Herzi Halevi admits Gaza war has not been gentle so far, latest phase won’t be either

Ex-IDF chief Herzi Halevi admitted over 200,000 Gazans were harmed in the war, saying the fighting “has not been gentle.”

As the IDF enters Gaza City for another new and major stage of the war, what does it mean that Lt.-Gen (ret.) Herzi Halevi, who ran the vast majority of the war as IDF chief of staff from October 2023 until March 2025, has admitted that more than 200,000 Gazans – around 10% of the population – have been harmed by the war.

He added that “this has not been a gentle war.”

In context, Halevi seemed to be reassuring the Israelis he was speaking to off-the-record that the IDF had not held back against Hamas due to objections by IDF lawyers.

However, the comments take on a different character in the global debate about Israeli legitimacy and the IDF’s conduct of the war.

Hamas’s Health Ministry’s latest numbers are around 65,000 killed and around 164,000 injured, meaning it sounds like Halevi is not far off their numbers.

IDF sources have said that Hamas’s numbers are biased and exaggerated, and they probably are, and that they also do not differentiate between Palestinian civilians and Hamas fighters or terrorists.

First, one can subtract from the total around 22,000 Hamas forces killed by the IDF.

Second, one can subtract probably at least a few thousand Palestinian civilians who were killed by Hamas rocket misfires from October 2023 to January 2024.

By early 2024, The Jerusalem Post was also told that 15,000-20,000 Hamas fighters were injured. Doubtless, that number has increased significantly.

How many Hamas terrorists are left?

However, at the start of the war, the IDF said that Hamas had 24,000 fighters.

As the war developed, the IDF said that Hamas had 30,000 or maybe even 40,000 fighters.

In late 2024 and early 2025, the IDF also said that Hamas had recruited thousands more fighters.

In May 2024, one of the UN’s units said that other UN units were using numbers of deaths which were 10,000 off the number of confirmed physical dead bodies.

All of this leaves an extremely unclear picture.

But even if 22,000 killed were Hamas, and Palestinian misfires killed a few thousand, and 20,000-30,000 of the wounded were Hamas – at some point, one runs into the ceiling number of 40,000-45,000 Hamas fighters.

Even if Hamas and the UN’s count were 10,000 off in May 2024 and maybe are 20,000 off now, the picture that comes out is roughly what Halevi said.

It would mean over 200,000 harmed Palestinians, of whom up to 40,000-45,000 were Hamas, while the rest would be civilians.

The numbers are “better” in the killed category, where for much of the war, 40% of those killed were Hamas, though in recent months the numbers have been worse on that count as well.

The number of wounded Palestinians is much worse, with the vast majority being civilians.

Of course, what wounded means could vary a lot, with Israelis often counting an elderly person tripping and breaking a bone on the way to a bomb shelter running from an enemy rocket as injured.

But as Halevi said, this has not been a gentle war.

What one does with these numbers is a separate question.

Were legal procedures followed in terms of targeting military objects and proportionality, and were civilians evacuated where feasible? If so, then the operations would be legal despite the carnage, especially in light of Hamas’s systematic human shields strategy.

Forgetting about the law, were there alternatives to the IDF’s conduct?

Could the war have been ended better, achieving the IDF’s goals in summer 2024, as much of the defense establishment thought then, or in early 2025 when much of the defense establishment opposed returning to hostilities and supported continued negotiations over the hostages, or last month when Hamas accepted another partial ceasefire deal and IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Eyal Zamir loudly opposed the current invasion, which he is now stuck commanding.

These are even harder questions, which may never be answerable, or certainly not without knowing how the story ends in terms of defeating Hamas, the fate of the Israeli hostages, the fate of the fighting Israeli soldiers, what happens to Palestinian civilians from this point on, and what happens to Israel’s severely endangered legitimacy.

But Halevi has made it clear that the war has not been gentle, and likely the current new phase will not be either.