Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

“Save this for the next time you hear that the Israeli military does everything possible to avoid harming civilians, and that the level of civilian harm in Gaza is less than other comparable conflicts,” said one advocate.

The world’s foremost monitor of civilian harm caused by aerial bombardment published a report Thursday calling the first 25 days of Israel’s ongoing U.S.-backed annihilation of Gaza the worst assault on noncombatants it has ever seen.

U.K.-based Airwars—which over its decadelong existence has meticulously and painstakingly documented civilian casualties in various campaigns of the U.S.-led so-called War on Terror, Russia’s bombing of Ukraine and Syria, Turkish attacks on Syria and Iraq, and other conflicts—published a “patterns of harm analysis” examining the first few weeks of Israel’s retaliatory assault on Gaza following the Hamas-led attack of October 7, 2023.

“By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign,” Airwars said in a summary of the report. “It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented.”

Key findings include:

• At least 5,139 civilians were killed in Gaza in 25 days in October 2023, nearly four times more civilians reported killed in a single month than in any conflict Airwars has documented since it was established in 2014;
• In October 2023 alone, Airwars documented at least 65 incidents in which a minimum of 20 civilians were killed in a particular incident, nearly triple the number of such high-fatality incidents that Airwars has documented within any comparable timeframe;
• Over the course of 25 days, Airwars recorded a minimum of 1,900 children killed by Israeli military action in Gaza, nearly seven times higher than even the most deadly month for children previously recorded by Airwars;
• Families were killed together in unprecedented numbers, and in their homes, with more than 9 out of 10 women and children killed in residential buildings; and
• On average, when civilians were killed alongside family members, at least 15 family members were killed—higher than any other conflict documented by Airwars.

“The international community has raised grave concern about Israeli military practice and the unprecedented scale of civilian harm,” the report notes. “The United Nations has repeatedly warned that Israel is breaching international law and even United States President Joe Biden, a staunch ally of Israel, eventually labeled the military response ‘over the top.’ In January 2024, South Africa brought a claim of genocide against Israel at the International Court of Justice.”

As of Friday, Gaza officials say that at least 44,875 Palestinians have been killed and 106,464 have been wounded in Gaza. At least 11,000 others are missing and believed to be dead and buried beneath the rubble of hundreds of thousands of bombed-out buildings.

Throughout the new report, Airwars compares Israel’s bombardment of Gaza to two other campaigns it has extensively analyzed, the battles for Mosul, Iraq and Raqqa, Syria during the U.S.-led coalition war against the so-called Islamic State. Airwars concluded that more Palestinian civilians were killed by Israeli forces during the first 25 days of the Gaza campaign than were slain in Raqqa during the entire four-month period studied and the deadliest month in Mosul—combined.

The report also pushes back on claims that Israel “does everything possible to avoid harming civilians,” and that “the level of civilian harm in Gaza is broadly consistent with, and even favorable to, other comparable conflicts in recent decades.”

“The manner in which Israel has conducted the war in Gaza may signal the development of a concerning new norm: a way of conducting air campaigns with a greater frequency of strikes, a greater intensity of damage, and a higher threshold of acceptance for civilian harm than ever seen before,” the authors wrote.

Airwars leaves readers with the ominous prospect that, while it is “expecting the overall trends to remain, magnitudes of difference—where measures of civilian harm in Gaza outpace those from previously documented conflicts—are expected to grow.”

Original article by Brett Wilkins republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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