Advocates are renewing calls for Canada to recognize a genocide in Gaza following the release of a new report that found at least five out of every six people Israeli forces have killed in the Israel-Hamas war have been civilians.
A joint investigation published Thursday by Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and British news outlet The Guardian, using a classified Israeli military intelligence database, found that as of May 2025, Israeli intelligence officials listed 8,900 named fighters from Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad as dead or "probably dead."
At that time, 53,000 Palestinians had been killed in attacks by Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) since Oct. 7, 2023, according to Gaza health authorities. With fighters named in the database accounting for just 17 per cent of total deaths, the investigation determined that the remaining 83 per cent of the dead were civilians.
CBC News has not seen the data and therefore has not independently verified the report. However, the civilian death toll reported in the investigation is significantly higher than most modern conflicts.
In the Sudanese civil war, about 50 per cent of the dead have been civilians, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, which tracks deaths in conflicts around the world. Uppsala says the civilian death rate in Russia's current war in Ukraine, by comparison, is about 10 per cent.
Annelle Sheline, a research fellow for the Middle East at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a former foreign affairs officer with the U.S. State Department, told CBC News the Gaza numbers are comparable to genocides in Rwanda and Srebrenica in the 1990s.
"Very clearly this is far outside the realm of what the IDF has claimed, which is that they have been targeting Hamas fighters," Sheline said.
"This reaffirms what should have been obvious, but is now clearly irrefutable: the fact that they have been so indiscriminate and are in fact engaging in what I would characterize as genocide."
Experts also told CBC News that the 83 per cent figure for civilian deaths is likely to be an undercount as it uses the IDF's own definition of militants.
Israel has named journalists and political members of Hamas as targets, for example, but international law prohibits targeting anyone who is not engaged in combat.
The investigation's findings align with previous studies and reports that found civilian death counts were far higher than numbers in statements from Israeli officials, who have claimed that the civilian death ratio is as low as 1:1 — one civilian killed for every militant killed.
The IDF did not answer questions CBC News sent via Whatsapp, but referred to a post on social media platform X, from spokesperson Lt-Col. Nadav Shoshani, saying the numbers in the report are "incorrect and do not reflect the data available in the IDF's systems."
The IDF did not explain what specifically is incorrect about the reporting, nor did it offer different numbers.
WATCH | Israeli PM rejects ceasefire as troops move into Gaza City:
Civilian death toll 'unprecedented': nonprofit
Airwars, a U.K.-based nonprofit that tracks and archives civilian casualties in wars using geolocation teams, official records, news and social media reports, among other sources, had already documented an "unprecedented" civilian death toll in Gaza for the rest of the month of October, following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas militants.
That's a pattern it says has remained consistent in the nearly two years since.
In October 2023, Airwars found Israeli forces killed at least 5,139 civilians in Gaza — that's nearly four times the number killed in the most lethal month the group had ever documented, March 2017, when a U.S. coalition killed at least 1,470 civilians in Iraq.
Airwars also found that there were more than 1,900 children killed in Gaza during October 2023. That's nearly seven times the number of children killed in January 2016 — previously the deadliest month for children ever documented by the group — when 279 children were killed by foreign actors in Syria.
The group found that at least nine out of 10 women and children killed in Gaza were in residential buildings at the time of their deaths.
WATCH | Palestinian children in Gaza City share their experiences:
Emily Tripp, the executive director of Airwars, told CBC News the civilian harm in Gaza has been more intense "on every single metric" than anything the organization has seen before, driven in part by attacks on residential neighbourhoods and schools where sometimes dozens of civilians are killed in a single airstrike.
Airwars has also documented more than 200 cases of individuals being shot by the Israeli military in and around aid sites and aid distribution sites.
Tripp says the nature of this war is that "civilians are bearing the brunt."
Violence in Gaza 'not like other conflicts': advocate
Michael Bueckert, interim president of the advocacy group Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East, told CBC News the investigation's findings are not surprising.
"Of course this is the case," he said of the high civilian death rates. "We know this to be true."
"Anyone who has been following the news over the past almost two years has seen Israel engage in daily attacks on hospitals, refugee camps, schools housing displaced people, deliberately targeting medical teams, ambulances, journalists, razing entire neighbourhoods."
Bueckert hopes the report pushes the Canadian government to recognize Israel's ongoing violence in Gaza as a genocide.
"It is not a war. It is not like other conflicts. It is a very significant atrocity that is taking place and which is escalating as we speak."
Fatema Abdalla, the senior government affairs and public policy officer with the National Council of Canadian Muslims, also called for the government to recognize the war in Gaza as a genocide.
"This is the world's most documented genocide in history," she told CBC News. "I don't think I have ever seen as many videos and pictures of gruesome war on civilians."
United Nations special rapporteur Francesca Albanese told the UN Human Rights Council last month that Israel is "responsible for one of the cruelest genocides in modern history." Many lawyers, human rights groups, genocide scholars and academics have also called Israel's military campaign a genocide.
Israel has consistently denied these claims, but its political and military officials have openly used genocidal rhetoric, including calling Palestinians "human animals" and saying it "does not matter" if children are killed. Last month, Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported Israeli soldiers were ordered to deliberately shoot at unarmed Palestinians seeking aid in Gaza.
Studies have also found the Gaza health ministry's official death toll is likely significantly lower than the actual death toll.
This is in part because Gaza's health ministry only records bodies that have been recovered, identified and reported by hospital morgues. It also does not record indirect deaths, such as deaths caused by starvation and lack of access to water and sanitation facilities that have been destroyed in the war.
Some scientists and public health experts have estimated the actual death toll in Gaza to be in the hundreds of thousands.
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