eight divisions; Basra was besieged then invaded in 2003; Russians were reported in January 2025 to be flanking Pokrovsk rather than fighting there (PDF p.66). Hue 1968: 80 percent of buildings destroyed or damaged (PDF p.67). Fallujah 2004: 70-90 percent of 300,000 residents evacuated before the battle, the remaining population suffering at least 580 killed (some estimates 800 or more), the Americans and allies about 50 killed, their enemies 1,000-1,500 killed, about one-fifth of buildings destroyed and approximately 40 percent more damaged (PDF p.67). Marawi 2017: almost all of about 200,000 residents escaped or were evacuated, 2,000 held hostage by ISIS excepted; fewer than 100 civilians killed, against 165 Philippine forces casualties and about 920 ISIS fighters; virtually all buildings in the combat zones destroyed or damaged and over half the residents made refugees (PDF p.67-68). Grozny: about 100,000 of roughly 300,000 residents remained, civilian death estimates varying between 5,000 and 27,000 (PDF p.68). Bakhmut: by December 2022 only 2,000-5,000 of some 80,000 residents remained, and the civilian toll was 204 on the mayor’s figure (PDF p.68). Open-city declarations (Paris and Brussels 1940, Athens 1944, Hamburg 1945), Stalingrad and Aachen (43 percent of buildings destroyed by Allied bombing before the battle and another 40 percent damaged) follow (PDF p.68-69). Mariupol 2022: of over 400,000 pre-war residents approximately 350,000 were evacuated or fled on UN estimates, while at least 1,348 civilians, 70 of them children, were killed; Ukrainian claims reached 25,000, including 5,000-7,000 buried under rubble; about 90 percent of residential buildings and 60 percent of private homes were damaged or destroyed (PDF p.69-70). Sarajevo 1992 and the “new wars” concept mark the contrasting case where expulsion of a rival ethnic group is the goal (PDF p.70). Post-Cold War, it is defenders, particularly non-regular defenders, who prevented civilians evacuating: blending into the population complicates targeting, and harm to civilians by the opponent serves the irregular party locally and internationally; the Taliban and ISIS cases are given, ISIS also mining escape routes and shooting fleeing civilians (PDF p.70-71). Hamas’s defense concept: war is reciprocal, and one-sided judgment that barely addresses Hamas’s methods is likened, via Alexander Jakobson, to a wrestling broadcast with one competitor erased; in urban warfare it is “virtually impossible to understand IDF conduct without an in-depth analysis of Hamas’s defensive strategy”, and the critics are said often to mention Hamas’s conduct only in an offhand, pro forma manner (“Hamas violations do not justify…”), the rest of the chapter setting out to fill that gap; a Hamas document captured during Operation Protective Edge (2014) is quoted that IDF soldiers “must limit their use of weapons and tactics that lead to unnecessary damage and loss of civilian life and property” and that damage to civilian property benefits the defenders by “increasing hatred toward the attackers”; Hamas is said to have developed the human-shields strategy since 2006, with cases in Operations Pillar of Defense (2012) and Cast Lead (2008-2009) where civilians voluntarily served as human shields for military targets and took pride in doing so, believing their presence prevented Israeli attacks, Fathi Hammad quoted that children and the elderly “excel in the death industry” and as human shields, Yahya Sinwar that civilian casualties “will pump blood into the veins of the nation”, and Sami Abu Zohri that civilian deaths are not a problem “because the wombs of our women will produce many more children”; the use of human shields is prohibited (Customary IHL Rule 97) and shields do not render a target immune (Geneva Convention IV Article 28; Additional Protocol I Article 51(7)) (PDF p.71-72). Hamas fighters, estimated at 30,000, abandoned a pre-planned conventional defence for small scattered cells, often in civilian clothes, and instructed civilians not to leave evacuation-warning areas, a policy also reported in the October 2024 battle in Jabalya; Hamas refused to declare any area an open zone, used the humanitarian zone to hide senior figures like Muhammad Deif and as a rocket launching site, and Egypt’s closure of the southern border, endorsed by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, is blamed in part for Gaza’s casualties being much higher than southern Lebanon’s (PDF p.73). The tunnel network: known before the war at dozens of kilometres, estimated by early 2024 at over 500 kilometres with about 5,700 shafts, probably greater than any other single military tunnel system in history (Cu Chi about 250 kilometres), entrances hidden in civilian buildings including the children’s room camouflaging the entrance to the tunnel where six Israeli hostages were murdered; Abu Marzouk is quoted that the tunnels were built to protect Hamas fighters, not civilians (PDF p.74). A 2021 Beit Hanoun explosion in a tunnel-stored explosives malfunction injured 36 on the reports cited; Hamas used hospitals, schools, clinics, mosques and UNRWA facilities for weapons, command centers, tunnel entrances and fighters, and placed rocket launchers near such buildings; a tunnel where Muhammad Deif hid ran beneath the emergency room of the European Hospital in Khan Younis, documented in May 2025; in the second Shifa Hospital raid (“Operation Local Surgery”) a Palestinian eyewitness testified hundreds of Hamas members, some armed, were inside the hospital and senior Hamas and Islamic Jihad commanders were detained there; in April 2025 a Hamas interrogation summons to a room at Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis was displayed by Kan 11’s Elior Levy (PDF p.74-76). Rockets fired from Gaza from October 7, 2023 until April 2024 totalled about 9,100, including the rocket that hit near Al-Ahli Al-Mamdani Hospital; about 11 percent of launches fell within the Strip on IDF estimates; Hamas’s strategy of drawing the IDF deep into Gaza and ambushing it, fighters emerging unarmed and disguised from tunnels to pick up cached weapons, and the case of 21 Israeli soldiers killed by RPG fire from orchards while preparing houses for demolition, are described (PDF p.76-77). Booby-traps: “It is impossible to know how many buildings were booby-trapped”; Brigade 162 estimated at least 96,000 booby-trapped locations destroyed across Gaza, about 14,000 buildings in Rafah and over 600 in Jabalya in the latter months of 2024; satellite analysis of February 2025 showed about 65 percent of Gaza’s buildings destroyed; cases of unjustified destruction, or destruction without proper approval such as Al-Israa University in Gaza City, are acknowledged (PDF p.78). The IDF’s polygon warning system, dividing Gaza into small polygons and announcing targets in advance at the cost of surprise, is said to be employed by no other military, and a JINSA Gaza Assessment Task Force is cited as concerned the precedent could undermine other armies’ effectiveness; crossfire accounted for 31 of 445 IDF combat fatalities in the Strip as of July 10, 2025, and six soldiers were killed by “firing deviations” (PDF p.79). The conclusion: much of the destruction resulted from genuine military constraints rather than malicious intent or disproportionate measures, and later chapters will show how false or incomplete data ignored this context to form a narrative biased toward describing a “genocide” (PDF p.80).

Chapter 3: The Question of Massacre and Deliberate Killing — summary and sections A-C (PDF p.81-87)

The summary sets the method: individual war crimes are inseparable from war, and forensically supported cases are the tip of an iceberg indicating a much larger volume of war crimes and disciplinary failures, a warning to the military system; documented cases “may be indicative of wider negligence, lack of professionalism, and even criminal tendencies throughout the ranks”; on Lee Mordechai’s database (March 2025 version) — a collection by a historian drawing on Palestinian witnesses, UN agencies, human rights organizations, academic researchers, media outlets and international critics of Israel, assembled to substantiate his claim of serious and intentional IDF war crimes — forensically supported incidents total 12 Palestinians and seven foreign civilians killed under circumstances strongly suggesting war crimes or at least criminal negligence, with an additional 15 Palestinian civilians killed in the Rafah ambulance shootings not covered in that edition; Mordechai’s further claims for 40 more Palestinians and one foreign UN worker rest on unverified or questionable accounts, most victims unnamed, and none of these cases meets the accepted definition of a massacre; Hamas-affiliated sources’ mass-killing claims lack sufficient forensic evidence; and the Palestinian American Medical Association doctors’ claims of systematic killing of children by snipers and “sniper drones” contradict independent injury-distribution findings, gunshot wounds, particularly to the head, being extremely rare among Gazan women and children, while the IDF does not operationally employ sniper drones (PDF p.81). The analysed cases are not the full extent of suspected war crimes, but the visible iceberg appears smaller than in comparable wars; most violations occurred during house clearances, in ambushes where troops believed they were engaging Hamas fighters, and most frequently against people entering prohibited zones or approaching military positions; as of June 1, 2025 there is no forensic evidence of large-scale close-range massacres or systematic executions of restrained prisoners, in contrast to Latakia Province in early 2025, the Second Iraq War, Mosul and October 7 (PDF p.82). Section A: contrary to Mordechai’s title “Massacres”, he describes no act meeting the common definition except the Flour Massacre and unverified claims by EuroMed Monitor, a Hamas-affiliated organisation; his score of incidents totals 61 people killed (PDF p.82). Section B, incidents confirmed by forensic evidence: the Hind Rajab family, five of whom were immediately shot and killed after their evacuating vehicle encountered IDF forces in Tel al-Hawa in January 2024, the Red Crescent rescue team coordinated with the IDF also killed, their bodies found two weeks later — doubts about the forensic evidence are outweighed, in the authors’ opinion, by other evidence indicating IDF culpability, and investigation and criminal charges if warranted are called for; the seven World Central Kitchen employees, whose killing led to the dismissal of the authorising officer, some passengers having been armed at least part of the time; the Al-Shati refugee camp building clearance captured on a leaked body camera, the corpse assumed from facial recognition, build and clothing to be Ibraheem Abdi, a 73-year-old deaf man found by his family a week later; and the shooting of five Palestinian men approaching two tanks, one apparently holding a white flag, Rami Abu Sahloul, 51, hit, with no warning shots, arrest procedures or verbal warning — 12 Palestinians and seven foreign aid workers in all (PDF p.83-84). Section C, the Tel al-Sultan paramedics shooting of March 23, 2025, not in Mordechai’s March 2025 edition: IDF soldiers opened fire on ambulances travelling with lights on, killing 15; the initial IDF report, later proven false, claimed the vehicles had no lights and at least nine passengers, including Mohammad Amin Ibrahim Shubaki, were Hamas or Islamic Jihad fighters; the bodies were buried by an IDF bulldozer that crushed the vehicles; Palestinian witnesses’ claims of handcuffed victims showing signs of close-range execution were not supported by evidence, and Palestinian medical authorities found no evidence of restraints; a paramedic’s video showed the lights on and sustained gunfire of at least six minutes concluding with soldiers shouting “Cease!”; the sequence is reconstructed as three incidents — a first ambulance (two killed, one detained and violently interrogated, released the next day), ambulances that passed unfired upon and then a five-vehicle convoy with a fire truck (12 killed, one detained and released a month later), and a UN vehicle whose Palestinian driver was killed about 12 minutes later; the IDF’s Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism found negligence and professional misconduct but not premeditated executions, the deputy commander of the Golani reconnaissance battalion who led the ambush was dismissed and the sector’s brigade commander reprimanded, and Yaniv Kubovich’s Haaretz account of the fuller investigation — a pre-attack ambush, a non-Arabic-speaking soldier’s mistaken interrogation concluding the victims were Hamas members, fire opened even as the vehicles moved away — is set out with the authors’ note that their own analysis of the original data differs from Kubovich’s on times, distances and rate of firing; a Golani reconnaissance commander’s statement days before, “Anyone we meet is an enemy. Recognize a figure—destroy.”, is quoted; even the most lenient interpretation indicates neglect of orders, negligence, reckless shooting, low professionalism and lies during the investigation, and at worst suspicions of war crimes, but the release of survivors and detained witnesses, and other vehicles passing unfired upon, are read as irreconcilable with an organised massacre (PDF p.84-87). Chapter 3 continues in part 3.

