Israel’s Military Advocate General’s Corps reported that, as at 3 August 2024, it had opened 74 criminal investigations into alleged misconduct by its forces in the Gaza war, drawn from more than 1,000 incidents referred for factual assessment, both figures being the Israel Defense Forces’ own counts of its own process. Against that sit findings issued by other named bodies: the US Department of State’s 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices describes Israeli bombardment in civilian areas that killed civilians at hospitals, ambulances, schools and displacement shelters, and Amnesty International concluded in December 2025 that the attack in Gaza was “directed against a civilian population.” Behind the question a reader carries is a simpler one: were the civilian deaths on the screen the object of the attacks or their consequence? The record assembled below shows which bodies answered that, in what form, and on what evidence each answer rests.
Key Findings
- Israel’s Military Advocate General’s Corps reported 74 criminal investigations opened as at 3 August 2024: 44 concerning the death of detainees held by the IDF, 13 alleged pillaging, 8 alleged detainee mistreatment, 6 alleged illegal use of force and 3 alleged destruction of civilian property without military necessity. These are the IDF’s own counts of investigations opened, not of findings or convictions.
- The same IDF publication states the standard that produces those counts: in armed conflict, “death or injury to a civilian or harm to civilian objects, while tragic and regrettable, in most cases do not by themselves indicate a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct.”
- The US Department of State’s 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, an official US government record, describes Israeli bombardment and shelling in civilian areas that killed civilians in hospitals, ambulances, residential areas, schools and shelters for displaced people.
- The IDF Spokesperson stated on 29 February 2024 that Israeli forces had eliminated over 13,000 people the IDF describes as terrorists in Gaza. That is the IDF’s own count and its own classification of those counted, not an independently verified figure.
- In a 2022 peer-reviewed study, Becker, Ascone and Troschke coded 26.9% of 1,504 comments under leading British media Facebook posts reacting to the May 2021 escalation as antisemitic, with 27.9% of those invoking Israel’s sole guilt for the conflict.
Which bodies have found direct attacks on Palestinian civilians?
Four named bodies have issued findings on Israeli attacks against civilians in Gaza. The highest-tier of them is the US Department of State, whose 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, an official record of the US government, describes Israeli bombardment and shelling in civilian areas that killed civilians at hospitals, ambulances, residential areas, schools and shelters for displaced people.
Amnesty International, a monitoring organization with a stated advocacy mission, published in December 2025 that its investigators had documented 16 Israeli air strikes since October 2023 that killed 370 civilians, including 159 children, and that in some of those cases the evidence it gathered suggested direct attacks on civilians and civilian objects. Those are Amnesty’s own investigations, coded against Amnesty’s own classifications of direct, indiscriminate and disproportionate attack.
The UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory has stated that certain attacks in Gaza constituted intentional attacks on the civilian population, and in 2026 that Israeli security forces deliberately targeted Palestinian children. The UN human rights office has separately condemned attacks against Palestinian civilians in the territory. Both are determinations of United Nations human rights bodies, made on their own investigative records and their own reading of the applicable standards.
What the four have in common is form as much as content. Each is an incident-level or pattern-level determination issued by an executive department, a monitoring organization or a treaty-body mechanism, and each names the strikes or the periods it examined. None of them is a judgment of a court, and none of them registers a finding that a standing policy directs attacks at Palestinian civilians as such. The distinction between an investigative finding and a judicial one is not a technicality about who published what: the two rest on different evidentiary thresholds, different rights of reply and different consequences, and a reader weighing the question is weighing findings of the first kind.
Is it often said Israel targets civilians deliberately?
It is often said that Israel deliberately targets Palestinian civilians, and named bodies state versions of that finding on the record. Amnesty International’s December 2025 report concludes the attack in Gaza was “directed against a civilian population,” and UN human rights experts stated in October 2023 that at least 1,100 Palestinians, including 290 children, had been killed in the early attacks on Gaza.
