Funeral of IDF St.-Sgt. Eliav Kahlon 22, from Safed Photo: Dave Bender

As a 72-hour ceasefire took hold on Tuesday along the border between Gaza and Israel, where Israel Defense Forces troops have pulled back after destroying three dozen tunnels, Israeli media and blogs focusing on the conflict have returned to the question of how many died in the fighting.

A senior military source told Times of Israel that the Army counted 900 Hamas militants of the 1,800 Gazans believed to have been killed, meaning a 1:1 kill ratio of civilians to combatants, which would be in-line with Israel’s  previous two wars against Hamas in Gaza.

Another tally was from The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, the ITIC, which reported figures from Sunday, with 407 terrorist operatives and 452 civilians. ITIC counted 1,438 Gazans dying in the conflict, including 589 people yet to be identified. Of the 407 terrorists, 222 were from Hamas, 123 from Palestinian Islamic Jihad and 62 from other terror organizations.

The United Nations counted 1,717 dead, in total.

Blogger Elder of Ziyon, who flagged the reports, noted that during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, in 2009, the number of dead was inflated by including natural deaths during the period to increase the body count in the “martyr” category.

During the month-long Operation Protective Edge, there were also stories of Hamas massacring dozens of its own people for alleged collaboration with Israel, plus the many ‘own goals’ from terror rockets misfiring and landing on homes and civilian infrastructure within Gaza.

On the Israeli side, Hamas’s 3,000 rockets caused mayhem, but few deaths, mainly because of Israeli use of bomb shelters and stairwells during attacks, as well as the Iron Dome missile defense shield that shot down rockets aimed straight at Israel’s biggest population centers. Rather than “homemade rockets,” the war saw Hamas using much larger and more sophisticated Iranian Fajr-5 and Syrian M-302 missiles to strike Israel, reaching all the way to its northern border.

In total 67 Israelis died: 64 soldiers, including 11 killed by Hamas terrorists emerging from their vast tunnel network, plus 3 Israeli civilians.