Was Gaza's destruction, high death toll necessary for Israel's war on Hamas? - analysis

The debate over the amount of destruction in Gaza Strip continues to grow as more footage emerges.

A recent video from the Associated Press, which shows the complete destruction of one area, has been circulating on social media.

This is something that has been seen before. However, each time, one is only provided a snippet of the overall amount of destruction caused by two years of war.

Each time these videos appear, a vibrant debate is sparked on social media. For those more sympathetic to the Palestinians, the footage is evidence of the horrors of the war.

Ihab Hassan, who describes himself as a human rights activist, wrote, “Apocalyptic aerial footage from Gaza – nothing left standing, only endless rubble.”

Others disagreed, and replies include references to “FAFO,” which stands for “f*** around and find out,” meaning, Gazans deserved to have all their homes destroyed because of the atrocities of October 7.

The “they deserved it” argument is one type of response to the massive destruction and the reported high death toll in the  Israel-Hamas War. Hamas-run health authorities said in late October that over 67,000 people were killed in the war.

Although some argue that these figures are biased because Hamas controls the Health Ministry, there are no alternative numbers that Israel has put out. The IDF put out some data during the first year of the war. In July 2024, the IDF said it eliminated and apprehended approximately 14,000 terrorists. “Among the eliminated terrorists are six brigade commanders, over 20 battalion commanders, and approximately 150 company commanders.”

It’s not clear how many more terrorists were killed or caught since then, but it stands to reason that, at most, it is twice that number, which would be an estimate of some 20,000-28,000. That still means that over half of those killed in the war were civilians. This has led to several topics of debate about the civilian death toll.

One posits that the number of civilians killed in this war is lower than in other conflicts.
This tries to break down the civilian death toll to a ratio compared to the number of enemy combatants killed. This macabre math doesn’t tell us that much because the number of Hamas members killed is an estimate, and neither is the overall death toll in Gaza is not known precisely.

In the past, the IDF has sometimes exaggerated its estimates of success in Gaza. For instance, the IDF believed most of the Hamas battalions in northern Gaza had been dismantled by December 2023. In August 2025, the IDF had to dismantle, once again, the Hamas battalion in Beit Hanun. In fact, almost all the Hamas battalions in northern Gaza had to be re-defeated, sometimes several times.

How could Hamas have been at a “breaking point” in northern Gaza in December 2023, if the IDF had to go back into Gaza City in September 2025? The same stories were told about Hamas being mostly defeated by April 2024 in all of Gaza. Yet the fact is that the group held onto a lot of areas and was never challenged in key parts of central and northern Gaza.

Hamas’s Rafah brigade was also declared defeated by July 2024, only to have to be defeated several times again. Members of the brigade are still hiding in tunnels in Rafah.

The reality is that a lot of the information that has come out of the war in Gaza is incomplete. This makes it hard to draw some conclusions about the casualties and the war.

What is clear is that a large number of civilians were killed.

In past Israeli wars, it was considered a “large number” of civilians if hundreds were killed, for instance, in the 2008-2009 Gaza War.

The fact that estimates say more than 30,000 people were killed in Gaza should require a pause for reflection. Asserting that it’s acceptable because the ratio is “1:1” doesn’t provide a real reflection on the war.

The destruction in Gaza also does not have an easy explanation. Further than the FAFO argument that they essentially “deserve it,” the question then arises of whether this level of destruction was, in fact, necessary.

Some arguments say that this is how urban warfare works, that because Hamas had snipers in buildings or stored munitions, or had tunnel shafts, every building had to be destroyed.

However, the reality of the fighting is in contrast to this depiction. While Hamas did use civilian buildings, it was also cleared from many areas of Gaza by the IDF – only to have those areas handed back to Hamas.

For instance, the IDF went into Jabalya in the first months of the war. Most of the buildings were still standing at this time, although some were damaged. The civilians had been evacuated. Hamas was pushed out of part of the area.

Then the IDF left. The army had to return to Jabalya to re-defeat Hamas several times during the war, each time causing more destruction to re-defeat Hamas.

The destruction in places like Jabalya wasn’t because Hamas used every building.

Had the IDF held the place after first taking it, most of it would have been spared.

This is one reason that other urban battlefields have looked different than Gaza.

Mosul City, for instance, was the site of a 10-month battle against ISIS. However, to defeat Islamic State, the Iraqi army did the opposite of the IDF. They called on civilians to move to internally displaced person (IDP) camps away from ISIS. Then the army cleared the city street by street. They never cleared the same areas several times.

The US-led coalition stopped its airstrikes in the dense urban area of western Mosul city out of concern for civilian casualties. While some areas were badly damaged, Mosul was less damaged than Gaza.

One theory presented for why high-rise buildings had to be destroyed in September was the argument that they could be used by Hamas as sniper positions.

However, this argument raises questions about why they were not hit with airstrikes early in the war when the IDF first operated in Gaza City.