Chapter 3 completed: sections D-K and the chapter tally (PDF p.88-101)

Section C’s conclusion: the Tel al-Sultan soldiers’ unprofessional conduct may indicate they perceived a threat, however unfounded, and concealing war crimes in an open society under critical scrutiny would require the complicity of fellow soldiers, superiors, Palestinian bystanders with cell phones, Israeli civil society and the media; 15 Palestinians were killed in the incident (PDF p.88). Section D, the Hala shooting: a 58-year-old grandmother shot on November 12, 2023 while holding her four-year-old grandson’s hand in an evacuation convoy from Rimal, Gaza City, filmed steadily from an elevated vantage point by an unidentified, apparently professional photographer; of three scenarios — a vengeful Israeli sniper team, an Israeli sniper team firing without warning at a woman outside the approved route, or a Hamas sniper deterring evacuation — the first is considered unlikely and the second more probable, the third speculative but aligned with reports of Hamas firing on evacuating Gazans; against Mordechai, the work compares Mosul 2017, where unidentified groups shot fleeing civilians and ISIS is presumed responsible on operational patterns and motives, and argues Palestinian casualties should not be attributed to Israel by default when they served Hamas’s strategic objectives; four Palestinians were killed in these incidents (PDF p.88-89). Section E, identified victims corroborated by multiple Palestinian testimonies: the Mahatta neighbourhood, Khan Younis, family home break-in of December 2023 (father killed at the entrance, mother and a child seriously injured in the kitchen, the mother allegedly executed while bleeding — fatal misidentification in house clearance is not necessarily a war crime, but the case warrants investigation); Najib, a handicapped man shot at Al-Hayir Hospital after repeatedly standing and shouting despite an officer’s threat; and a detained, shackled Palestinian forcibly sent to Nasser Hospital to order evacuation — Israeli rulings since 2005 prohibit using civilians for military purposes, and the recurring Mosquito Procedure reports of detainees used to detect IEDs are called reprehensible and must be ended and punished; four civilians were killed in these cases (PDF p.89-90). Section F, single or unreliable witnesses: EuroMed Monitor’s 94-year-old grandmother left behind at Shifa, Muhammad Shehada’s tank run-over claims, an unnamed elderly man shot at a checkpoint toward Rafah, a sniper claim on a rooftop body, up to four unnamed executions in Rimal, and a girl mourning her mother — up to 11 alleged victims in all (PDF p.90-91). Section G, context-dependent drone cases: five Palestinians killed leading a horse-drawn cart, with a possible secondary explosion indicating an explosive device, and four young men killed wandering the ruins of Khan Younis before residents’ return was authorised, a second missile exploding seconds later — both visually conforming to IED-planting patterns by Palestinians in civilian clothing; nine unidentified Palestinians killed (PDF p.91-92). Section H, less credible cases with possible military justification: Al Jazeera border-fence videos whose angles and fixed multi-angle recording raise fabrication doubts; four undated beach videos of a lone Palestinian walking north, raising his hands and falling inside a prohibited zone announced six months earlier — with the legal caveat that the IDF cannot declare “killing zones”, only heightened-risk areas with abbreviated warning and arrest procedures; a EuroMed compilation; and the sniper video titled as the execution of a civilian recovering a dead boy, in which Daniel Raab, self-identified as part of the sniper team, claimed both men were terrorists in a mined area with a tunnel, the second unarmed but dragging a terrorist’s body during battle; ten unidentified Palestinians allegedly killed; none of the victims in these videos has been identified by name after over a year (PDF p.92-93). The general remark: brief clips cannot establish whether those depicted are misidentified civilians, positively identified combatants, or targets of professional judgment, but “none of the reviewed videos depicts close-range executions of helpless captives” (PDF p.94). Section I, coordination failures: two Paltel infrastructure workers killed after straying from their written coordinated route, the +972 investigation accepting verbal approval to alter it — a case demanding serious investigation — and a UN vehicle marked with UN symbols hit by a tank in May 2024 in an active combat zone without prior coordination, on the IDF’s claim; two Palestinians and one international worker died (PDF p.94-95). The chapter tally: Mordechai’s sources depict incidents allegedly leading to the unjustified killing of 51 out of 50,021 reported killed by GMOH by May 2025, and eight foreign casualties, plus the 15 of Tel al-Sultan; even as the tip of a broader iceberg this is read as relatively small against the March 2025 Alawite Coast massacres (1,084-2,191 killed, with dozens of verified close-quarter execution videos), the Second Iraq War and Mosul, Bucha, and October 7, and the evidence is said to fall short of the specific intent for systematic intentional mass killings (PDF p.95). Section J: most of Mordechai’s cases rest in a short paragraph citing EuroMed Monitor, a Hamas-affiliated entity, alleging dozens of executions and hundreds killed waiting for food convoys, and Hossam Shabat’s Shifa mass-execution claims — claims covered by neither Israeli nor international media nor HRW or Amnesty and lacking any factual or forensic basis (PDF p.96). Section K, the PAMA doctors: their claim to have each daily treated pre-teen children shot in the head or chest, 99 daily cases at least, with sniper drones responsible for much of it, is tested against the February-April 2024 average of 130 injuries a day (about 40.5 children) and against injury studies — Salqawi and Villar at Shuhada Al-Aqsa (82 percent explosions and collapse, 8 percent gunshot, all gunshot cases male, 3 percent head wounds), Alasarr et al. on 500 cases, a May 2025 European Hospital study (4-5 of 41 primary surgical injuries children, no skull trauma), and MSF’s 22,637 consultations (gunshots 11.3 percent, bombs and shelling 83 percent) — and found incompatible with possible reality even on maximal assumptions (PDF p.96-98). Mark Pearlmutter’s 70-75 percent children claim is set against GMOH’s figures for his hospital (children 16 percent of the injured); the CT scans are read, on the authors’ expert consultations, as most consistent if authentic with low-velocity falling bullets entering the skull apex (PDF p.98-99). The 99 signatories’ statement that over a combined 254 weeks not one saw any Palestinian militant activity in any Gaza hospital is set against Fauzia, the Yazidi woman forced to work at Shuhada Al-Aqsa who saw armed presence daily, Dr. Baxtiyar Baram at Al-‘Awda and Kamal Adwan, hostages held at Shifa and Nasser, and Victoria Rose at the European Hospital, metres from the tunnel entrance where Mohammed Sinwar sheltered; the doctors’ assessment of 67,413 hunger and disease deaths as of September 2024 is said to be contradicted by the Spagat and Shikaki survey; and no model of sniper drone with small arms is found in operational use anywhere, the Elbit prototype having no real trials published and no documented operational use (PDF p.99-101).

Chapter 4: The Question of Indiscriminate Bombing (PDF p.101-118)

The summary: the chapter sets out the IHL framework (distinction, proportionality, military necessity, humanity), then argues the munitions-to-fatalities ratio — fewer than one death per munition in the first two and deadliest months — points to precision targeting and restraint, since an army intending mass civilian casualties would have used fewer munitions on denser centres despite ordnance shortages, embargo threat and other fronts; evacuation orders significantly reduced risk, only 2-4 percent of reported fatalities from May 2024 to January 2025 occurring in the designated humanitarian zone where over half the population had relocated, on BBC Verify data; precautions included ample advance warnings and delaying or aborting strikes; unguided munitions do not in themselves violate international law when properly used by trained pilots taking feasible precautions; and the deadly Beit Lahiya strike is conceded as flawed intelligence, human error or miscalculation — the chapter is a methodological clarification, not blanket exoneration, bombing being assessed by the intelligence available at the time, the target’s military value and the precautions taken (PDF p.101-102). Section A: distinction (Additional Protocol I Article 52’s four criteria — nature, location, purpose, use — with dual-use targets legitimate only if the dominant use is military), the defender’s Article 58 duties and the attacker’s Article 57 duties; military necessity; proportionality in ius in bello — no predetermined numerical threshold or formula exists, assessment is the reasonable commander’s professional judgment on the intelligence available at planning, not outcome-based analysis, and civilians’ presence near a target does not automatically preclude attack, Article 51(7) prohibiting the defender from shielding objectives with civilians; humanity — no obligation to prefer less effective weapons, worked through a hypothetical in which a commander may lawfully choose a 500kg bomb expected to kill nine civilians over a 250kg bomb expected to kill four, if the larger damage is not excessive, though choosing it over an available 300kg option would be questionable (PDF p.102-106). Section B, excessive use of munitions: Mordechai’s comparison of about 29,000 Israeli air munitions to December 2023 with 3,678 US munitions in Iraq 2004-2010 is answered with the invasion-period comparison (about 29,199 US air munitions in the 2002 Afghanistan invasion [as printed] and the Iraq invasion’s initial stages; the US used cluster bombs, Israel is not reported to have); by the end of December 2023 about 22,000 Palestinian deaths were reported, many in ground fighting, giving fewer than one casualty per aerial munition — read as precision and as strikes directed mostly at evacuated or warned areas, the IDF often avoiding legitimate targets such as tunnel shafts until civilians had evacuated, as in Al-Zahra on October 19, 2023 (PDF p.107-108). Section C, unguided munitions: not inherently indiscriminate (ICRC Rules 12 and 71; the ICJ nuclear-weapons opinion); “dumb bombs” delivered by trained pilots can be accurate to within approximately 50 metres; Israel’s unguided share to December 2023 was 40-45 percent, against 40 percent for the US in Afghanistan, 32 percent in Iraq and 70 percent in Kosovo, and US/UK heavy unguided use and Iraqi Grad salvos at Mosul; guided munitions in the quantities expended were not available on the international market at any price amid Ukraine-war shortages, and preserving them for Lebanon and Iran fronts that ultimately materialised was a legitimate “military munitions economy” — guided weapons were 8 percent of munitions but 84 percent of cost in the 1991 Gulf War (PDF p.108-111). Section D, intelligence accuracy and collateral damage: Mordechai’s published civilian-to-fighter ratios for early attacks (1:15 to 1:300) against the US 1:29 for the Saddam Hussein assassination attempt, and his claim of over 10 percent target misidentification, are answered by explaining “permissible incidental harm” as a maximum threshold set by senior command, not a cap to be met, an estimate, or a fixed rate — every attack still passes a chain of approvals and commanders often refrain even below threshold; US decapitation strikes killed none of the 55 blacklisted Iraqi leaders initially, while Israeli assessments suggest most of Hamas’s Gaza leadership was neutralised except two wounded commanders; the reported upper limit of 20 civilian casualties per main target (via +972) is not an average of 20 civilians per combatant (PDF p.111-113). Section E, evacuation notices and “safe zones”: Israel never officially defined any area as a “safe zone” in the strict legal sense, such zones normally requiring mutual agreement; nothing prevented Hamas unilaterally declaring one, or humanitarian organisations calling on both parties to agree one; Israel designated higher-risk combat areas and advised relocation, designating Al-Mawasi a “safer zone” by December 2023, in effect to the January 17, 2025 ceasefire and later extended to Deir Al Balah — the UN and humanitarian organisations refusing to direct supplies and services there until the Rafah operation forced it; on GMOH data supplied to Zeina Jamaluddine, those remaining in the north (about 300,000 assumed) were 8.5 times more likely to die in November 2023 than those who fled; BBC Verify recorded about 550 deaths in the humanitarian zone from May 2024 to January 2025, including 90 in the Muhammad Deif strike — 2.1 percent of identified deaths May 2024-March 2025, or 3.5 percent on GMOH supplemented data — while Hamas used the zone to shelter leaders and launch hundreds of rockets (PDF p.113-116). Section F, specific attacks: Amnesty’s four Rafah strikes (95 civilians) and HRW’s “House of Engineers” strike in Nuseirat (106 deaths) rest on resident interviews, which cannot establish the absence of military targets — the same methodology failed to identify Hezbollah fighters in the 2006 Lebanon War — and Israel’s non-disclosure of intelligence is a burden-of-proof matter, not illegitimacy; the Beit Lahiya strike of October 29, 2024, bombing a crowded building to target a Hamas sniper on the mistaken belief it had been evacuated, killed 132 residents and is given as the tragic counter-case (PDF p.116). Section G, AI targeting: the +972 Lavender report is answered that AI in the IDF is an intelligence-processing and cross-referencing tool, not an autonomous decision-maker, approvals remaining in human hands; hasty mechanical use by some soldiers is a grave concern applying with even greater force to human decision-making (PDF p.117). The Conclusion restates the chapter: 2-3.5 percent of reported deaths to March 2025 occurred in the humanitarian zone from May 2024 to January 2025, on partial data that “may be much higher” yet indicative of relative safety (PDF p.118).

