Patterns of harm analysis: Gaza, October 2023

from Airwars (H/T Owen Jones)

Introduction

On October 7, 2023, Palestinian militants breached the Israel-Gaza border fence into Israel, killing at least 1,200 people and taking a further 251 into Gaza. Israel subsequently launched one of the most intense military campaigns of the 21st century. As of November 2024, more than 43,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to official statistics from the Palestinian Ministry of Health (MoH) in Gaza.

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

Israeli officials argue that the military does everything possible to avoid harming civilians, and say that Hamas’ tactic of embedding itself in the civilian population makes civilian harm an inevitable byproduct of seeking to destroy Hamas’ military infrastructure. Israel also claims that the level of civilian harm in Gaza is broadly consistent with, and even favourable to, other comparable conflicts in recent decades, including the US-led bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

 

With Israeli strikes in Lebanon initially mirroring the pace and intensity of the Gaza campaign, 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 seen before.

This report focuses on the pattern and intensity of civilian harm during the opening weeks of Israel’s campaign in Gaza, comparing the level of civilian harm with military campaigns documented by Airwars over a decade of work in some of the world’s most intense and complex conflict zones.

At the time of analysing this dataset, Airwars had published 606 incidents of civilian harm reported between October 7th and October 31st 2023 - the first three weeks of the war. In these incidents, a minimum of 5,139 civilians were reported killed. This represents only a fraction of the more than 7,000 incidents of civilian harm in Gaza that Airwars researchers have monitored since October 2023, the vast majority of which are yet to be published. Still, this record of harm constitutes an evidence base that is large enough to allow for reliable comparisons with other conflicts, and to draw conclusions on those findings.

Since October 7th, policy makers, journalists and military personnel have sought to understand the comparative intensity of this war against others. Primarily, this report intends to speak to these comparative questions and provide a clear, data-driven response for those trying to understand patterns of harm in Gaza. As such, the report does not address the full and varied lives of those individuals who are reflected in this report. Such narratives are available on Airwars’ public civilian harm archive.

Key findings

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. 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. This is 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. This is 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. This is 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. More than nine out of ten women and children were killed in residential buildings. In more than 95 percent of all cases where a woman was killed, at least one child was also killed.
• On average, when civilians were killed alongside family members, at least 15 family members were killed. This is higher than any other conflict documented by Airwars.

 

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