Israel's Gaza bombardment 'among deadliest for civilians' in modern warfare

Investigation by Airwars, an independent conflict monitor, lays bare intensity of bombing campaign

Smoke from a bomb blast during an Israeli air strike on Ain Jalut towers in Nuseirat, central Gaza. Bloomberg

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Airwars, an international award-winning war monitor, which has investigated civilian deaths in drone strikes and aerial bombardments for a decade, says it has been shocked by the intensity of violence in Gaza.

After a nine-month investigation, it released a report on Wednesday evening, called One Name, Two Lists, focusing on 300 Israeli air strikes in Gaza between October 7 when the war began and October 24, identifying 3,259 civilian deaths.

The war monitor says civilian killing by Israeli bombing is more intense than in air campaigns in Libya, Iraq and Syria, which spanned the post Qaddafi civil wars, the international campaign against ISIS and Russia’s 2015 air campaign in Syria.

Israel began its bombardment of Gaza on October 7 after Hamas militants killed about 1,200 people in southern Israel.

Subsequent investigations by Israeli magazine +972, for which Israelis involved in war planning in Gaza were interviewed, claimed military forces used outdated intelligence to attack suspected Hamas sites and may have been driven by pressure from commanders to rapidly generate targets as much as by military goals.

By the end of 2023, more than half of the enclave of 2.3 million people was in ruins.

Thousands of tonnes of bombs had been dropped on densely populated neighbourhoods and according to one investigation by Synthetaic, an AI specialist firm, 500 bombs each weighing more than 900kg had been used by December. Experts say such weapons will almost inevitably cause civilian death due in part to their sheer size.

Strengthening claims by Gaza’s Ministry of Health that more than 39,100 Palestinians have been killed in the war, Airwars said there was a 74.7 per cent match between civilian deaths they could identify and names released by Gaza’s health authorities.

Israeli government officials, including Foreign Minister Israel Katz, have questioned the ministry’s data, saying the organisation is controlled by Hamas. The UN says the ministry’s reporting is credible and "well developed”.

Airwars investigators sought to match names of the dead they had verified on social media and from local reports to the Health Ministry’s data, which has been released in batches.

“By comparing those victims' names with the first list produced by the ministry, this investigation found a high correlation between the official ministry data and what Palestinian civilians reported online – with 75 per cent of publicly reported names also appearing on the ministry list,” Airwars said in its report.

The organisation said it was shocked by the intensity of violence in the air strikes.

“The first weeks of the war in Gaza were among the deadliest for civilians in modern warfare,” the report said.

“Airwars researchers tracked more allegations of civilian harm in October 2023 than in any month of its 10-year history of monitoring – including the US-led campaign against ISIS, the Nato-led coalition in Libya and the Russian bombardment of Syria.

"Around one in every four allegations involved at least 10 civilians reportedly killed – far higher than any previous conflict Airwars has monitored.”