'We Took the Gloves Off': Former Israeli Military Chief Admits 220,000 Gaza Casualties

Belying persistent efforts by Israel and its defenders to deny the staggering number of Palestinians killed during the 23-month Gaza genocide, the general who led the Israel Defense Forces during most of the war acknowledged this week that around 220,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded.

Former Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Herzi Halevi—who stepped down in March after leading the IDF since January 2023—told residents of Ein Habor in southern Israel earlier this week that "over 10%" of Gaza's population of approximately 2.2 million "were killed or injured" since October 2023.

"This is not a gentle war, we took the gloves off from the first minute" Halevi said, adding that "not once" has any legal authority "limited" his wartime conduct.

Following the October 7 attack, the IDF dramatically loosened its rules of engagement, effectively allowing an unlimited number of civilians to be killed when targeting a single Hamas member, no matter how low-ranking.

The IDF’s use of massive ordnance, including US-supplied 1,000- and 2,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs capable of leveling entire city blocks, and utilization of artificial intelligence to select targets has resulted in staggering numbers of civilian deaths, including numerous instances of dozens or more people being massacred in single strikes.

Halevi insisted that "we are doing everything in accordance with international law."

The International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague disagrees, having issued warrants for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes including forced starvation and murder. Israel's conduct in the war is also the subject of an International Court of Justice (ICJ) genocide case filed by South Africa and supported by around two dozen nations.

Halevi's admission tracks with official Gaza Health Ministry figures showing at least 228,815 people killed or wounded by Israeli forces in Gaza. GHM also says that around 9,000 people are missing and presumed dead and buried beneath rubble. Experts—including the authors of multiple peer-reviewed studies in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet—assert that the actual death toll in Gaza is much higher than reported.

The remarks by Halevi come less than a month after a joint investigation by Israeli journalist and filmmaker Yuval Abraham of +972 Magazine and Local Call and Guardian senior international affairs correspondent Emma Graham-Harrison revealed that, as of May, 5 in 6 Palestinians—or 83%—killed by the IDF through the first 19 months of the war were civilians. The report, which drew from classified IDF intelligence data, blew the lid off of Israeli government claims of a historically low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio.

Responding to Halevi's admission, Drop Site News national security and foreign affairs reporter Murtaza Hussain said on social media that he is "looking forward to the contortions of people whose paychecks are dependent on denying that any of this is the case."

Israeli officials and media, along with their supportive US counterparts during both the Biden and Trump administrations, have generally cast doubt or outright denied GHM figures—which have been found to be reliable by the IDF, US officials, and researchers—by linking them to Hamas. This comes in addition to widespread Israeli and US denials of Israel's forced famine and starvation deaths and IDF war crimes in Gaza.

However, there have been rare instances of frankness, including when Barbara Leaf, a senior State Department official during the Biden administration, said that Gaza casualties could be "even higher than are being cited." Biden-era State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller also admitted that the Gaza death toll "could very well be more" than GHM reported, even as he lied to the public about who was thwarting ceasefire efforts.