The claim is therefore not a rumour without an author. Amnesty rests its conclusion on what it calls the civilian nature of the overwhelming majority of locations attacked, the repetition of attacks, and its assessment that the vast majority of those killed, injured or abducted were civilians. Human Rights Watch, in its World Report 2024, relayed a count from Gaza authorities of more than 18,700 Palestinians killed between 7 October and 12 December 2023, “most of them civilians,” including more than 7,800 children. The number in that sentence was measured by the Gaza health authorities, not by Human Rights Watch, and travels with that authorship.
What varies across these statements is the class of claim being made. Amnesty’s finding is that an attack was directed against a civilian population, a characterization of a campaign. The UN experts’ October 2023 statement is a count of deaths with a legal warning attached. The State Department report is a description of incidents. None of the four is a determination that every Palestinian civilian death in the period was intended, and none is a ruling that a policy of targeting civilians exists.
Where the record is thin is exactly there. No domestic court judgment, in Israel or elsewhere, establishes a standing policy of directing attacks at Palestinian civilians, and the reviews that Israel’s own military legal system has produced are counts of investigations rather than adjudicated outcomes. That absence sits alongside the findings above; it does not cancel them, and they do not fill it. Readers weighing war crimes claims and the legal record meet the same division between what has been alleged and what has been adjudicated.
How does deliberate targeting differ from indiscriminate attack?
They are separate classifications with separate evidence behind them. The UN human rights office’s thematic report of 19 June 2024 found that 87% of the Gaza fatalities it verified occurred in incidents with 5 or more deaths, and over 60% in incidents with 10 or more, a finding about weapon selection and strike patterns rather than about attacks aimed at civilians as such.
Amnesty International’s own reporting keeps three categories apart. A direct attack on civilians means the civilian was the object of the strike. An indiscriminate attack means the method or weapon could not distinguish between military objectives and civilians in the circumstances, whatever the intent behind it. A disproportionate attack means the expected civilian harm was excessive relative to the anticipated military advantage, which presupposes a military objective was being struck. Each maps to a different question, and each is evidenced differently: the first by target selection and orders, the second by munition and setting, the third by the relation between the two.
Large-casualty incident shares of the kind the UN office reported speak to the second and third categories. A finding that most verified deaths occurred in incidents killing five or more people describes what was used and where, and it is consistent with strikes aimed at military objectives in dense settings as well as with strikes aimed at civilians. It does not, on its own, separate them.
This matters for how a single sentence travels. A body that finds a pattern of indiscriminate attacks has made a serious determination, and it has not made the determination that the word “deliberately” carries in the question people ask. Collapsing the three into one phrase produces a claim that no published finding in this record states in that form, and it also understates the findings that were made, since indiscriminate and disproportionate attack are themselves distinct grounds under the law of armed conflict rather than lesser versions of one allegation.
Can casualty figures establish that civilians were targeted?
They cannot, on their own. The largest circulating totals are the Gaza Ministry of Health’s own counts: 37,232 Palestinians killed as of 13 June 2024, relayed by the UN human rights office, and more than 70,000 killed between 7 October 2023 and 3 December 2025, relayed by Amnesty International. Each relayer names the ministry as the measuring body.
A casualty total records deaths registered by a reporting system. Direction of attack is established from a different class of material: operational orders, target-selection records, the ranking of a strike’s expected effects before it is authorized, official statements, and repetition across comparable incidents. None of that is contained in a total, and a total of any size neither supplies it nor rules it out. This is why the published findings that do speak to intent are built on named incidents rather than on the aggregate, as Amnesty’s 16 documented strikes are.
Pattern data sits between the two. Oxfam reported in 2024, citing measurement by Action on Armed Violence, that explosive weapons struck civilian infrastructure in Gaza once every three hours on average since the war began, homes every four hours, and schools and hospitals every four days. The measuring body there is Action on Armed Violence; Oxfam relays it. A frequency of that kind describes the distribution of strikes across categories of site, which is evidence about method and setting, and it becomes evidence about direction only when joined to what was known about a given site when it was struck.
The counts themselves differ by the body publishing them and by what each body defines as a war-related death, a division examined in the published counts each party issues. For the question at hand the practical consequence is narrow: a reader who wants to know whether civilians were targeted will not learn it from a total, however that total is derived, and the bodies that have made targeting findings did not derive them from one.