Chapter 5: The Question of Casualty Counting and Distribution — summary and sections A-G opening (PDF p.119-127)

The summary: characterising most casualties as civilians, especially women and children, rests almost entirely on GMOH data cited by human rights organisations, UN agencies, Western countries and even the Israeli government; such reliance is tainted by the Certainty mirage; GMOH does not distinguish civilians from combatants under Hamas’s 2014 directive, and shows suspicious patterns — sudden jumps in women and child rates, seeming inclusion of age-associated natural mortality, omission of names, systematic inclusion of biased media reports; the alternative speculative model includes around 6,400 natural and rocket-misfire deaths in the GMOH lists (13 percent of the total) and excludes a similar number of combat-aged male deaths, yielding a distribution like previous Gaza rounds and compatible with IDF claims of 20,000 combatants eliminated before the January 17, 2025 ceasefire and with GMOH reports of primarily paternal orphans and male amputees; the initial 70 percent women-and-children assertion, though quietly retroactively corrected, shaped public discourse far more than the revised data (PDF p.119). Section A: since 2008 Hamas has instructed operatives and the population not to disclose casualty circumstances, affiliations or combatant status and to present all killed as civilians, implemented by GMOH; the 2014 Interior Ministry directives are reproduced in Arabic and translation (Figures 15-16): “The Ministry of Interior and National Security calls on all our people and all resistance organizations not to publish information or images of resistance victims and not to specify any details regarding the circumstances or location of their death.” and “Everyone who is killed or becomes a martyr should be called a citizen from Gaza, Palestine, before we discuss their status in Jihad or their military rank. Always remember to add ‘innocent citizen’ in your description of those killed by Israeli attacks on Gaza.” Had Hamas’s fighter losses been low, it would have had every incentive to distinguish them as Hezbollah did before September 2024 (PDF p.120-121). Section B: the Al-Ahli Al-Mamdani claim of 471 killed in an Israeli attack on October 17, 2023 was comprehensively disproved — a Palestinian Islamic Jihad rocket exploding in the parking lot — on recorded conversations, video and ballistic analyses accepted or not rejected by leading human rights organisations and foreign governments; GMOH manipulated that day’s data to include almost no casualties from other strikes and never corrected it; as of May 2025 neither the UN nor major human rights organisations had audited GMOH reliability in consequence (PDF p.122). Section C: between October 27 and November 24, 2023 there was no statistically significant correlation between women and children killed and a strong negative correlation between men and women in GMOH daily reports (Abraham Wyner, Figures 17-18, read in the original: Figure 17, Daily Women vs. Daily Children, 15 daily points with two at zero daily women, gives r: 0.130, R²: 0.017, F(1,13)=0.22, PValue=0.6437; Figure 18, Daily Men vs. Daily Women, 15 daily points descending steeply, one plotted below zero daily men, gives r: -0.914, R²: 0.835), suggesting crude manipulation to a “quota” of women and children; GMOH chose not to identify adult male gender; Ahmed Hewidy’s late-identification explanation is answered that the final dated lists supplied to Jamaluddine give women and children at 61 percent (October) and 57 percent (November), below the 70 percent reported, with adult men to adult women at 1.63 and 1.83, consistent with UNRWA employee deaths; Wyner’s low-variation claim for October 26-November 10 is recorded as not extending to the ceasefire and not a strong indication of manipulation (PDF p.122-125). Section D: GMOH persistently reported over 70 percent women and children until April 2024, 74 percent in December 2023, almost precisely their population share and largely unchanged despite drastic shifts in combat; with munitions exceeding reported casualties and each munition capable of killing dozens or hundreds in civilian clusters, amid Israeli shortages and regional-war prospects, the figures cannot be reconciled with deliberate indiscriminate killing; the acceptance of the data is a textbook Certainty mirage (PDF p.125-126). Section E: UNRWA staff casualties — men 62 percent of casualties while 41 percent of the 13,000 employees, a male death rate 2.3 times the female rate in the war’s first three weeks, when GMOH reported women and men dying at roughly the same rate — are used against both the claim that Israel’s distinction improved over time and the claim that only the Gaza Media Office, not GMOH, was responsible for early inaccuracies (PDF p.126). Section F: Jamaluddine claimed GMOH traumatic deaths were underestimated, at 62,260 by June 2024 alone, but her GMOH-supplied database — identities, dates and districts openly listed, proving public withholding was deliberate — gives women and children at no more than 61 percent in October and 57 percent in November, against 72 percent claimed from that time and 68 percent in data released by November 2, 2024; this is read either as an extraordinarily silent retroactive correction or as an intentional, successful effort to create the impression of indiscriminate killing in the war’s first month (PDF p.126-127). Section G opens: from November 2023 GMOH reports were supplemented with “reliable media reports” from the Gaza Media Office, 62 percent of all reports by March 18, serving from the outset as a clearly unreliable means of artificially inflating the women-and-children proportion (PDF p.127). Chapter 5 continues in part 4.

Chapter 5 completed: “reliable media reports”, removals, natural deaths, the speculative estimate and the undercount survey (PDF p.128-150)

Section G’s bullet summary (PDF p.128): GMOH reports to November 2, 2023 (9,061 casualties) gave 68 percent women and children, rounded to 70 percent by the Gaza Media Office, while men added to December 11, 2023 were 50 percent of casualties (adult women an improbable 39 percent, children 11 percent); the Media Office count omitted 1,381 men while adding 1,851 women and 3,673 children; men were 52 percent of the 8,563 GMOH-listed casualties of December 11, 2023-March 23, 2024, against only 8 percent men among the 14,602 deaths added in the same period on “reliable media reports”. A second section headed G (PDF p.128-129): on May 6, 2024 the UN decided to disregard the Media Office-linked distribution and rely solely on ID- and name-verified GMOH lists, and the identified women-and-children share dropped overnight from 69 to 52 percent, a new “elderly” category appearing in UN reports at about the same time; excluding invalid IDs in GMOH’s April 1 table reduced the women-and-children share from 56.4 to 53.3 percent; after the exposure the adult-men share in GMOH data fell to 45 percent by August 2024 while family reports rose to 64 percent, read as a shift to manipulating identified-casualty registration. A third section headed G (PDF p.129-130) gives sudden additions: Al-Aqsa Hospital’s cumulative dead rose by 1,614 in a week to March-April 2024, 848 of them children (52.5 percent of the increase); on October 19, 2023 children were 85 percent of a 785-person increase; on October 26 and December 5, 2023 the women-and-children increase exceeded the total increase (626 against 481; 1,353 against 1,041); on October 31, 97 percent of the increase, and on November 6-7, 118 percent of the increase, were women and children. Section H (PDF p.130-132): 3,400 names identified by Salo Aizenberg as removed from the March 2025 list, GMOH admitting 3,952 previously verified names removed, and the Henry Jackson Society finding 6,394 names removed across the war’s lists — 12.78 percent of GMOH’s total — including Yahya Sinwar’s cousin Naeem Ibrahim Khalil Sinwar and aunt Meryam Hassan Mahmoud Al-Sinwar, Tel Sultan Battalion commander Hamdan Mahmoud Hamdan Al-Astal, and medical personnel and “journalists” identified in Israeli reports as Hamas operatives, among them Ismail Al-Ghul; Figure 19 lists Hamas and Islamic Jihad fighters missing from GMOH lists. Section I (PDF p.132-135): natural-death inclusion — GMOH’s November 2024 announcement that its lists included 1,800 natural deaths, corrected by spokesperson Zahir Al-Wahhidi only after others noticed; supposedly traumatic mortality among elderly women rises with age almost exactly as natural mortality predicts (Figure 20), the excess matching an estimated 3,160 women aged 25+ over 531 days on 2019 rates, and the work infers 4,530 natural deaths concealed in the reports (up to 1,730 men aged 60+ and 2,800 women), testing and rejecting the alternatives of conflict-related non-traumatic excess, injury vulnerability and evacuation resistance. Section J (PDF p.135-137): on the March 2025 lists males of all ages are 67 percent of casualties and adult men 18-59 are 45 percent; excess male mortality ages 11-59 consistent with fighting is 15,760 (Table 6); Figures 20-23, read in the original: Figure 20 (PDF p.134, titled Female Traumatic Mortality) plots the female casualty-to-population ratio running about 0.6-0.9 at ages 25-55 and climbing to about 2.15 at 76+; Figure 21 (PDF p.135, titled Distribution of casualties by age) shows male casualties peaking at about 930 at age 29 against a steadily declining female line, the two crossing at about age 47; Figure 22 (PDF p.136) plots casualty proportion to population share by age for both sexes (male plateau about 2.35-2.45 at ages 33-39; female rising to about 2.05 at about age 76); Figure 23 (PDF p.138, titled Teenage casualty gender distribution) shows the male ratio rising from about 0.55 at age 10 to about 1.30 at 18 while the female ratio stays about 0.5-0.67; no source is credited under any of the four captions; the boys’ disparity from age 11, accelerating at 14, is read against Hamas’s use of underage boys in combat support; against B’Tselem’s 2016 Protective Edge figures, women 18-59 at 14 percent after subtracting excess age-related mortality are a statistically negligible difference from 2014’s 11.12 percent, and minors at 28 percent after population adjustment against 26 percent in 2014. Section K (PDF p.138-139): expected natural mortality for Gaza is computed as 8,394 people (July 7, 2023-March 21, 2025, as printed), about 7,422 excluding under-5s; the most significant potential manipulation is said to be non-reporting of combat casualties, many operatives being buried in tunnels or killed in evacuation zones; no crude traces of manipulation of child traumatic death were identified, but the WHO/GMOH polio vaccination count of 603,000 children (November 2024-February 2025) exceeds the USCB (557,558) and PCBS (591,714) counts of children under 10 for 2023 even before allowing for about 100,000 who left Gaza and 8,229 GMOH-reported child deaths aged 0-9, giving coverage considerably higher than 100 percent. Section L (PDF p.139-143), the speculative alternative estimate: from GMOH’s March 2025 baseline of 50,021 (44.5 percent men 18-59, 16.6 percent women 18-59, 31.21 percent minors), deducting about 4,000 excess age-related natural deaths, then 2,000 failed-rocket deaths, then adding 7,000 unreported combat losses gives men 18-59 at 57 percent and an almost 1:1 ratio of excess combat-age male mortality to all other casualties (Table 7); the authors expressly do not claim this as a grounded assessment; the IDF’s estimate of 20,000 fighters killed is significantly lower than the scenario’s excess male mortality, so a ratio of two combatant deaths to three civilian deaths “cannot be ruled out”; GMOH dashboard orphan figures (32,152 children who lost their father against 4,417 who lost their mother in January 2025, a 7.3:1 ratio), 13,900 widows, and amputee figures (4,500 amputations, 18 percent children and 12 percent women) are set against the reported distribution. The 2014 comparison closes the section: the PA’s April 2015 report claimed 54.5 percent women, children and elderly, while B’Tselem’s June 2016 name-by-name investigation gave combatants as 59.5 percent of adult males killed and adult men as 60 percent of all casualties (Table 8). Section M (PDF p.143-150) assesses Michael Spagat and Khalil Shikaki’s family survey, which concluded GMOH undercounts, with 75,200 violent deaths as its central count: the prisoner extrapolation (52 of 9,729 mapped individuals, extrapolated to 9,400 prisoners, against B’Tselem’s 2,216 Gazans held on security grounds at end-December 2024), household size of 4.5 against PCBS’s 5.3 and a child share of 37 against 47 percent, peak mortality in households of 3-4, the Gaza 3 and Gaza 9 team outliers (Gaza 9 recording 25 percent of reported mortality and not excluded), Zlochin’s geolocation critique, surveyor bias and the August 2024 IDF-released documents alleging Hamas interference in Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research polling, and the absence of any question asking whether violent deaths had been reported to GMOH. The provisional conclusion: “up to March 2025, the GMOH was deliberately engaged in both practices—undercounting combatant casualties and, in a quantitatively minor but qualitatively significant way, overcounting non-traumatic, age-related deaths”, and, like Gabriel Epstein, the authors do not believe GMOH’s total is significantly higher or lower than reality, the divergence lying in gender and age distribution; an unintentional undercount in the hundreds to low thousands is likely, but a GMOH-sanctioned non-anonymised survey would have uncovered an undercount in the tens of thousands. The chapter Summary (PDF p.150) restates the Certainty mirage with the Josephus Flavius example.

