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| A child looks from a door following an Israeli strike on a post office at which people were sheltering in Nuseirat in central Gaza Strip on Thursday. (Khamis Said/Reuters) |
| The death toll in Gaza has been the source of uncertainty, speculation and heated debate. Since Israel unleashed its war machine on the territory from which militant group Hamas launched its lethal strike of Oct. 7, 2023, we have relied upon data provided by Gaza’s Health Ministry, whose work counting the dead in previous rounds of conflict was seen as accurate, although it doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians. Most humanitarian organizations, the United Nations itself and Israeli-friendly governments, including the Biden administration, have broadly accepted the publicized data as the best measure of what has unfolded over the past 14 months. Israeli officials and their supporters abroad scoff at the reported casualty figures in Gaza as the inflated product of Hamas propagandists. They blame Hamas for embedding itself in Gaza’s densely packed neighborhoods. But the undeniable devastation of Gaza and hundreds of documented mass casualty events tell a different story — one that myriad watchdog groups and human rights organizations are trying to flesh out in greater detail.
Last week, Airwars, a British-based nonprofit that charts civilian casualties in 21st-century conflicts, put out a report that examined in granular detail the first 25 days of the war in October 2023. It concluded that, in that time period, “civilian harm in Gaza occurred on a scale unmatched by any conflict” the organization has tracked, which includes the U.S.-led bombing campaigns of the Islamic State-held cities of Mosul and Raqqa. The organization said Israel’s campaign in Gaza “is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign” and “by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict” it has tracked. In October 2023 alone, Airwars reported, 5,139 civilians were killed in Israeli strikes, 1,900 of them children. The figure is nearly seven times higher than the monthly toll for slain children in any other conflict the group’s researchers have monitored. Out of 606 incidents of civilian harm during October 2023 that Airwars has studied so far, just 26 had clear public evidence of the death of at least one confirmed Palestinian militant. Those 606 are less than a tenth of the more than 7,000 such incidents its researchers have monitored that month. The organization is known for its thorough, painstaking approach. Its referrals prompted more than 70 percent of the Pentagon’s investigations into incidents of civilian harm during the U.S.-led air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. In the case of Gaza, Airwars spent months combing through open-source data on casualties, including the Palestinian national ID numbers of the victims, social media notices, news reports and other information, to build a dataset regarding each casualty incident. The data for October 2023 is available, but it’s continuing the work for the subsequent months of the war. The picture that may emerge, the organization said, is grim. “While 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,” Airwars noted in its report. The violence has hardly let up. Even as Israel carried out a widespread bombing campaign across Syria and expanded its hold over the contested Golan Heights, it maintained its drumbeat of strikes on Gaza. According to local health authorities, there were five Israeli attacks over the weekend that, collectively, killed at least 46 people. Since October, Israeli operations aimed at uprooting cells of Hamas fighters have further pounded northern areas of the Gaza Strip, flattening neighborhoods and displacing the population that remains multiple times. Rights groups warn of the dire threats facing everyone trapped in the territory as the cold of winter deepens.Hamas endures despite an Israeli campaign in Gaza that has forced some 2 million people from their homes and destroyed most of the territory’s civilian infrastructure, including bakeries, water plants and hospitals. Israeli restrictions on aid deliveries and organized criminal looting have accelerated a hunger crisis, as my colleagues reported, leaving some areas on the brink of famine. The scale of the devastation, the pattern of strikes and the rhetoric of many Israeli politicians all fed into Amnesty International’s declaration earlier this month that Israel had committed — and was committing — acts of genocide. Israeli authorities rejected the human rights group’s findings. “The claims presented in this report are entirely baseless,” the Israeli military said in a statement to The Washington Post. The military said it was “actively working to dismantle Hamas’ military infrastructure while adhering to its obligations under international law.” Those claims have been challenged in many instances, including through ongoing cases against Israel and its leaders at the International Court of Justice and International Criminal Court. The incoming Trump administration appears set to shield Israel from further international censure — following, in many ways, in the footsteps of its predecessor. The Biden administration received nearly 500 reports alleging that Israel used U.S.-supplied weapons for attacks that caused unnecessary harm to civilians in the Gaza Strip, but it has failed to comply with its own policies requiring swift investigations of such claims, my colleagues reported in October. “They’re ignoring evidence of widespread civilian harm and atrocities to maintain a policy of virtually unconditional weapons transfers to the [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu government,” John Ramming Chappell, a legal and policy adviser who focuses on U.S. security assistance and arms sales at the Center for Civilians in Conflict, told my colleagues.he precedent set by Israel’s furious response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack may have broader implications in an age of mounting impunity, Airwars concluded in its report: “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.” | ||||||