The War in Gaza Is Far Worse Than You Thought

Researchers went back to check Palestinian casualty reports from October 2023. They found a deadlier month for civilians—and children—than any other chapter of the "war on terror."

How many people in Gaza have been killed by the Israel-Hamas war? For a long time, the only source of information was the Palestinian Ministry of Health. And the accuracy of their death rolls became the subject of a morbid political debate. Is it fair to call the ministry "Hamas-run"? Did they tell the truth about the Ahli Hospital bombing? What to make of the discrepancy between identified and unidentified corpses?

It's an ethical question not just for Israelis carrying out the war, but also for Americans, who are providing both the funding and weapons that make the war effort possible.

Airwars, a team of conflict researchers affiliated with the University of London, went back and cross-checked the casualty lists from the first 25 days of the Israeli air campaign against news reporting, social media, and other local sources. And unlike the Palestinian ministry, they differentiated between civilians and fighters, using data such as social media funeral notices to determine Hamas affiliation.

The Airwars report, released on Thursday, shows a rate of civilian slaughter "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." The Palestinian ministry reported 8,525 wartime deaths, including 3,542 children, from October 7, 2023, to October 31, 2023. Airwars was able to verify a minimum of 5,139 civilians killed by Israeli air raids in that timeframe, including at least 1,900 children.

Most of them were not the collateral damage of combat against Hamas. Out of 606 incidents of civilian casualties studied by Airwars, only 26 overlapped with the death of a militant. And in those 26 incidents, the killing was still incredibly lopsided, with 32 militants killed in total, at a cost of 522 civilian lives.

For example, the Israeli military killed Hamas commander Ibrahim Biari on October 31, 2023, by dropping American-made 2,000-lb bunker buster bombs on the Jabalia refugee camp. The attack also killed at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, according to Airwars. "Children were carrying other injured children and running, with grey dust filling the air. Bodies were hanging on the rubble, many of them unrecognized. Some were bleeding and others were burnt," Palestinian eyewitness Mohammad Al Aswad told CNN at the time.

Israeli military spokesman Lt. Col. Richard Hecht called the deaths in Jabalia a "tragedy of war" in a CNN interview. "About the civilians there, we're doing everything we can to minimize. Sadly they [Hamas] are hiding themselves within the civilian population," Hecht told CNN. "We're going to go after every one of these terrorists who was involved in the hideous [October 7, 2023] attack."

Hamas raided Israeli towns and villages on October 7, 2023, killing 815 civilians, including 36 children, and 380 military personnel. Its fighters shot Israelis and foreigners in their houses, bomb shelters, and music festivals at close range, returning to Gaza with 251 captives, about 96 of whom are still being held hostage. The human rights organization Amnesty International said that Hamas "flagrantly violated international law and displayed a chilling disregard for human life by carrying out cruel and brutal crimes including mass summary killings, hostage-taking, and launching indiscriminate rocket attacks into Israel."

Israeli leaders promised a counterattack "with neither limitations nor respite" on October 8. The Israeli military used artificial intelligence to generate long target lists, both designed to "kill as many Hamas operatives as possible" and to "create a shock" that will "lead civilians to put pressure on Hamas," intelligence officers told +972 Magazine. Israel also employed a program known as "Where's Daddy" designed to kill Hamas members at home with their families, +972 later reported.

The results were consistent with that kind of strategy. "Families were killed together in unprecedented numbers, and in their homes," the Airwars report states. Over 90 percent of women and children killed by Israeli air raids died in their homes, and in 95 percent of cases where a woman was killed, at least one child was also killed, according to the Airwars report.

Amnesty International concluded last week that the Israeli war in Gaza constitutes a "genocide against Palestinians" because "the destruction of Palestinians in Gaza, as such, was Israel's intent, either in addition to, or as a means to achieve, its military aims." Israel denied the allegations. The Amnesty report is "nothing but accusing us—the victims of this terror—of permitting the genocide which has been committed on our people by Hamas' design," Israeli government spokesman David Mercer told Sky News.

The Airwars report did not come to any conclusion about Israel's intent. It states that the research is only "intended to cut through the 'fog of war'—to provide an evidence base that offers civilians a route to accountability, to give policy makers the tools they need to make decisions that protect civilians, and to present an accurate and comprehensive picture even in the most contested of battlefields."

Airwars was founded in 2014 by Chris Woods, a British journalist with a long career investigating drone warfare, to monitor the consequences of air campaigns around the world. Its current areas of research include the Russian bombing in Ukraine and Syria; U.S. and U.S.-led coalition bombing in Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and Yemen; Turkish bombing in Syrian and Iraqi Kurdistan; and bombing by all sides of the Libyan civil war.

Although the Israeli government and its supporters often argue that its military tactics are more humane than the American "war on terror," Airwars found the exact opposite to be true. Before October 2023, the deadliest month for civilians ever recorded by Airwars was March 2017, when a U.S.-led coalition was battling the Islamic State group for Mosul, Iraq. That campaign killed 1,470 civilians, only one-fifth of the verified Palestinian civilian death count in October 2023. Children made up 9 percent of casualties in Mosul overall, and 36 percent of casualties in Gaza in October 2023.

These numbers are a conservative estimate, based on the minimum reported casualties in cases that Airwars was able to verify were Israeli bombing rather than Hamas misfires. And the study only covers one month of the war. More than a year later, the Palestinian Ministry of Health reports that 45,600 people have been killed and 11,000 are missing. Again, unlike the Airwars report, these numbers don't distinguish between civilians and Hamas fighters.

But with hospitals overwhelmed, communications cut, and thousands of bodies left in the street or trapped under rubble, 45,600 deaths is possibly an undercount. Other researchers have estimated that the total death toll from war, starvation, and disease in Gaza could be greater than 100,000 or even 300,000.

With all these debates over numbers or legal terminology, it's easy to forget that the Palestinian and Israeli death statistics represent human lives violently cut short. As Jewish scripture states, every human being is an entire world; and as Islamic scripture states, to kill one person is to kill all of humanity.