Chapter 6: The Question of Iraq and the Humanitarian Bias (PDF p.151-162)

The summary (PDF p.151-152) argues the assumption that UN agencies and human rights organisations are neutral and reliable, and its failure, are universal: such organisations rely mainly on individual testimonies, public data and cooperation with local authorities, and the last three decades in the Middle East show this leading to serious failures which the organisations do not learn from. Section A (PDF p.152): Security Council Resolution 661 (August 1990) prohibited all trade with Iraq except “payments exclusively for strictly medical or humanitarian purposes and, in humanitarian circumstances, foodstuffs”; sanctions remained after Iraq’s April 1991 surrender, conditioned on WMD and missile dismantling and other issues; by 2003 Dr. Nasheit reported Iraqi infant mortality rising from 28 to 107 per 1,000, with 1,673,942 child deaths in 1990-2003. Section B (PDF p.152-154): the 1995 FAO survey in Baghdad, its interviewers recruited directly by the Iraqi Ministry of Health, gave infant mortality rising from 40.6 per 1,000 (August 1985-July 1990) to 198.2 (August 1990-August 1995); Sarah Zaidi and Fawzi extrapolated 576,000 excess child deaths, the figure behind Leslie Stahl’s 1996 question to Madeleine Albright — “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” — and Albright’s answer, “we think the price is worth it”; the May 1996 Oil-for-Food Memorandum of Understanding let Iraq keep one-third of its oil revenues, and Saddam Hussein’s regime gained over $11billionbeyondtheofficiallyallocatedamountthroughillegalsmugglingandafurther$1.7 billion in commissions and bribes; the UN Humanitarian Coordinator in Baghdad resigned in 1998 declaring he did not want to run a program that amounted to genocide; UNICEF’s 1999 survey with the Iraqi government gave under-five mortality doubling from 60 to 120 per 1,000 in 1990-1991 and continuing to rise, implying approximately 400,000-500,000 under-five deaths. Section C (PDF p.154-155): Zaidi’s 1996-1997 follow-up found 1996 child mortality of 38 per 1,000, less than one-fifth of the 1995 survey, and her guess that “some” Iraqi surveyors recorded deaths that did not take place or fell outside the timeframe; her correction was cited 11 times against the original’s 83; in the Kurdistan Autonomous Region, free of regime pressure, child mortality declined after 1991 (Figure 24); many involved held precisely quantifying child mortality neither essential nor constructive, an anti-quantitative approach the work also finds in Amnesty’s Gaza report, quoted: “Amnesty International has not sought to establish how many food trucks would be needed to enter Gaza to replace the loss of domestic food production and meet the population’s nutritional needs.” Section D (PDF p.156-157): Amnesty and HRW coverage uncritically cited the surveys — HRW’s 1999 report citing UNICEF that “the death rate of children under five in 1996 was eight times greater than before the Gulf War” and Dennis Halliday’s “4,000 to 5,000 children (sic) dying unnecessarily every month”; contradictions were presented as proof of the 1999 survey’s professionalism, and UNICEF’s 2022 report still labels sanctions’ severe impact on children without seriously mentioning the refutation (Figure 25). Section E (PDF p.159-160): post-2003 UN surveys show no sharp sustained increase in under-five mortality from 1991 — a sharp but limited 1990-1991 rise attributed mainly to the suppression of the Shia and Kurdish uprisings, then a downward trend — and “Not only did sanctions fail to cause an increase in child mortality in Iraq (at least after 1991), but it is difficult to argue that they slowed the decline in mortality”; UNICEF and the UN Inter-Agency Group changed their estimates to ignore the 1995 and 1999 surveys without official explanation (Figures 26-27). Section F (PDF p.160-161) lists the falsification signs not acted on: Iraq’s population growth of 35.8 percent (1977-1987) against 35.1 percent (1987-1997) on the government’s own data, the ignored Zaidi follow-up and 1995/1999 discrepancy, rising claimed mortality while per capita GDP recovered, the Kurdish region’s decline under the same sanctions, and the largely ignored FAO/WHO September 2000 report finding overweight prevalence of 67 percent in Baghdad for those aged 25+. Section G (PDF p.161): the claim continues to be cited by activist organisations, and in medical, academic and think-tank publications, after its refutation. Section H (PDF p.161-162) gives seven methodological conclusions, among them that the credibility of UN mortality reports conducted under conditions allowing authoritarian interference is “very low, approaching zero”, that the UN’s willingness to admit mistakes publicly is likewise “very low, approaching zero”, and that a publicly presented victim number is adopted regardless of credibility through the anchoring effect, its refutation rarely receiving the original claim’s attention.

Chapter 7: The Question of Civilian Casualty Assessment in Conflict Zones — summary, Jenin and the Lebanon opening (PDF p.163-168)

The summary (PDF p.163-164) sets the chapter’s cases — Jenin 2002, the Second Lebanon War, and Operations Cast Lead and Protective Edge — and its three factors: a narrow definition of “fighter” (recognising as direct participation in hostilities only those actively wielding weapons, against the ICRC’s 2009 Interpretive Guidance on continuous combat function), a human rights-based interpretation of IHL, and personal experience bias (few military experts in reporting organisations’ leadership); the Certainty mirage operates here as the assumption that a single set of related sources must be credible for lack of contrast, and the double standard — civilian and NGO allegations true until proven false, states and armies false until proven true — is named the Burden of proof fallacy; its proponents’ early-warning justification is conceded to be “not an inherently bad idea or a bad faith argument”, but without systematic learning and consequences for false reporting the outcome is unjust criminalisation of lawful state conduct and failure to prevent actual war crimes. Section A (PDF p.165-168), Jenin: the Park Hotel suicide bombing of April 2, 2002 killed 30 Israeli civilians; the camp was the origin of at least 23 of the first 100 suicide attacks in Israel, claiming 131 lives; the factions had prepared a joint operations room and houses packed with explosives; about 90 percent of residents evacuated within three days and the operation ended April 12, 2002 after more than 200 armed individuals surrendered. The massacre claims are documented: PA Secretary-General Ahmed Abed al-Rahman (thousands killed, mass graves), Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo (500 killed, half women and children, presented to the UN Human Rights Council April 15, 2002; later 900 murdered), and Saeb Erekat (“They want to hide their crimes, the bodies of the little children and women.”); early press credulity is documented through the Sydney Morning Herald’s Muiassar Abu Ali account and Peter Beaumont’s April 14 Guardian estimate of 100-200 killed, most civilians, UN envoy Terje Roed-Larsen’s “Israel has lost all moral ground in this conflict”, and Amnesty forensic representative Derrick Pounder’s declaration that the claims appeared credible. Beaumont’s revision about two weeks later — the majority of those recovered were fighters from Islamic Jihad, Hamas and the al-Aqsa Brigades, civilians “in the minority” — and HRW’s May 2, 2002 report (52 Palestinians dead: six women, four adolescents, six men over 55; 27 fighters, 22 non-combatants, the rest inconclusive) largely correspond with the UN fact-finding mission and the PA’s own investigation (56 killed); later HRW, Amnesty and UN reports dismissed the massacre allegations, yet their war-crimes conclusions rested almost entirely on the resident testimonies, many later discredited; unlike Gaza, affiliation was mostly not concealed in Jenin, membership conferring status and benefits and factions competing for recognition, and as of August 2004, 1,413 of 2,124 identified Palestinian fatalities of the Second Intifada (66 percent) were affiliated with armed organisations. Section B opens (PDF p.168): Hizballah’s discreet casualty policy, in Hassan Nasrallah’s deputy Naim Qassem’s view a key factor in its success — 1,276 “martyrs” reported over 15 years of low-intensity conflict, just 13 fighters claimed lost in Operation Grapes of Wrath (April 1996), and no casualty lists in Operations Accountability (1993) and Law and Order (1988); during the 2006 war Hezbollah never announced its tally, published reports totalling 70 deaths, while Amal formally reported approximately 30 fatalities despite minimal involvement. Chapter 7 continues in part 5.

Chapter 7 completed: the Second Lebanon War assessment, Cast Lead and the Goldstone Report, Protective Edge (PDF p.169-177)

Section B completed (PDF p.169-170): the Lebanese government reported 1,086 non-military or non-police deaths without distinguishing civilians from Hizballah and other resistance fighters, in line with Hezbollah’s concealment policy. Human Rights Watch’s study, relying on Lebanese civilian testimonies, examined 94 Israeli air, ground and artillery strikes totalling 561 fatalities and identified only 51 as Hezbollah operatives in its preface; by its publication in September 2007 Hezbollah had acknowledged at least 250 fighters dead. The IDF claimed up to 800 fighters killed, identified 440 after the fact, and later revised its estimate to 600-700; Lebanese sources and UN officials estimated about 500 a month after the war. HRW accepted the 250 admission but identified none of those casualties in the incidents reviewed or in its list of 548 killed outside the 94 incidents. The work states the 51 figure is itself inaccurate: the study accounted for only 35 Hezbollah operatives, precisely half the 70 deaths Hezbollah eventually acknowledged during the war after third-party disclosures, and its list included eight Amal and five Communist Party combatants, again roughly half each organisation’s acknowledged total, those groups having publicised their losses openly. HRW’s position on visibility is called inconsistent — affiliation said to be easy to determine from “shaheed” (“martyr”) tombstone inscriptions, yet Hezbollah’s secrecy also said to make identification difficult — and from its inability to identify Hezbollah casualties in the villages reviewed HRW probably inferred Hezbollah largely absent, although Israel’s legitimate engagements, HRW concluded, occurred largely outside the strikes analysed. In the 94 incidents adult male fatalities were three times female fatalities, a pattern the work reads as inconsistent with random or indiscriminate strikes, most documented fatalities resulting from airstrikes on houses or enclosed vehicles. Section C, Operation Operation Cast Lead and the Goldstone report (PDF p.170-173): after taking Gaza by force in 2007 Hamas adopted Hezbollah’s information-warfare tactics and, reversing its Second Intifada practice of parading “martyrs”, initially claimed only 48 fighters lost and that all 1,440 additional GMOH-reported deaths were civilians; the GMOH had undergone a Hamas political purge of Fatah-identified medical officials. Khaled Mashal claimed in June 2009 more than 400 fighters lost including police officers; Interior Minister Fathi Hammad claimed 200-300 in November 2009 and, about a year later, 700 Hamas members killed including 250 police officers killed on the first day and 150 “internal security” personnel, almost exactly matching IDF estimates. The Definition Controversy subsection (PDF p.171-173): HCJ 769/02, the Targeted Killings case (2006), read Article 51(3) of Additional Protocol I’s “for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities” as covering combatants who cease militant functions only for rest periods; the ICRC’s 2009 Interpretive Guidance’s “continuous combat function” is set against both Israel’s formal approach (all military-wing members targetable) and the human rights organisations’ position (anyone not directly engaged is a civilian). On the police targeted in Cast Lead’s opening, the Goldstone Report is quoted that Israel’s “overwhelming majority” assertion “appears to be an overstatement”; against it, an analysis of Palestinian social media and armed-faction websites identified 258 of the police killed (75.2 percent) as Hamas military-wing members, with PFLP, Al-Qassam Brigades, PIJ and unaffiliated “fighters” bringing the affiliated share to 82 percent, and the “internal security force” is said to have conducted full-scale military exercises as a fully capable paramilitary force. The Mission’s listed positions — that neither Hamas membership nor military-wing membership itself renders an individual a combatant, that the police chief’s public statements and the military wing’s acknowledgments are disregarded against contrary testimony and NGO reports, and that factions’ “ownership claims” are disregarded — are argued to strip the ICRC’s functional approach of meaning and to exemplify the Burden of proof fallacy a third time. Goldstone’s later retraction of many of the report’s conclusions is noted to have left little impact on the humanitarian ecosystem. Section C (second so lettered), 2014 and Operation Protective Edge (PDF p.174-177): Hamas had improved information security under its concealment policy and the Interior Ministry instruction to define every “martyr” as a civilian; GMOH initially claimed “nearly half” the casualties were women and children and OCHA that “at least” 77 percent of the dead were civilians. The Associated Press investigation of 844 casualties from strikes on extended family homes, assisted by B’Tselem, identified only 96 (11 percent) as fighters, although GMOH itself reported women (263) and children (578) as only 39 percent of casualties and B’Tselem’s June 2016 report conceded the share was even lower. Attacks condemned for having no identifiable military target were later shown to have killed Hamas and PIJ members concealed from investigators, most later identified as combatants in the 2016 B’Tselem report, with no retraction of the 2014 reports; the IDF, citing undisclosed intelligence, estimated approximately 45 percent of those killed were combatants. Amnesty’s insistence that “the onus is on Israel to provide information concerning the attacks and their intended targets” is answered that no country has ever complied with such a demand, which would hand Hamas hard intelligence. B’Tselem’s later identifications came from belated public competition for status and credit: PIJ had claimed 121 of its own dead by August 2014, and by February 2015 a Hamas official source admitted to AP it had lost 400 fighters. GMOH never released the full list, publishing only 1,032 names by July 2015; from the more comprehensive public list and Gazan social-media reports the IDF identified 936 fighters (44 percent) and 761 civilians (36 percent), with 428 (20 percent) undetermined; GMOH had also omitted approximately 93 Hamas fighters, some later released by the Palestinian Authority’s health ministry, and its figures may have included Hamas executions, failed-rocket victims and natural deaths. The authors expressly do not suggest human rights organisations act with malicious intent; they lack access to membership information deliberately withheld. The July 29, 2014 Gaza power-plant case closes the chapter’s evidence: HRW and Amnesty immediately issued war-crimes statements on Gazan officials’ claim that an Israeli strike had disabled the Strip’s sole power plant for at least a year, although Israel said an errant Hamas rocket struck it (10-20 percent of Gaza launches being misfires), Israeli electricity and fuel supply continued, and the plant was repaired within weeks — the humanitarian imperative, the work argues, structurally precedes accurate assessment, with evidentiary limits relegated to the “small print”. The chapter Summary (PDF p.177) restates the Certainty mirage and the incompatibility of the states’ burden of proof with protecting intelligence sources and methods.