Do the findings extend beyond Gaza to the West Bank?
Yes. The UN humanitarian affairs office counted 464 Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the West Bank, including 109 children, between the start of 2023 and 12 December 2023, a count relayed in Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2024 and measured by the humanitarian office rather than by Human Rights Watch.
The longer series predates the current war. UN General Assembly Third Committee material in 2023 recorded 1,434 Palestinian children killed between 2008 and 6 October 2023, of whom 1,025 were killed in Gaza after the blockade began in 2007. The remainder of that figure falls outside Gaza, which places roughly 400 child deaths across a fifteen-year span in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in periods that include no large-scale Gaza campaign.
The 2026 statement of the UN Commission of Inquiry that Israeli security forces deliberately targeted Palestinian children is framed against that longer record rather than against a single operation. This is what makes the scope of the allegation wider than the war: the bodies making it point to policing operations, arrest raids and demonstrations as well as to air strikes, and to a period stretching back well before October 2023.
Two consequences follow for a reader assessing the question. First, evidence drawn from the Gaza campaign does not exhaust the claim, and a rebuttal confined to Gaza does not answer it. Second, the West Bank material is measured by a different apparatus. Gaza totals come from a health ministry’s registration system; the West Bank counts come from an international humanitarian office’s incident recording, which logs each fatality with a date, a location and a described circumstance. The West Bank counts are smaller and individually more documented, which is why findings about deliberate targeting of children are often anchored there even when the public argument is about Gaza.
What do Israel’s own directives state about attacking civilians?
The IDF’s published ethical code, The Spirit of the IDF, names six values, the first of them Purity of Arms, which states that a soldier “will not use their weapon or power to harm uninvolved civilians and prisoners and will do everything in their power to prevent harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.” That is the party’s own published standard, and it carries no count.
Two further clauses in the same code bear on the question. Under Human Life, a soldier “will put themselves and their fellow soldiers at risk only to the extent required to fulfill their mission.” Under Discipline, a soldier “will ensure they are only giving out legal orders, and do not follow illegal orders.” The code states that it, together with the practical rules derived from it, constitutes the ethical code binding on soldiers and commanders. Quoting it establishes what the IDF requires of itself; it is not evidence about conduct in any particular incident, and no figure can be derived from it.
The IDF separately states that it warns civilians by telephone calls, text messages and leaflets, uses a loud non-lethal munition against a building’s roof before striking it, aborts strikes when civilians are present, and published a numbered evacuation-area map in December 2023 so residents could follow instructions by area. It also states that Hamas sites military infrastructure, headquarters, launchers and weapons storage in residential buildings, hospitals, mosques and schools. The IDF publishes no count of warnings issued, roof-knocks performed or strikes aborted, so the measures are described in the record without a magnitude attached to any of them.
Where the IDF does publish a number on targeting, it is a count of those it says it struck. The IDF Spokesperson stated on 29 February 2024 that Israeli forces had eliminated over 13,000 people the IDF describes as terrorists in Gaza, and that some 3,400 people it describes as terrorists had been apprehended in the West Bank jointly with the Israel Security Agency. Both figures are the IDF’s own counts, the classification of those counted is the IDF’s own, and neither is independently verified. Israel’s Foreign Ministry restated the government’s position on the war’s objectives in a statement last updated 17 September 2025, again as a party’s own account.
How many incidents has Israel’s military advocate reviewed?
74 criminal investigations. Israel’s Military Advocate General’s Corps reported that, as at 3 August 2024, it had opened 74 criminal investigations into alleged misconduct in the Gaza war, drawn from more than 1,000 incidents identified as requiring factual assessment and referred to the General Staff’s Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism, with hundreds still under assessment. Both figures are the IDF’s own counts of its own process.
