An Israeli team of researchers calculated that during the first two months of the war in Gaza the risk to Israeli hostages of being killed in Israeli airstrikes, as claimed by Hamas, was an unlikely 10 to 28 times greater than the risk of death to Gazans from airstrikes, according to lower Israeli and higher Hamas figures of hostage deaths. The team therefore reached a conclusion that Hamas terrorists probably murdered most or all of those killed.
The researchers examined whether the estimated death rate of Israeli hostages was similar to the estimated death rate of Gazans and the Hamas claim that many Israeli hostages held in underground tunnels were killed by indiscriminate Israeli airstrikes together with a large number of Gaza residents.
Shaare Zedek Medical Center’s Prof. Francis Mimouni, Dr. Sefi Mendlovic, and Dr. Yuval Dadon of the Health Ministry in Jerusalem published the study in the March edition of the Israel Medical Association Journal Imaj under the title “A statistical approach to the high mortality rate of Israeli citizens held hostage in Gaza.”
The team used two estimates of hostage death rates, one from Israeli intelligence sources and the other published by a Hamas spokesman. They found that by the end of December 2023, the rate of Israeli hostage deaths according to Israeli sources was 23 per 238, and 60 per 238 according to Hamas. ie. 1 in 10 or 1 in 4. Both figures, they wrote, were “strikingly and significantly higher” than the death rate among Gazans, which was estimated to be 19,667 per 2.2 million, or one in 111 Gazans.
On October 9, two days after the deadly Hamas incursion of the south, its al-Qassam Brigades (the terrorist group’s military arm) officially threatened to execute the Israeli hostages if the Israeli government continued to bomb Gaza, and demanded that over 5,000 Palestinians held then in Israeli prisons, mostly after conviction for security offenses, be released. Hamas, the authors wrote, didn’t publish such executions, and “to this date, it is not completely clear how many of them died after their abduction.”
"Not plausible" that high death rate is result of Israeli airstrikes
They wrote their study to offer a “statistical approach to the probable cause of the death of Israeli hostages” and suggested that a random, high death rate from Israel Air Force airstrikes was “not plausible.”
According to Israeli intelligence, at the end of December, 129 hostages were being held, and 23 of them were confirmed by Israel to have died in captivity, making the death rate 9.7%. At the same time, Hamas claimed that 60 hostages had been killed in Israeli air strikes – 10 times the death rate of Palestinians in Gaza (by Palestinian estimates).
They concluded that there are “many possible interpretations for the striking difference in hostage deaths and Palestinian deaths from Israeli air strikes: The first is that the hostages were kept in locations less protected from the air strikes than Palestinians were.
A second is that the hostages were purposely exposed to the airstrikes, but this is “not logical because many hostages who have been released reported that they had been kept in tunnels located tens of meters below the ground.”
Their third possible explanation that is “more chilling,” is that Israeli hostages were not killed during Israeli airstrikes but actually murdered by Hamas terrorists, the Israeli authors wrote.