PIJ’s own obituaries put a fighter in nearly every strike incident. That’s a problem for the “indiscriminate bombing” and “genocide” claim.
Someone reconstructed every Gaza strike where Palestinian Islamic Jihad later published the dead person as one of their own commanders. Not IDF claims. PIJ's own obituary posters, names, photos, unit affiliations, matched against the Gaza Health Ministry casualty list. 364 incidents, 1,547 identified dead. Read it before the usual fight kicks off.
What stuck with me:
Nearly every incident had an actual militant in it, by PIJ's own word. And the author bent over backwards to be conservative. He didn't count anyone as a fighter off Israeli say-so. Only when PIJ or another faction published them as one themselves. So that's the floor. The real militant count is higher.
The fighters are exactly who you'd expect if strikes were aimed at fighters. Median age 35. Among men 35 to 39 in his data, 80% were identified militants. Almost no kids or elderly in the combatant column. Random, indiscriminate killing does not produce that shape. Targeted killing does.
Now run the ratio. 451 combatants against 1,096 collateral dead in these incidents. That's about 2.4 civilians per fighter, and remember that's the floor, because the "collateral" bucket still includes adult men who keep getting reclassified as fighters in later PIJ releases. Put that next to the benchmarks. The UN's historical average for urban warfare is around 9 civilians per combatant. Richard Kemp, former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, has said the best ratio ever achieved before this was 4 to 1. West Point's John Spencer, who studies this for a living, puts Israel between 1.5 and 3 to 1. This dataset lands right in that range, built entirely from the militants' own records. That is not a massacre stat. That is the best civilian-to-combatant ratio in the history of urban warfare. It's not even close.
Then there's where the commanders died. Houses were 38% of the incidents but 58% of the dead. Read that again. The single biggest driver of civilian casualties in this data is PIJ commanders operating out of family homes. Not fighters caught in the open, fighters who parked their command roles inside a house with their relatives in it. Every one of those family deaths traces back to that choice.
Schools and hospitals, same story. Seven school incidents, every single one had identified fighters in it, Al-Tabi'een included. Hospitals too. You can argue the strikes all day, but the militants were there. They put themselves there.
And some of the dead held civilian jobs and militant roles at the same time. Doctors, journalists, professors who also turn up in PIJ military obituaries. So a chunk of those "Israel killed a journalist" stories were, by PIJ's own posters, also killing someone inside the military wing. The public only ever saw the first half of the resume.
This doesn't prove any single strike was proportionate, I'm not going to pretend it does. If you want to argue Israel's conduct, proportionality is the honest place to do it. But "indiscriminate" is a different word with a specific meaning: no target, no distinction. This data is the opposite. It's strikes hitting a real, named militant network, with the civilian deaths bunched tightly around the fighters instead of scattered across the population.
Two straight questions for anyone who still wants to say "indiscriminate" or wants to stick to the ridiculous claim of genocide. Does data built from the militants' own records move you at all? And if it doesn't, what actually would?
Source is a substack reconstruction, Palestinian and factional records plus MoH IDs. I'll drop the link in the comments.