The threshold that produces those counts is stated in the same publication, and it travels with them: in armed conflict, the Corps writes, “death or injury to a civilian or harm to civilian objects, while tragic and regrettable, in most cases do not by themselves indicate a reasonable suspicion of criminal conduct, as they can be explained as reasonable aftermath of lawful operational activity.” The ratio of 74 investigations to more than 1,000 referred incidents is a function of that standard, and cannot be read without it.
The mechanism itself dates to the 2014 Gaza conflict, created on a recommendation of the Turkel Commission, an Israeli government-appointed review, and now operating as a permanent body conducting factual assessments. On independence, the Corps states that “the MAG is subject only to the law on professional matters and operates with full independence,” and that its decisions are subject to civilian oversight and can be challenged before Israel’s Attorney General and before the Supreme Court.
Three limits sit on the figures. They count investigations opened, not findings, indictments or convictions, and the publication reports no outcome data alongside them. The subject breakdown is weighted toward custody: 44 of the 74 concern the death of detainees held by the IDF, which is conduct after capture rather than target selection during a strike. And the entire set is the IDF’s own account of its own machinery, published by a party to the events it describes.
Which analysts reject the deliberate-targeting finding?
The Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, in a 2025 essay, sets a ceiling of at most 41,000 civilians in Gaza dead of war-related causes, derived by subtracting estimated natural deaths and Israel’s count of Hamas fighters killed from the Gaza Ministry of Health total.
It is the publisher’s own arithmetic on inputs supplied by parties to the conflict, and the same page states that neither the 67,000 total nor Israel’s estimate of 21,000 fighters killed has been independently confirmed.
That figure is the argument’s hinge rather than a measurement. Its author presents it as a ceiling and uses it to compare Gaza’s civilian toll with those of the two world wars, the Korean War and four historical genocides, arguing that the combatant share and the resulting ratio are inconsistent with a campaign aimed at the civilian population. Both of its inputs come from a party: one from the Gaza health ministry, one from the Israeli military.
The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, a research institute at Bar-Ilan University, publishes running situation reports carrying Israeli casualty totals, including 1,664 Israelis confirmed killed and 17,809 wounded in the war as at 5 September 2024, and 1,184 Israelis killed on 7 October 2023 alone. No official body is credited for the first two figures on the page. The institute’s reporting frames the campaign as a response to the October attack, the frame within which its analysts read subsequent conduct.
NGO Monitor, an organization whose stated mission is scrutiny of non-governmental organizations reporting on Israel, contests the methods behind casualty and intent findings. Its 2024 annual report states that it identified 157 groups in the United States linked to what it calls an anti-Israel network, with over 3,000 connections, and 111 such groups in Canada with over 1,800 connections. The report does not state the mapping’s inclusion criteria or method, and the counts are the organization’s own. The dispute over what conduct establishes intent, rather than over the totals, is the substance of the disagreement here, and it recurs in the reading of the pattern of conduct invoked in genocide determinations.
How does the targeting framing appear in measured discourse?
26.9% of 1,504 comments under leading British media Facebook posts reacting to the May 2021 escalation were coded antisemitic by Becker, Ascone and Troschke in a 2022 peer-reviewed study, coded against a scheme based on the IHRA working definition.
The same 2022 study by Becker, Ascone and Troschke found 12.6% of 1,500 French comments and 13.6% of 1,520 German comments coded antisemitic under that same IHRA-based scheme.
Within the antisemitic UK comments, 27.9% assigned Israel sole guilt for the events, 8.1% invoked child murder or blood libel, and 4.2% used a Nazi analogy. The authors report that thread context was needed to infer the antisemitic meaning in 38.7% of the UK cases, 48.3% of the German and about 62% of the French, so the coding turns on the surrounding conversation as much as on the comment.
Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh reported in a 2025 peer-reviewed study of two British samples (N = 354 and N = 490), primed with war-in-Gaza material, that political orientation was positively associated with anti-Jewish hostility through social dominance orientation, and that conservative orientation was negatively associated with antisemitism through out-group identity fusion with the Palestinian people. The associations are correlational and the authors describe two separate pathways rather than one.