Chapter 8: The Inverted Funnel — How to Study Conflict Zones? (PDF p.178-187)

The Summary (PDF p.178) names the chapter’s terms: the source criticism fallacy, the Inverted funnel (“inverted information funnel”), the Burden of proof fallacy and the “illusion of certainty”, closing with a proposed methodology for investigating war crimes in conflict zones. Section A, The Source Criticism Fallacy (PDF p.179): Lee Mordechai’s database exemplifies the ecosystem’s flaws; many of his “alternative” sources are affiliated with Hamas or aligned with its resistance narrative — social media activists, Gaza-based figures, the BDS movement, Palestinian organisation networks in the West and Al Jazeera. EuroMed Monitor’s concern is not its Hamas ties as such but its disregard for truth: chairman Rami Abdo claimed Hamas held only a few dozen hostages, most “soldiers”, describing the kidnapped civilians Yotam Hayim, Alon Shmariz and Samer Taalalka as soldiers, asserted no Israeli women were raped on October 7, and claimed in May 2025 that some aid trucks carried burial shrouds “as a prelude to mass death”; Mordechai nevertheless relies extensively on Abdo’s tweets. Forensic Architecture, led by Eyal Weizman, is likewise charged with repeated unreliability rather than discredited by his BDS activism: the 2014 claim that West Bank settlement houses were fitted with red roofs to prevent Israeli Air Force targeting, and the October 2023 attribution of the Al-Ahli hospital damage to an Israeli Iron Dome missile, neither retracted. Section B, Fake Sources and AI-Generated Material (PDF p.179-180): images circulated as Gaza atrocity images were in fact from Syria, Yemen, Tajikistan and elsewhere, and many, including a soldier aiming at terrified children, were AI-generated; authentic horrific Gaza images and misleading Israeli-influencer visuals are both acknowledged, but the genocide allegations are said to be uniquely reliant on imagery to bypass factual scrutiny, and researchers are advised to exclude unverified imagery. Section C, The Humanitarian Bias and the Inverted Information Funnel (PDF p.180-183): all raw casualty data and breakdowns rely exclusively on GMOH reports, with no independent real-time assessment ever conducted outside Hamas-controlled sources; incident reporting rests on local eyewitness testimonies, among which testimony describing Hamas’s use of civilian infrastructure is strikingly absent; foreign reporters’ movements and interviews are monitored and pre-arranged through Hamas fixers and local staff, “much like in the former Soviet Union”, and some local “freelance” reporters are active Hamas operatives or open sympathisers. Aid organisations rely on a local workforce under Hamas pressure, illustrated by the World Vision case (the Muhammad Halabi case of Chapter 1): the Be’er Sheva court’s verdict that the oversight mechanism “operates from outside Gaza and is conducted primarily through remote review of documents received from within the Strip” and that the defendant’s schemes exploited remote oversight’s distance and weaknesses and internal actors’ ability to distort data, and the Hamas interrogation of a worker who raised concerns. Documented Hamas infiltration of UNRWA, Médecins Sans Frontières and World Central Kitchen (which did fire identified infiltrators) is recorded against the sources’ continued authoritative treatment. The Humanitarian bias is specified: questioners of an entrenched catastrophe claim are accused of lacking empathy and of “irrelevant accounting”, so the burden falls on scrutiny rather than on the false premise; Tom Fletcher’s May 21, 2025 claim that 14,000 infants would die in the “next 48 hours”, against the IPC report’s warning of a similar number suffering acute malnutrition over the coming year, echoed uncritically by the Guardian, is the example. The funnel’s output spills into smaller outlets, Wikipedia and international legal proceedings, and likely into AI models; the Curveball single-source failure on Saddam Hussein’s WMD programme and the forged Hitler diaries, authenticated against samples forged by the same forger, are given as analogies. Figure 28 illustrates the funnel in Gaza (PDF p.183). Section D, The Burden of Proof Fallacy (PDF p.183-185), is worked through Shifa Hospital: Amnesty’s November 23, 2023 statement that it had “not seen any credible evidence to support Israel’s claim that al-Shifa is housing a military command centre” and HRW’s “HRW cannot corroborate this allegation”, persisting despite US intelligence confirmation, are said to have deterred rescue and evacuation and allowed hundreds of armed fighters to evacuate with civilians and two Israeli hostages to be executed in or near the hospital; after the first raid, media still could not “independently verify” the released tunnel evidence and hostage-kidnapping footage, and critics shifted to demanding proof Shifa was Hamas’s main command centre actively used during the raid (the Washington Post passage on “the fourth dimension, which is time”); after the second, unexpected raid, HRW’s reliance on patients and medical staff who said they saw no fighters is set against the gunfire footage and high-ranking arrests. Released hostages’ testimony of being held in hospitals, and of nurses cheering at their arrival, is conspicuously absent from the condemning organisations’ statements. The section’s rules: Israeli and anti-Hamas Palestinian sources are not necessarily credible but belong in the evidentiary picture, especially with forensic documentation; non-refutation does not imply falsity; and where forensic evidence contradicts local testimonies, the testimonies should be doubted. Section E, The Certainty Mirage (PDF p.185): exclusivity does not confer credibility; “It is better to be troubled by doubts than to adopt a false picture.” Section F, Catastrophic Accusations and Silent Retractions (PDF p.185-186): the Amnesty report and the legal proceedings against Israel relied on the UNRWA 70 percent aid-collapse claim, the 500-trucks claim and the GMOH 70 percent women-and-children claim, all conclusively disproven and retracted or dropped, while the corrections were issued quietly in vague language and received little traction — the same pattern as Iraq (Chapter 6) and Protective Edge (Chapter 7) — and the failures are likely to recur absent meaningful public and academic accountability. Section G, How can we effectively investigate war crimes during conflicts? (PDF p.186-187): effective research is not impossible, victims’ claims are not to be automatically dismissed, and Western militaries are not to be blindly trusted; claims are to be cross-verified and ranked by credibility, with primary sources prioritised over secondary ones and open-society testimonies over closed-society ones — in Israel thousands including reservists, retired generals and former chiefs of staff publicly opposed the war policies and accused the IDF of war crimes, while in Gaza challenging Hamas’s narrative risked lives — closed-society testimonies being cross-checked rather than dismissed. Figures 29-30 (numbered as discussed in Open questions) present the source-prioritisation and the recommended methodology for investigating war crimes in totalitarian or closed societies such as Gaza.

Summary and Conclusions (PDF p.188)

The study’s reports target — UN agencies, human rights organisations, major media outlets and scholars advocating the “genocide” narrative — is restated as plagued by systemic and serious methodological flaws: misleading statistics, unfounded apocalyptic projections on weak data, conflation of credible and unverified evidence, and unreliable testimonies used in a desperate search for a “smoking gun”. The “inverse information funnel” (as printed here), neglect of urban warfare’s military context and of Hamas’s strategic conduct, and misuse of military and legal terminology compound the flaws. The comparison across conflicts found assertive international-body statements on wide-scale civilian killings, absence of combatant harm and severe humanitarian crises often baseless, their debunking and retractions receiving a small fraction of the original attention while the original allegations continued to circulate, a pattern especially pronounced in the dense 2023-2025 coverage and unlikely to change absent meaningful consequences. The closing concern is the trivialisation of “genocide”, likened to unchecked inflation devaluing currency: “If every urban conflict involving significant human suffering is labeled genocide—regardless of a lack of systematic intent to destroy a group—the concept will lose its emotional and legal weight, becoming a hollow political tool.” A genuine future threat to annihilate a people might then meet a delayed or diminished response.

Appendix 1: Injury patterns and forensic analysis of the PAMA allegations (PDF p.189-193)

Appendix 1 supplements Chapter 3 with studies published or pre-published since its analysis and a forensic assessment of the PAMA-affiliated doctors’ X-ray images. Part I’s table (PDF p.189): El-Taji et al. (BMJ 2025, survey of 78 international healthcare workers) give gunshot head/chest wounds as 6.7 percent of total weapon injuries among 23,726 trauma-related injuries; MSF’s 22,637 patients (2024) give 11.3 percent gunshot wounds against 83 percent bombs and shellings, under-15 children 29.7 percent of all injured; Alasarr et al.’s 500 traumatic injuries at Al-Aqsa Hospital record no head injuries; Alsalqawi and Villar’s 110 in-patients give 8.1 percent gunshot against 86 percent explosive injuries, two head injuries of 187 (1.08 percent), all gunshot injuries male; WHO Emergency Medical Teams reports give major head/neck/spine injuries as 3.2 percent of all EMT injuries; Al Hseinat et al.’s 362 trauma patients give gunshot 31.2 percent against blast 48.3 percent, no head injuries. Part I’s text (PDF p.190): El-Taji’s higher gunshot proportions may reflect observation bias or recall bias; applying its 6.7 percent to GMOH’s 11,755 injuries of February-April 2024 (130 a day) gives about 8.71 gunshot head/chest injuries a day across Gaza, and on maximal assumptions — 20 percent under 13, all sniper-caused, all directed to the 99 PAMA physicians, whose average stay was 18 days — each could have encountered no more than 0.31 such child injuries in an entire stay, against the doctors’ claim to have daily treated pre-teen children shot in the head and chest. Part II (PDF p.191-193) reproduces in full the November 19, 2025 letter of T. Forcht Dagi, professor of neurosurgery and former combat neurosurgeon, on the New York Times X-rays: high-velocity military and sniper wounds generally perforate the skull with small entrance and large exit wounds; the undeformed downward-pointing bullet in one lateral scout image is most likely, if authentic and intracranial, a low-velocity, low-energy round entering at the crown, of the kind produced by a round fired in the air and falling; the limited image set cannot diagnose the bullet’s location, a bullet outside the skull being able to appear inside it; and without the full admission image set, chain of custody, metadata examination and physical examination of the bullet, no definitive conclusion can be reached — nor can a shooter’s intent or identity ever be surmised from imaging alone. Appendixes 2-7, listed in the contents (PDF p.5), do not appear in this file; the work ends at PDF p.193.

