Thread by @MiddleEastBuka

🧵PIJ Commander Deaths: Incidents and Collateral Casualties

An incident-by-incident investigation into Palestinian Islamic Jihad commander deaths, the people killed alongside them, and what the reconstructed casualty clusters reveal.
1/23

This thread summarizes a detailed research project I conducted over the last two months.
The full article is much longer and includes the source trail, methodology, statistics, charts, key findings, patterns, and the underlying sources.
2/23
middleeastbuka.substack.com/p/pij-commande…

Since October 2025, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) has published 19 bulk obituary batches containing 425 killed commanders, from staff-level figures to platoon commanders.
I used those PIJ self-identifications as the starting point for an incident-level OSINT analysis.
3/23

The main purpose of this research is to map the casualty impact of incidents in which PIJ commanders were killed: who was killed in the same event, how those people were connected, and what patterns appear across these reconstructed incidents.
4/23

From the 425 commanders, 391 were included in the incident-level analysis after exclusions.
Those 391 names were linked to 364 reconstructed incidents, containing 1,547 identified deaths: 391 PIJ commanders, 60 additional combatants, and 1,096 collateral casualties.
5/23

The numbers became meaningful quite fast.
PIJ commander-linked incidents alone contain 1,547 identified deaths: 2.25% of Gaza MoH List 12 (Oct 2025).
The ID-matched collateral casualties are 1,096 people, or about 1.6% of the full MoH list.
6/23

This study should be read as a snapshot in time, not a closed final classification.
Since the dataset cutoff, at least 2 people classified as collateral casualties were recently identified by PIJ as commanders.
As shown in the article, classifications can change over time.
7/23

The full article explains the source base and method in detail: PIJ publications, MoH ID matching, @airwars, Shireen, GIGAZA, social media posts.
It also covers the hard parts: name variants, missing IDs, partial casualty lists, ambiguous matches, and classification limits.
8/23

October 2023 is the early peak: 52 incidents and 420 identified people: 74 combatants and 346 collateral casualties.
After that, counts drop, with later spikes sometimes coinciding with IDF offensives or high-casualty events, such as school-linked strikes.
9/23

161 of 364 incidents had no collateral casualty found (44.2%).
Among the 203 incidents with collateral, 145 stayed in the 1–5 range (71.4%): 75 had 1–2, and 70 had 3–5.
The heavier 6+ clusters were 58 incidents (28.6%), including 23 with 11+ and 12 with 20+.
10/23

Location type is dominated by houses.
House / family-home incidents are 38.2% of incidents but 57.8% of deaths.
Streets are 13.2% / 11.7% deaths; tents 6.6% / 5.4% deaths.
Schools and hospitals together are only 4.1% of incidents, but 9.8% of identified deaths.
11/23

Schools and hospitals account for 15 reconstructed incidents and 152 identified deaths.
The cases include known incidents such as Al-Tabi’een School, Al-Shifa and European Hospital (and even Al-Ahli)
The article includes the full school/hospital-linked incident list.
12/23

A major part of the work was trying to resolve how each collateral casualty was connected to the identified combatant.
Among 1,096 collateral casualties, 708 were tagged as relatives (64.6%)
House incidents contain 611 of those 708 collateral relatives (86.3%).
13/23

Among 1,096 collateral casualties: 425 were adult men (38.8%), 254 adult women (23.2%), and 414 children (37.8%).
Children casualties were mostly family-linked: 311 of 414 were tagged as relatives of the killed PIJ commander or identified combatant (75.1%).
14/23

Regionally, the North leads: 43.1% of incidents, followed by South 28.6% and Central 21.4%.

At city level, incidents and deaths mostly track each other: Gaza City 27.5% / 451 deaths, Rafah 12.4% / 251, Nuseirat 8.5% / 189, and Deir al-Balah 7.7% / 141.
15/23

Some combatants had dual civilian roles: journalists, health workers, teachers, and others.
I focused on dual-role combatants, and tagged collateral cases when possible.
Journalists come from my monitoring thread; other roles were cross-checked with @GabrielEpsteinX
16/23

The identified combatant layer skews adult and mid-age: average age 35.9, youngest 18, oldest 66.
Among adult males, combatant share rises from 10.3% at ages 18–19 to 41.4% at 25–29.
It peaks at ages 35–39: 132 of 164 adult males were identified combatants (80.5%)
17/23

PIJ role titles are not always easy to map into a clean hierarchy.
Some levels are clear, such as platoon, battalion, brigade or council / staff
Other categories, especially "unit commander" and "central unit", are less clear and depend on PIJ’s own wording.
18/23

Brigade metadata spans Gaza, Central, North, Rafah, and Khan Younis.
Unit labels include missile/artillery, logistics, media, manufacturing/weapons, operations, security, communications, and support.
Full breakdown in the article.
19/23

Incident reconstruction surfaced combatants beyond the 391 PIJ commanders.
The mapped combatant layer remains overwhelmingly PIJ: 405 of 451 records (89.8%).
But the same incidents also included other affiliations: 14 Hamas, 1 DFLP, 1 PRC, and 30 unknown affiliation
20/23

Two records in the dataset are marked as MoH data anomalies: one identified combatant appears in the MoH list as a female, and one casualty listed as 110 years old appears to be a 10-year-old child in Gigaza portal
21/23

I invite readers to read the full article, which includes the methodology, source trail, web-app link with investigated incidents, screenshots and sources, downloadable research dataset, appendices, and acknowledgments.
Full article:

22/23 middleeastbuka.substack.com/p/pij-commande…

So what next?
Continue expanding the main casualty-mapping project, now at 5%+ coverage of the 68,844 names in Gaza MoH List 12.
As new factional publications appear, some classifications may change and the dataset will keep evolving.

The end. More to come.