Number of Palestinians / Israelis Killed in Mideast Violence Over Past 10 Years

By Ali Abunimah, Salam Review,
November 1997

As a follow up to a previous report I wrote about Palestinian victims of Israeli violence since the Oslo accords, I did a little research at the web site of B'Tselem, the Israeli human rights monitoring group. The results are fascinating and disturbing.

The web site lists casualty statistics for Israelis and Palestinians since Dec. 1987 (the beginning of the Intifada). Here is a brief summary of what I found. The importance of the numbers is not to show that one side suffers more than another, or that one side is more right than another, but rather to use fact to challenge the media-inspired impression that it is overwhelmingly Israelis who suffer at the hands of Arabs. Facts show that this is simply not true.

While terrorism that targets civilians is in my view deplorable and unjustifiable, it is still a much ignored fact that Palestinians are at far greater risk of death at the hands of Israeli security forces and civilians, than Israelis are of death at the hands of Palestinians. As long as Israel seeks security for itself, while it (and the world) are unwilling to recognize the desperate need Palestinians have for protection from Israeli violence, there is unlikely to be much progress on this matter. Here are the numbers:

• Since 1987, 1,342 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces in Israel and the Occupied Territories. An additional 132 were killed by Israeli civilians, and 161 of the total were killed by Israeli death squads. This brings the total Palestinian deaths to 1,474.
• Since 1987, 304 Israeli civilians and security force personnel have been killed by Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories.
• Of the total numbers of dead, 225 Palestinians have been killed since the beginning of 1994 (roughly since the peace process began), while 170 Israelis have been killed in the same period.

Please note that these figures do not include either Israelis or Lebanese killed as a result of the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon. If anyone knows of a reliable source for that information, please let me know.

If you want more information and breakdown of these numbers and on all aspects of human rights, I encourage you to visit B'Tselem's website at http://www.btselem.org. B'Tselem is capable of providing you with the name and circumstances of death of each and every person counted in their statistics. I thank them for their diligence and steadfastness in documenting these facts over the years.