Tikvah
Editors’ Pick

February 2, 2026

No, the IDF Does Not Accept Hamas’s Account of Gaza Fatalities

By conflating civilians with combatants, Hamas denies responsibility for the war it started.

To the delight of those who would accuse Israel of war crimes, the left-leaning Israeli daily Haaretz recently reported that the IDF has quietly accepted Hamas’s casualty figures. Except that’s not quite what happened. First, this is not the official position of the Israeli military, and the IDF Spokesman’s Office has contradicted it. The Haaretz report, Ben-Dror Yemini and others have noted, was based on comments from unnamed sources within the IDF. Second, even these sources stated that Hamas was correct about the overall number of those killed, but maintained that some were killed, deliberately or accidentally, by Hamas and other jihadist groups. 

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