Key passages

• “About 500 trucks per day were crossing into Gaza before the hostilities began.” — António Guterres, October 27, 2023, as quoted in the work (PDF p.26)
• “The analysis could not benefit from representative evidence of non-trauma mortality as intended by IPC Protocols (Crude Death Rate and Under Five Death Rate)” — March 2024 IPC analysis, as quoted in the work (PDF p.31)
• “Trucks screened by COGAT are typically only half full, in line with its requirements.” — UN OCHA spokesperson, April 2024, as quoted in the work (PDF p.48)
• “I saw Hamas terrorists carrying boxes with the UN and UNRWA emblems on them into the tunnel.” — Eli Sharabi, testimony to the UN Security Council, March 20, 2025, as quoted in the work (PDF p.51)
• “It is lawful to besiege enemy forces, i.e., to encircle them with a view towards inducing their surrender by cutting them off from reinforcements, supplies, and communications with the outside world. In particular, it is permissible to seek to starve enemy forces into submission.” — US Army combat manual, as quoted in the work (PDF p.55)
• “We are not responsible for Gaza’s civilians. Israel and the UN are responsible.” — Mousa Abu Marzouk, as quoted in the work (PDF p.62)
• “Specifically, every one of us on a daily basis treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest.” — the PAMA-associated doctors’ letter, as quoted in the work (PDF p.98)
• “The 99 signatories to this letter spent a combined 254 weeks inside Gaza’s largest hospitals and clinics. We wish to be absolutely clear: not once did any of us see any type of Palestinian militant activity in any of Gaza’s hospitals or other healthcare facilities.” — the PAMA-associated doctors’ letter, as quoted in the work (PDF p.99)
• “Everyone who is killed or becomes a martyr should be called a citizen from Gaza, Palestine, before we discuss their status in Jihad or their military rank. Always remember to add ‘innocent citizen’ in your description of those killed by Israeli attacks on Gaza.” — Hamas Interior Ministry directive, 2014, translation as given in the work (PDF p.121)
• “Living people complained that they were registered as dead.” — GMOH spokesperson’s explanation for removed names, as quoted in the work (PDF p.131)
• “For the record, our provisional conclusion is that up to March 2025, the GMOH was deliberately engaged in both practices—undercounting combatant casualties and, in a quantitatively minor but qualitatively significant way, overcounting non-traumatic, age-related deaths.” — the authors (PDF p.149)
• “We have heard that a half million children have died. I mean, that’s more children than died in Hiroshima. And, you know, is the price worth it?” — Leslie Stahl to Madeleine Albright, CBS, 1996, as quoted in the work (PDF p.153)
• “My guess is that ‘some’ Iraqi surveyors recorded deaths when they did not take place or the child had died outside the time frame but they specified the opposite.” — Sarah Zaidi to Michael Spagat, as quoted in the work (PDF p.154)
• “They want to hide their crimes, the bodies of the little children and women.” — Saeb Erekat on Jenin, as quoted in the work (PDF p.165)
• “in some of the cases in this report Amnesty International has not been able to identify any possible military target.” — Amnesty International on Protective Edge, as quoted in the work (PDF p.175)
• “in all the cases described in this report and other similar ones during the conflict, the onus is on Israel to provide information concerning the attacks and their intended targets.” — Amnesty International, as quoted in the work (PDF p.175)
• “The oversight mechanism operates from outside Gaza and is conducted primarily through remote review of documents received from within the Strip.” — Be’er Sheva court verdict in the World Vision case, as quoted in the work (PDF p.181)
• “Amnesty International has so far not seen any credible evidence to support Israel’s claim that al-Shifa is housing a military command centre.” — Amnesty International, November 23, 2023, as quoted in the work (PDF p.183)
• “None of the patients or medical staff who spoke to Human Rights Watch said that they saw Palestinian fighters inside the hospital compound during Israeli military operations.” — Human Rights Watch, as quoted in the work (PDF p.184)
• “The minute we came in, all the nurses were standing there and going like this [cheering].” — the first hostage released before the ground operation, as quoted in the work (PDF p.185)
• “It is better to be troubled by doubts than to adopt a false picture.” — the authors (PDF p.185)
• “If every urban conflict involving significant human suffering is labeled genocide—regardless of a lack of systematic intent to destroy a group—the concept will lose its emotional and legal weight, becoming a hollow political tool.” — the authors (PDF p.188)

Evidence the work relies on

• OCHA Movement in and out of Gaza 2022 and the OCHA crossings dashboard, for pre-war and wartime truck totals (PDF p.25, p.29).
• COGAT’s Gaza aid data site, for food-truck and tonnage totals (PDF p.25, p.29, p.46-47).
• IPC and Famine Review Committee reports of December 2023 and February-July 2024, and IPC famine guidelines and country-analysis mapping (PDF p.26, p.31-37).
• Lee Mordechai, Witnessing the Gaza War database and document, as the compilation of allegations reviewed (PDF p.18, p.24, p.29).
• Spagat and Shikaki’s January 2025 Gaza family survey, via its medRxiv version, for non-violent mortality (PDF p.22, p.32, p.39).
• US Census Bureau International Data Base series for infant mortality and life expectancy, 1997-2019 (PDF p.39-42).
• PCBS agricultural census 2010-2011 and December 2023 supply-and-use publication, UNCTAD land and production tables, and Checchi’s wartime food availability assessment for the 12 percent local-production figure (PDF p.43-44).
• Amnesty International, ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza (5.12.2024), as the principal statement of the claims answered in Chapter 1 (PDF p.39, p.43, p.48).
• Hamas archive documents released by the IDF in June 2025, for the military wing’s 25 percent and later 15 percent direct theft of humanitarian aid (PDF p.51).
• Checchi, Tesse-Ververs and Jamaluddine, Wartime Food Availability in the Gaza Strip, October 2023 to August 2024, as the quantitative basis of the northern-Gaza analysis (PDF p.53-54).
• The US Department of Defense Law of War Manual, the UK military manual (JSP 383), Article 23 of Geneva Convention IV and Jean Pictet’s 1958 commentary, for the laws of siege (PDF p.55-57).
• A Hamas combat manual captured during Operation Protective Edge (2014), Fox and Aizenberg, Hamas’s Human Shield Strategy in Gaza (Henry Jackson Society, April 2025), and the JINSA Gaza Assessment Task Force report (May 2024), for Chapter 2’s account of Hamas’s strategy and the IDF’s warning system (PDF p.71-72, p.79).
• Forensic and journalistic reconstructions of the incidents in Chapter 3, including the Guardian on the Hind Rajab family, ITV News on the white-flag shooting, and The New York Times, Sky News, the Washington Post and Yaniv Kubovich in Haaretz on the Tel al-Sultan paramedics shooting, with the IDF’s Fact-Finding Assessment Mechanism findings (PDF p.83-87).
• Middle East Eye, Sky News, ITVx and NBC accounts and the videos Mordechai’s database collects, for Chapter 3 sections D-H, with Daniel Raab’s interview as a self-identified member of the sniper team in the beach/sniper cases (PDF p.88-94).
• Salqawi and Villar and Alasarr et al. at Shuhada Al-Aqsa Hospital, a May 2025 European Hospital study, and the MSF Lancet study of 22,637 traumatic-injury consultations, for the injury-distribution test of the PAMA claims, with GMOH hospital injury figures and Duke Robotics’ revenue reports for the sniper-drone claim (PDF p.97-101).
• Additional Protocol I Articles 51, 52, 57, 58 and 60, Geneva Convention IV Article 14-15 and Geneva Convention I Article 23, and ICRC Customary IHL Rules 7, 8, 12, 14, 17, 23 and 71, with Gillard (Chatham House, 2018), for Chapter 4’s legal framework (PDF p.102-106).
• US GAO munitions data, HRW’s Iraq reporting, BBC reporting on Al-Zahra and BBC Verify’s humanitarian-zone count, and the IDF’s warning and leaflet totals, for Chapter 4 sections B-E (PDF p.107-115).
• Hamas Interior Ministry directives of 2014 via MEMRI (Figures 15-16), Abraham Wyner’s Tablet Magazine analysis (Figures 17-18), the Henry Jackson Society’s Questionable Counting, UNRWA staff casualty data via the Telegraph, and Zeina Jamaluddine’s GMOH-supplied database (GitHub appendix to her Lancet paper), for Chapter 5 sections A-F (PDF p.120-127).
• GMOH Telegram casualty reports, OCHA Flash Updates, the Henry Jackson Society’s Stone and Rose review of all GMOH lists (April 2025), Salo Aizenberg’s identification of removed names, PCBS 2019 mortality data, WHO and PCBS/USCB child population figures from the polio campaign, the GMOH casualties dashboard’s orphan and widow figures, and B’Tselem’s 2016 Protective Edge investigation with the PA’s April 2015 report to the World Health Assembly, for Chapter 5 sections G-M and Tables 6-8 (PDF p.128-143).
• Michael Spagat and Khalil Shikaki’s family survey (medRxiv), with Mark Zlochin’s and Sergio Della Pergola’s critiques, B’Tselem’s detainee figures, the PCPSR questionnaire (HR05), and Gabriel Epstein’s Washington Institute Policy Note 158 (May 2025), for Chapter 5 section M (PDF p.143-150).
• Security Council Resolutions 661 and 687, Zaidi and Fawzi’s FAO Lancet survey (1995) and Zaidi’s 1997 Lancet follow-up, UNICEF’s 1999 survey and 2022 report, the FAO/WHO September 2000 report, Dyson and Cetorelli (BMJ Global Health, 2017), Amatzia Baram, and Amnesty and HRW reporting of 1999-2003, for Chapter 6 (PDF p.152-162).
• HRW’s Jenin report (May 2, 2002), the UN fact-finding mission and PA investigation figures, Peter Beaumont’s Guardian reporting of April 2002 and his revision, the Sydney Morning Herald’s Abu Ali account, and Naim Qassem’s Hizbullah: The Story from Within (2005), for Chapter 7 sections A-B (PDF p.165-168).
• HRW’s September 2007 Lebanon report (94 incidents, 561 fatalities, and its list of 548 killed outside them), Hezbollah’s post-war acknowledgment of at least 250 fighters, IDF figures (up to 800 claimed, 440 identified, revised to 600-700) and Lebanese and UN estimates of about 500, for Chapter 7 section B (PDF p.169-170).
• HCJ 769/02 (the Targeted Killings case, 2006), the ICRC’s 2009 Interpretive Guidance on Direct Participation in Hostilities, the Goldstone Report’s police discussion (pp.106-110 of the report as cited), and an analysis of Palestinian social media and armed-faction websites identifying 258 of the police killed as Hamas military-wing members (via the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs), for Chapter 7 section C (PDF p.171-173).
• The Associated Press/B’Tselem family-homes investigation, Amnesty and HRW’s 2014 reports, B’Tselem’s June 2016 report, the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center’s list analysis (936 fighters, 761 civilians, 428 undetermined), PIJ’s claimed 121 dead and the February 2015 AP report of a Hamas source’s 400 fighters, and the 2014 power-plant statements, for Chapter 7’s Protective Edge section (PDF p.174-177).
• Rami Abdo’s and Eyal Weizman’s public statements, fact-checking collections on misattributed and AI-generated imagery, the Be’er Sheva District Court verdict in the World Vision (Halabi) case, the Silberman-Robb Commission report on Curveball and Robert Harris’s Selling Hitler, and Amnesty, HRW, Reuters and Washington Post reporting on Shifa Hospital, for Chapter 8 (PDF p.179-185).
• El-Taji et al. (BMJ 2025), the MSF Lancet study, Alasarr et al., Alsalqawi and Villar, WHO Emergency Medical Teams data and Al Hseinat et al., with GMOH’s February-April 2024 injury totals, and Dr. T. Forcht Dagi’s November 19, 2025 forensic letter on the New York Times X-rays, for Appendix 1 (PDF p.189-193).