Huesmann and colleagues surveyed 89 Jewish American and 180 Arab American high-school students in a 2012 peer-reviewed study and found that total media exposure to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict did not directly predict ethnic stereotypes. The association ran through identification with the groups as portrayed in the coverage, with ethnic identity correlating with implicit out-group stereotyping at r = -0.70. On the authors’ own account, exposure to conflict coverage is not itself the measured driver.
Methodology and limitations
This report describes what named bodies published about attacks on Palestinian civilians, what each figure measures, and how each was produced. It draws on four source types, labelled at each use: official and primary records, including the US Department of State’s 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices; a party’s own published records, including the Israel Defense Forces’ ethical code, its Spokesperson’s briefings, its stated precautions in Gaza and its Military Advocate General’s Corps publication of 24 February 2024, updated 3 August 2024; determinations issued by monitoring organizations and United Nations human rights bodies, named and dated in the prose; and peer-reviewed research on discourse and attitudes.
Party-published counts are attributed as that party’s own reporting and are not independently verified. This applies to every IDF figure here, including the 74 investigations, the more than 1,000 referred incidents, and the over 13,000 people the IDF classifies as terrorists. The classification of those counted is the IDF’s own. The investigation counts are of cases opened, and the publication reports no outcomes, so they cannot be restated as findings, indictments or convictions. They are also a function of the threshold the same publication states, which is quoted in the body.
Gaza casualty totals appear here only as the Gaza Ministry of Health’s counts, named as such, with the relaying body identified. Determinations by monitoring organizations and UN human rights bodies are investigative rather than judicial, made on each body’s own definitions and evidentiary standards; several of those bodies state an advocacy mission. No court judgment establishing a standing policy of targeting civilians appears in the record assembled here, and no such judgment is implied by the findings that do appear.
The discourse studies are correlational and carry their authors’ own caveats. Becker, Ascone and Troschke coded comments under specific media pages during one escalation and their categories are non-exclusive. The Ozer, Obaidi and Bergh findings are drawn from the published abstract of two experiments and describe associations, not causes. The Huesmann study measured adolescents in one US metropolitan region in 2012. None of the three measures whether any attack was directed at civilians; they measure how the surrounding argument is expressed and how it relates to attitudes toward Jews.
Conclusion
Were the civilian deaths the object of the attacks or their consequence? The published record answers that in two voices that do not meet. Named investigative bodies say the first, at the level of incidents and patterns: Amnesty International documented 16 strikes killing 370 civilians including 159 children and concluded the attack was directed against a civilian population, the UN Commission of Inquiry has stated that certain attacks were intentional attacks on civilians and that Palestinian children were deliberately targeted, and the US State Department’s own country report describes bombardment in hospitals, schools and shelters. Israel says the second, in documents of its own: a code that forbids harming uninvolved civilians, a set of described warning measures that carries no published count, 13,000 people it classifies as combatants, and a legal machinery that referred more than 1,000 incidents for assessment and opened 74 criminal investigations from them, under a threshold holding that civilian death in war does not by itself indicate criminal suspicion.
What separates the two is not mainly the arithmetic. It is what each treats as evidence of direction. A total of 37,232 or of 70,000 records deaths registered, not the aim of a strike. An 87% concentration of verified deaths in incidents killing five or more people records what was used and where. A count of 74 investigations records how many incidents crossed one institution’s stated bar. Each of those is a real measurement of a different thing, and none of them measures the word the question turns on.
The framing does not stay in the legal argument. Becker, Ascone and Troschke found that 26.9% of British comments under conflict coverage were antisemitic and that Israel’s sole guilt was the second most common category within them, with blood-libel and Nazi imagery present at 8.1% and 4.2%. Those tropes carry a claim about deliberate harm to children that is far older than any strike record. So the question this record hands back is about circulation rather than about law: when an allegation of deliberate killing moves from a dated finding about named incidents into a general characterisation, does it start supplying an old story with a new occasion? Whoever answers that will have to weigh it against the finding sitting beside it, that these determinations were made by named bodies, on the record, about specific days.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which body produces the Gaza casualty totals that circulate?
