Israel Gives an Indication of the War’s Toll on Hamas

Israel’s military has said that it had killed or captured around 14,000 combatants in Gaza since the war there began more than nine months ago, an unverifiable and ambiguous number that gives a measure of Israel’s assessment of its progress toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated goal of destroying Hamas.

In a statement on social media on Tuesday, the Israeli military also said that it had eliminated half the leadership of Hamas’s military wing, the Qassam Brigades, and that among those killed were 20 commanders of battalions, the largest grouping of Hamas’s forces, and 150 company commanders.

It said that it had struck 37,000 targets in Gaza from the air and more than 25,000 sites that it described as terrorist infrastructure and launch sites during the war. That figure did not appear to equate to the number of airstrikes, since some targets have been struck multiple times.

Israel has only occasionally released overall numbers for the toll the war has taken. It has previously said that it has killed more than 14,000 of Hamas’s estimated 25,000 fighters and, in March, Mr. Netanyahu was quoted in an interview with Axel Springer, the parent company of Politico, as saying that some 13,000 “terrorists” had been killed.

In its latest report, the military gave little detail about the 14,000 people it called terrorists who it said were killed or captured through late June.

A military spokesman gave no additional details when asked how many of the 14,000 had been apprehended and how many killed. The military also did not say how it had arrived at that number, or how it had distinguished combatants from civilians.