Analysis

The work’s method is to reconstruct baselines from the primary counting series its targets cite (OCHA, COGAT, IPC) and to test predictions and distributions against the outcomes the same ecosystem later reported (GMOH starvation deaths, the Spagat and Shikaki survey, belated faction acknowledgments of fighter losses). Its Chapter 1 case stands or falls on the working-day/calendar-day reconstruction in Table 1 and on treating COGAT’s series as the more accurate where it conflicts with UNRWA’s real-time series, a preference it supports with UNRWA’s retroactive corrections. Its casualty cases (Chapters 3, 5 and 7) rest on a recurring evidentiary pattern it assembles across Jenin 2002, Lebanon 2006, Cast Lead and Protective Edge and the present war: testimony-based identification by families, neighbours and residents systematically fails to identify fighters whom the armed groups themselves later acknowledge, and later corrections never catch up with the original claims. Its strongest internal checks are the ones it can run on its targets’ own numbers — the May 6, 2024 UN distribution shift, GMOH’s removed names, the injury-distribution studies against the PAMA claims, and the maximal-assumption arithmetic of Appendix 1. Its limits are visible in the work itself: several load-bearing figures come from interested parties whose series it prefers (COGAT truck and tonnage totals, IDF fighter estimates and list analyses, Hamas archive documents released by the IDF in June 2025), and the standard it applies to its targets’ reliance on Hamas-controlled sources is not applied symmetrically to that reliance; its alternative casualty estimate in Chapter 5 section L is expressly speculative and is not claimed as a grounded assessment; and its legal chapters argue classification questions (police membership, continuous combat function, permissible incidental harm) from authorities it selects, presenting the Goldstone Mission’s contrary factual premises largely through a hostile gloss in a footnote (PDF p.172, note 576). Legal and moral judgment is expressly deferred to the facts as the authors establish them (PDF p.7, p.21), and the work’s scope is deliberately frozen at June 1, 2025 (PDF p.6), so its findings do not address the war after that date. The seven appendixes announced in the contents, on which several chapters’ detailed workings were to rest, are represented in this file by Appendix 1 alone.

People, organizations, places and events

Danny Orbach, Jonathan Boxman, Yagil Henkin, Jonathan Braverman, Lee Mordechai, Michael Spagat, António Guterres, Benjamin Netanyahu, Yoav Gallant, Karim Khan, Francesco Checchi, Eli Sharabi, Yahya Sinwar, Mousa Abu Marzouk, Hind Rajab, Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, COGAT, UN-OCHA, UNRWA, World Food Programme, World Health Organization, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, Gaza Ministry of Health, Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, International Court of Justice, International Criminal Court, Gaza, Hamas, Israel Defense Forces, Israel, World Central Kitchen, Palestinian American Medical Association, Shifa Hospital, Flour Massacre, Tel al-Sultan paramedics shooting, Golani Brigade, Islamic Jihad, EuroMed Monitor, Zeina Jamaluddine, Abraham Wyner, Mark Pearlmutter, Al-Mawasi, Beit Lahia, Khalil Shikaki, Gabriel Epstein, Sarah Zaidi, Saddam Hussein, Henry Jackson Society, Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, UNICEF, Oil-for-Food Programme, Iraq, Jenin, Operation Defensive Shield, Second Lebanon War, Hizballah, Hassan Nasrallah, Palestinian Authority, B’Tselem, Operation Cast Lead, Operation Protective Edge, Goldstone report, Richard Goldstone, Khaled Mashaal, Human Rights Watch, Forensic Architecture, Eyal Weizman, Rami Abdo, T. Forcht Dagi

Concepts

Genocide, Human shields, Humanitarian bias, Inverted funnel, Siege, Certainty mirage, Mosquito Procedure, Burden of proof fallacy

How it relates to other sources

• Against From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine, whose foreword states as its opening claim that Israel is committing a genocide in the final months of 2023: this work argues the genocide allegation, including its starvation component, does not survive cross-checking against the primary data its proponents cite (PDF p.7-16, p.18).
• Against Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights, which treats Israel’s siege of Gaza as an act of genocide, albeit slow: this work argues on 1997-2019 mortality and life-expectancy data that pre-war Gaza was not on the brink of humanitarian catastrophe and that restrictions since 2006 show no apparent effect on life expectancy (PDF p.39-42).
• It is published by the same center as ‘Mowing the Grass’: Israel’s Strategy for Protracted Intractable Conflict and thanks Eitan Shamir among its advisers (PDF p.21); its account of IDF precautions and proportionality in the Executive Summary (PDF p.12) is the wartime counterpart to that article’s strategy account, and the two are not reconciled here.
• Its Chapter 6-7 previews place Jenin 2002, the 2006 Lebanon War, Cast Lead and Protective Edge in a single line of contested casualty assessment with the present war (PDF p.14); Chapter 7 as completed in part 5 carries that framing through all four cases on the same testimony-identification argument (PDF p.163-177).
• Against Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian Rights and Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope on the Goldstone report: Barghouti quotes the report’s paragraphs as the core documentary evidence for accountability and Falk records Goldstone backing away from the single most incriminating finding while the other three members refused to withdraw it; this work treats the report’s police discussion as factually mistaken on its own cited evidence and Goldstone as having “retracted many of the report’s conclusions”, with little effect (PDF p.172-173). ‘Mowing the Grass’: Israel’s Strategy for Protracted Intractable Conflict likewise states Goldstone retracted the findings. The accounts stand, attributed, on the Goldstone report page.
• On Operation Cast Lead casualty composition, against Barghouti’s more than 1,400 killed, approximately 83 percent civilians, and against the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights figures Inbar and Shamir record (926 civilians, 255 police, 236 fighters): this work’s argument is that Hamas’s own later statements (Mashal’s more than 400, Hammad’s 700 including 250 police) and the faction-website analysis of the police killed (82 percent affiliated) show the civilian share was constructed by concealment and by the police classification (PDF p.170-173). Both accounts stand on the Operation Cast Lead page.
• Against the accounts of Hamas in Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope and Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation as a political actor pursuing long-term coexistence or a language of self-determination: Chapter 2 presents Hamas’s defining wartime conduct as a deliberate human-shields strategy, documented from its own captured 2014 manual and its leaders’ statements, and Chapter 1 presents its diversion of humanitarian aid, documented in part from its own archives, as a central fact of the war (PDF p.51, p.71-74). The two bodies of account are not reconciled here; both stand on the Hamas page with attribution.
• Against The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation on Jenin 2002: Pappe presents the camp invasion as a massacre and Makdisi gives Amnesty’s conclusion that acts there were grave breaches and war crimes; Chapter 7 of this work argues the massacre claims were false — 52 dead on HRW’s count, 27 of them fighters — and that the war-crimes conclusions of HRW, Amnesty and the UN rested on resident testimonies many of which were later discredited (PDF p.163, p.165-168). Both accounts stand on the Jenin page with attribution; they are not reconciled here.
• Its Chapter 7 account of the Second Lebanon War extends ‘Mowing the Grass’: Israel’s Strategy for Protracted Intractable Conflict and Disproportionate Force: Israel’s Concept of Response in Light of the Second Lebanon War: where Inbar and Shamir record the UN figure of 1,191 Lebanese civilians killed against Israel’s evaluation of 700 Hizballah fighters killed, this work’s argument is that HRW’s site-by-site method identified only 35 Hezbollah fighters among the dead in the attacks it reviewed, a failure of identification rather than a count (PDF p.163).

Open questions

• Appendix numbering conflicts as printed: the contents page (PDF p.5) lists PAMA forensic analysis as Appendix 1 and truck reconstruction as Appendix 2; the Executive Summary appendix list (PDF p.17) numbers PAMA I and truck counting II consistently, but the Introduction (PDF p.21) makes truck counting Appendix I and PAMA Appendix IV and lists only six appendixes, omitting the Spagat and Shikaki appendix.

• Introduction note numbering as printed: two notes numbered 1 on PDF p.18 (Segal; the Amnesty news link) before note 2 (ICC) and note 3 (Mordechai).

• The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is printed “GFH” at PDF p.9 and “GHF” at PDF p.9-10 and in Chapter 1; both forms stand as printed.

• Table 2 (PDF p.34), read in the original (corrected against the original): the layout is a Current block and a Projected block, each with a merged Total inferred mortality cell. Current rows infer 2,906, 7,302, 8,561 and 8,711, totalling 27,480; Projected rows infer 18,951, 14,722, 10,305 and 14,854, totalling 58,832 (printed “58832”); the bottom grand total is 86,312. Each total is the sum of its rows (computed from the original), so the table is internally consistent in the original. Its grand total does not, however, reconcile with the text figure of 78,582 projected starvation deaths by January 17, 2025 (PDF p.22, p.33): 86,312 exceeds 78,582 by 7,730 (computed from the original), and no reconciliation is given in this part.

• Total food transferred October 7, 2023-January 17, 2025 is 1,011,575 tons in the text (PDF p.46) and 1,010,613 tons in Table 5 (PDF p.46-47).

• Table 4 ratio is printed “0.0.0146” for 2011 including agricultural production (PDF p.44).

• Chapter 1 has no section E as printed: section D (PDF p.36) is followed by section F (PDF p.39).

• At PDF p.45 the text says wartime trucks per capita “would still be substantially smaller” than 2011 while giving wartime supply as 58 percent higher (COGAT) or 30 percent higher (UNRWA) than 2011; the wording stands as printed.

• Note 88, cited for Hamas evacuating civilians and placing explosives in Rafah homes, links as printed to the ICC arrest-warrant document also used at note 85 (PDF p.47).

• The work’s statement that Gaza life expectancy remained higher and infant mortality lower than both Jordan and Egypt by 2022 (PDF p.8) is supported in this part only by the 1997-2019 Census Bureau series (PDF p.39-42); no 2020-2022 series is shown in this part.

• Checchi’s 12 percent local-production figure is adopted while the work records that its cited OXFAM datum could not be tracked down and Checchi could not supply a more exact source (PDF p.44, note 77).

• Chapter 1 section lettering as printed in part 2: H is used both for the Interim Summary (PDF p.45-46) and for Hamas Aid Diversion (PDF p.50); I is used for The May Crisis That Wasn’t (PDF p.47-49), for Northern Gaza, Local Hunger, Siege and International Humanitarian Law (PDF p.52-55), and for Claims of Starvation after the End of the Second Ceasefire in March 2025 (PDF p.62-63).

• At PDF p.62 the sentence “As of May 27, aid was resumed, though in insufficient quantities” is preceded by the repeated fragment “As of May 27,” as printed.

• Checchi’s name is spelled “Cecchi” in note 113 (PDF p.53), against “Checchi” elsewhere.

• Duplicate note numbers with an F-suffix recur throughout part 2 as printed, among them notes 96F/97, 9F/100, 107F/108, 108F/109, 138F/139, 150F/151, 15F/156, 182F/183, 18F/189, 189F/190, 190F/191, 198F/199, 219F/220, 24F/225, 25F/226, 239F/240, 246F/247, 250F/251, 253F/254, 262F/263, 26F/267 and 267F/268.

• The March 2025 Rafah ambulance incident is located at “Tal al-Sultan” in the Executive Summary (PDF p.11) and Chapter 3’s summary (PDF p.81), and at “Tel Al-Sultan” in section C’s heading (PDF p.84); both spellings stand as printed.

• Elior Levy’s surname is spelled “Levy” in the body text and “Levi” in Figure 14’s caption and credit (PDF p.76).

