People check the rubble of a building hit in an overnight Israeli strike in Beit Lahya in the northern Gaza Strip on November 17, 2024. (Photo by AFP)
London, December 15 (RHC)-- A UK-based company that tracks international air wars across the globe has described as the “most destructive and fatal conflict” in recent times the Israeli aggression against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip since October last year.
Airwars said in a new report that Israel launched one of the most intense military campaigns of the 21st century after the Palestinians staged a surprise operation in the Israeli-occupied territories on 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. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented,” the London-based not-for-profit company said.
Airwars added that at least 5,139 civilians were killed in Gaza in 25 days in October last year, which is “nearly four times more civilians reported killed in a single month than in any conflict” the company 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 time frame.
Over the course of 25 days, Airwars recorded a minimum of 1,900 children killed by Israeli military action in Gaza, which is nearly seven times higher than even the most deadly month for children previously recorded by the tracking firm.
Airwars underlined that Palestinian 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.”
The London-based company said 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.”
Airwars stressed that the report considered patterns of harm and analyzed trends that include the rate at which civilians were killed, the average number of civilians killed per incident, and the rates at which women and children were killed in Gaza.
The Israeli regime launched its brutal aggression on the coastal sliver last October in response to a retaliatory operation that had been staged by the territory’s resistance movements earlier over the regime’s decades-old campaign of occupation and deadly aggression against Palestinians.
The brutal Israeli military onslaught has so far claimed the lives of nearly 44,900 Palestinians, mostly women and children.