The Gaza Ministry of Health. Its counts of 37,232 killed as of 13 June 2024 and more than 70,000 killed to 3 December 2025 were relayed by the UN human rights office and by Amnesty International respectively, and each relayer names the ministry as the measuring body. Israel’s own count of combatants killed is published separately by the IDF.
What is the Fact-Finding and Assessment Mechanism?
An Israeli military body that reviews alleged incidents before any criminal investigation is opened. The IDF states it was created during the 2014 Gaza conflict on a recommendation of the Turkel Commission, an Israeli government-appointed review, and now operates as a permanent body conducting factual assessments for the Military Advocate General.
What oversight applies to Military Advocate General decisions?
The Corps states that the Military Advocate General “is subject only to the law on professional matters and operates with full independence,” and that its decisions are subject to civilian oversight and can be challenged on appeal before Israel’s Attorney General and before the Israeli Supreme Court. That description is the IDF’s own account of its arrangements.
Does the IDF publish counts of warnings given or strikes aborted?
No. The IDF describes telephone warnings, text messages, leaflets, roof-knocking and aborted strikes, and published a numbered evacuation-area map in December 2023, but attaches no figure to any of these measures. The only targeting-related count it publishes is of those it says it struck or apprehended.
Did antisemitic incident reports change after October 2023?
The Community Security Trust, a British Jewish community security body, recorded at least 1,205 antisemitic incidents across the UK between 7 October and 10 November 2023, against 191 over the same 35 days in 2022, a 531% increase on its own definitions. CST calls the figure provisional and counts only what is reported to it.
How do researchers decide whether a comment about Israel is antisemitic?
Becker, Ascone and Troschke coded 4,500 comments against a scheme based on the IHRA working definition in their 2022 peer-reviewed study, assigning categories such as sole guilt, blood libel and denial of Jewish self-determination. They report that the thread context was needed to infer the antisemitic meaning in 38.7% of the British cases and 48.3% of the German.
Sources
- Becker, M., Ascone, L., Troschke, H., 2022. Antisemitic comments on Facebook pages of leading British, French, and German media outlets. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. DOI 10.1057/s41599-022-01337-8. Peer-reviewed.
- Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, 2025. The Gaza Terror Offensive, 1 August to 5 September 2024. besacenter.org. Research institute.
- Community Security Trust, 2023. Antisemitic incidents, 10 November update. cst.org.uk. Monitoring organization.
- Huesmann, L. R., Dubow, E. F., Boxer, P., Souweidane, V., Ginges, J., 2012. Foreign wars and domestic prejudice. Journal of Research on Adolescence. DOI 10.1111/j.1532-7795.2012.00785.x. Peer-reviewed.
- Israel Defense Forces, no date. The Spirit of the IDF: the ethical code and its values. idf.il. Official record, the party’s own published doctrine.
- Israel Defense Forces, 2024. Press briefing by IDF Spokesperson, 29 February 2024. idf.il. Official record, the party’s own reported counts.
- Israel Defense Forces, no date. Stated precautions in Gaza and the human-shields position. idf.il. Official record, the party’s own stated position.
- Israel Defense Forces, Military Advocate General’s Corps, 2024. Addressing alleged misconduct in the context of the war in Gaza, published 24 February 2024, updated 3 August 2024. idf.il. Official record, the party’s own reported counts.
- Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Permanent Mission of Israel to the Multilateral Organizations in France, 2025. Israel’s objectives and current operation, last updated 17 September 2025. embassies.gov.il. Official record, the party’s own statement.
- Jerusalem Center for Security and Foreign Affairs, 2025. The Death of Genocide. jcfa.org. Research institute.
- NGO Monitor, 2025. Annual Report 2024. ngo-monitor.org. Monitoring organization, advocacy mission.
- Ozer, S., Obaidi, M., Bergh, R., 2025. The impact of globalized conflicts: examining attitudes toward Jews among Britons in the political context of the war in Gaza. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, vol. 107. DOI 10.1016/j.ijintrel.2025.102184. Peer-reviewed, abstract-sourced.
- US Department of State, 2024. 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Israel, West Bank and Gaza. state.gov. Official record.