• At PDF p.83 the Hind Rajab passage reads that the Red Crescent rescue team “reported that were marked with laser sights”, lacking a main verb, as printed.

• Note 274 (PDF p.84), cited for the Al-Shati building-clearance footage, gives the same IDF World Central Kitchen investigation link as note 273 (PDF p.83), as printed.

• Chapter 3’s counts do not sum as printed: the forensically supported incidents total 12 Palestinians and seven foreign civilians (PDF p.81, p.84) and the unverified or questionable accounts a further 40 Palestinians and one foreign UN worker (PDF p.81), which together give 60 of the 61 people Mordechai is said in section A to describe (PDF p.82); the remaining one is not accounted for in this part (computed from the work).

• The map fragment at the foot of PDF p.50 (Kerem Shalom, Gate 96, floating dock, Erez West) carries no caption on that page in the text copy, and note 243 (PDF p.75) is scrambled in the text copy, its Shifa Hospital sources interleaved with the body text of PDF p.76; the notes for those pages record the interleaving.

• Chapter 3’s section tallies do not sum to its chapter tally as printed: sections D-K and A-C give, for the cases sorted there, 12 Palestinians and seven foreign civilians forensically supported (PDF p.84), 15 at Tel al-Sultan (PDF p.88), four in section D (PDF p.89), four in section E (PDF p.90), up to 11 in section F (PDF p.91), nine in section G (PDF p.92), ten in section H (PDF p.93) and two Palestinians and one international worker in section I (PDF p.95), against the chapter tally of 51 unjustified killings of 50,021 and eight foreign casualties (PDF p.95); the sections as printed sum past 51 depending on which are counted as unjustified, and no reconciliation is given in this part (computed from the work).

• Mark Pearlmutter’s surname is spelled “Pearlmutter” in note 331 and the surrounding text (PDF p.96) and “Perlmutter” in section K’s hospital-figures passage and its note 342 (PDF p.98); both forms stand as printed.

• At PDF p.97 the Salqawi and Villar figures are given as 72 male patients of 110 as “63%” and 56 adults aged 18-35 as “52%”; 72 of 110 is about 65 percent and 56 of 110 about 51 percent (computed from the work); both percentages stand as printed.

• At PDF p.99 the PAMA letter is quoted as “254 consecutive weeks of continuous work” in the body text, against the letter’s own “combined 254 weeks” in the quotation immediately following; both forms stand as printed.

• At PDF p.100 the hunger-and-disease assessment is given in the body text as 67,413 deaths, while the passage quoted in note 355 gives 62,413 deaths from malnutrition and disease plus 5,000 chronic-disease deaths, for a total of at least 118,908; 62,413 plus 5,000 is 67,413 (computed from the work), so the body figure appears to be the sum, but this is not stated in this part.

• Chapter 4’s humanitarian-zone share is given as 2-4 percent in the summary (PDF p.101), as 2.1 percent or 3.5 percent in section E (PDF p.115), and as 2-3.5 percent in the Conclusion (PDF p.118); all three forms stand as printed.

• At PDF p.108 the ratio argument is stated as “fewer than one civilian casualty per aerial munition” while the casualty figure given for the end of December 2023 is approximately 22,000 Palestinian deaths, “both combatants and civilians”; the wording stands as printed.

• At PDF p.114 the Jamaluddine database is cited to “Appendix 5”, while at PDF p.123 it is cited to “Appendix 3”; the contents page (PDF p.5) lists the GMOH “women and children” appendix as Appendix 5. Both citations stand as printed.

• At PDF p.115 the GMOH is printed “GMO” in the supplemented-data sentence, against “GMOH” elsewhere and “GMO” for the Gaza Media Office at PDF p.126-127; the forms stand as printed.

• At PDF p.126 the uncritical acceptance of GMOH data is dated “until April 2023”, against “until April 2024” in the surrounding argument at PDF p.125; both forms stand as printed.

• At PDF p.127 the ratio of men to women and children is given as “1.63-1.83 times higher” than the GMOH-declared ratio, while at PDF p.123 the same figures are given as the proportion of adult men to adult women for October and November; both statements stand as printed.

• Duplicate note numbers with an F-suffix continue in part 3 as printed, among them notes 287F/288, 327F/328, 329F/330, 34F/335, 41F/412 and 428F/429; note 300 is printed “300300” (PDF p.91).

• The hospital in the Najib case is named “Al-Hayir Hospital” at PDF p.90, as printed; no other spelling is given in this part.

• At PDF p.107 the US comparison is dated to “the 2002 Afghanistan invasion”, as printed.

• Chapter 5 section lettering in part 4 as printed: G is used for the reliable-media-reports section (opening at PDF p.127), again for Phasing out Reliance on “Reliable Media Reports” (PDF p.128), and again for Filling Women and Children Caseloads Through Sudden Additions (PDF p.129); the text cross-refers to a “section L” for the manipulation-method discussion at PDF p.131, while the speculative-estimate section is headed L at PDF p.139 and the GMOH undercount section is headed M at PDF p.143.

• At PDF p.130 the December 5, 2023 sudden-addition passage is printed twice in succession, the first with the note marker “4F445” and the second with note 446 citing the same OCHA reports; both printings stand.

• Males of all ages on the March 2025 lists are 33,517 in the text (PDF p.135) and 33,571 in Table 6’s total row (PDF p.137); both figures stand as printed.

• The natural deaths subtracted in the speculative estimate are “about 4,000 women over 25 and men over 60” at PDF p.140 and “the 4,200 we subtract” at PDF p.141; both figures stand as printed.

• The Al-Ahli death figure in the speculative estimate is “about 250 in Al-Ahli alone [according to the Gaza Ministry of Health, 461]” (PDF p.140), against 471 for the Al-Ahli claim at PDF p.119 and p.122; all three figures stand as printed.

• The men-to-women ratio after the speculative steps is printed “1:4.8” at PDF p.140 while the surrounding text gives men 18-59 rising to 57 percent against women 18-59 at 11.8 percent in Table 7 (PDF p.141); the printed form stands.

• Adult men in B’Tselem’s 2016 investigation are raised “from 1202 to 1315” in the text (PDF p.143) and given as 1,317 in Table 8 on the same page; both figures stand as printed.

• The expected natural mortality period is printed “between July 7, 2023 and March 21, 2025” at PDF p.138, against the war’s start on October 7, 2023 used elsewhere; the printed dates stand.

• In Chapter 5 section M the promised in-depth Spagat analysis is referred to Appendix 7 (PDF p.144, p.147, p.149), Spagat’s family-survey track record to Appendix 6 (PDF p.149) and the retroactive utility of family surveys to Appendix 5 (PDF p.149); the contents page (PDF p.5) lists Appendix 5 as the GMOH “women and children” appendix on Jamaluddine’s database, Appendix 6 as the history of family surveys and Appendix 7 as the Spagat and Shikaki geolocation delve. The Appendix 5 reference stands as printed against that listing.

• Chapter 6: the FAO survey’s pre-sanctions infant mortality is 40.6 per 1,000 at PDF p.153 and the Executive Summary gives 40.7 (PDF p.13-14); the 1995 survey rate is 198.2 per 1,000 at PDF p.153 and 206 deaths per 1,000 in the 1996 comparison at PDF p.154; Sarah Zaidi’s name is printed “Zeidi” once at PDF p.154; HRW’s predecessor survey is dated 1996 at PDF p.156 while the FAO survey is dated 1995 elsewhere. All forms stand as printed.

• Chapter 7’s summary gives Jenin’s actual casualties as “fewer than 50” (PDF p.163), while section A gives HRW’s 52 identified dead and the PA investigation’s 56 killed (PDF p.167); both stand as printed.

• Notes 498-500 (PDF p.148), garbled in the text copy, were read in the original: they consist solely of hyperlink anchor fragments with no printed URL or bibliographic details (note 498 beginning mid-word, “llege interference in the operation of Shkaki’s Gazan polling teams”; note 499 “to express confidence in his Gazan teams”; note 500 “next polls”), so the destinations they link to cannot be recovered from the printed page. Note 559’s Hebrew source (PDF p.168) and the charts of Figures 20-23 (PDF p.134, p.135, p.136, p.138), garbled or scrambled in the text copy, were read in the original and are recorded in the reading notes and, for the figures, in the Chapter 5 entry above.

• Chapter 7 section lettering in part 5 as printed: C is used both for Operation “Cast Lead” (2008-2009) and the Goldstone Report (PDF p.170) and for 2014 and Operation “Protective Edge” (PDF p.174); no section D heading appears in Chapter 7 in this part.

• HRW’s Lebanon fighter count is given three ways in Chapter 7: only 35 Hezbollah fighters identified among the dead in the attacks reviewed (PDF p.163, summary), 51 identified as Hezbollah operatives across the 94 incidents in HRW’s preface as reported at PDF p.169, and, at PDF p.169, the study in reality accounting for only 35 — the 51 and 35 are presented as HRW’s claim and the work’s correction of it, and both stand as printed; the IDF’s identified fighters are 440 at PDF p.169, against no identified count in the summary.

• At PDF p.174 the Interior Ministry instruction to define every “martyr” as a civilian is cross-referred to “Chapter 2”, while the directive is reproduced in Chapter 5 (PDF p.120-121); the cross-reference stands as printed.

• At PDF p.175 the quotation “Israeli forces have brazenly flouted the laws of war… displaying callous indifference to the carnage caused” is footnoted (note 589) to an Amnesty International news release URL, while the surrounding text attributes the front-of-report conclusions to HRW; the attribution and the note stand as printed. At PDF p.176 Philip Luther’s power-plant statement is footnoted (note 600) to an Amnesty release on a UN school attack; both stand as printed.

• Chapter 8’s figure numbering as printed: the text at PDF p.186 refers to the source-prioritisation figure as “Figure 30”, its caption at PDF p.187 is “Figure 29: Prioritizing Sources in the Investigation of War Crimes in Conflict Zones”, and the methodology figure presented immediately after it at PDF p.187 is referred to as Figure 30, its caption reading “Figure 30: Recommended Methodology for Investigating War Crimes During Conflict”; Figure 28 (PDF p.183) is the inverted funnel diagram. The funnel itself is named “inverted information funnel” and “inverted funnel” in Chapter 8’s summary and section C (PDF p.178, p.182) and “inverse information funnel” at PDF p.186 and in the Summary and Conclusions (PDF p.188), against “inverted funnel” in the Executive Summary and Chapter 5; all forms stand as printed.

• Duplicate note numbers with an F-suffix continue in part 5 as printed, among them notes 568F/569, 615F/616, 616F/617, 621F/622, 623F/624 and 632F/633; the Washington Post note at PDF p.184 is printed “63F634”.

• Appendix 1 (PDF p.189) cites Chapter 3 as “pp. 157–165”, which matches neither Chapter 3’s PDF pagination (p.81-101) nor its printed pagination (p.80-100) in this file; the citation stands as printed. Its Part I table is partly scrambled in the text copy, and the Al Hseinat et al. bibliographic entry (note 645) is split across PDF p.189-190.

• Appendixes 2-7, listed in the contents page (PDF p.5) — truck-count reconstruction, GMOH list analysis, the “women and children” appendix, family-survey history and the Spagat and Shikaki delve among them — do not appear in this file, which ends with Appendix 1 at PDF p.193; the Introduction (PDF p.21) states the other appendixes were to appear later. Cross-references to them in Chapters 1, 5 and elsewhere therefore point to material not in the file as supplied.

• The Dagi letter reproduced in Appendix 1 (PDF p.191-193) is dated November 19, 2025 and the El-Taji study in its table is dated September 25, 2025 (PDF p.189), both after the work’s stated June 1, 2025 scope and after the Hebrew edition of July 4, 2025 and the English preface of 24.7.2025 (PDF p.6), consistent with the file being the updated file of 12.5.2026; no statement in this part reconciles the appendix’s dates with the preface’s statement that the scope was not extended beyond June 1, 2025.

Coverage

PDF p.1-193 of 193, read in full in parts 1-5 of 5.