No and this is misleading. First, that’s not how civilian status is determined. Civilian vs. combatant is not decided by uniforms or post-strike assumptions but on direct participation in hostilities at the time and positive identification. Someone actively firing an RPG is a combatant at that moment but that does not justify retroactively classifying every unidentified body as militant. I'm honestly surprised that I've to explain that.

Second, the example is a hypothetical case to erase the real issue. The claim about ~80% civilian deaths is not based on “assuming everyone is civilian,” but on subtracting those Israel itself could identify as militants using intelligence-linked, name-based records. Israel’s own database explicitly excludes people it merely suspects or assumes were fighters.

Third, this logic fails at scale. Gaza’s death toll includes tens of thousands of women, children, elderly, and entire families killed in homes, shelters, hospitals, and aid lines, not people observed using RPGs. Field reports and Israeli investigations show many victims were later posthumously labeled militants without evidence, inflating numbers.

Forth, the argument flips the burden of proof. You don’t get to call people militants because you can’t identify them. If that standard were accepted, any mass-casualty air war could declare most of its victims “terrorists” by default, which is exactly why serious militaries and conflict datasets reject that logic.