Mass Killing
Overview
This page is devoted to gathering evidence of Israel's mass killing in Gaza. Click on any of the bullets below to jump to a specific section.
Mass Killing
This section explores:
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the Colossal Death Toll - As of November 2025 the Gaza Ministry of Health confirmed over 70,000 deaths - mostly women and children - while independent experts estimate over 385,000 direct and indirect deaths. Indirect deaths include deaths from starvation, disease, and lack of medical care.
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the Unprecedented Rate of Killing and Maiming Children - During the first month, 1 child was killed every 10 minutes, an astonishingly fast rate. During the first 4 months, more children were killed in Gaza that in the last 4 years of war in the entire world combined. Gaza now has the largest concentration of child amputees in the world, and 43,600 children have been orphaned according to Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor.
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Indiscriminate Bombing – This section discusses the use of massive 2000-pound bombs and shrapnel-packed bombs in one of the most densely populated urban areas on earth, as well as the carpet-bombing that has leveled Gaza.
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the Massive Scale of Bombing - With well over 70,000 tons of explosives dropped on the tiny enclave, Israel has dropped the equivalent of 5 Hiroshima atomic bombs.
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the Illegal Use of White Phosphorus - which is prohibited under international law because it chemically burns people to the bone.
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Mass Graves - This section discusses the discovery of numerous mass graves, often with people who still have their hands zip-tied (and therefore posed no threat and were likely summarily executed) or with hospital bands still attached to their wrists (likely patients who were killed or died during Israel's invasion of Gaza's hospitals).
The Colossal Death Toll
“Gaza has become a slaughterhouse.”
~ British Doctor Tom Potokar
Understanding the Gaza Death Toll
As one journalist summarized: “On the eve of the war’s first year, Israel bombed, on average, an aid distribution point and warehouse every fifteen days, a school and hospital every four days, a tent and other temporary shelter every seventeen hours, and someone’s home every four hours. As a result, Israel has racked up record after record in terms of killing: the most health care workers killed in at least a decade, most UN personnel ever killed, the deadliest war for aid workers on record, and the deadliest one for journalists in history — more reporters killed than in the past seven major US-involved wars combined, including the two World Wars and the Civil War.” Three months into the war the average daily death toll was 250 deaths/day – the highest this century. The next highest, the bloody Syrian civil war, was less than half this number.
There is no way to know the true extent of Palestinians killed so far during this genocide in Gaza. Israel's decimation of the health system and assault on civilian governance, the thousands missing and buried beneath the crushing weight of collapsed buildings, and the untold thousands dying from indirect causes – such as disease, malnutrition, and injuries – due to the lack of medical care and unsafe living conditions, make this impossible.
As of November 2025, the Palestinian Health Ministry reported over 70,000 killed, but independent experts say this understates the true scale of the crisis – and the real death toll is much higher. As Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reported: “more and more international experts are stating that not only is this list, with all the horror it embodies, reliable - but that it may even be very conservative in relation to reality.” That list starts with 11 pages of children under the age of 6 months. The death toll as of June 2025 included over 17,000 children, 232 journalists and media workers, 1,580 healthcare workers, and 452 aid workers.
Indirect deaths include those who die from lack of evacuation, medical care, food, or clean water. These are people who would have survived if there was a functioning health system. In other words, people who are sick and wounded and ultimately die from otherwise treatable conditions are not counted in the official death toll – even though their deaths are directly caused by Israel’s “war,” and in particular it's assault on the healthcare system and its blockade of aid.
Understanding the Gaza Death Toll
77,000 - 109,000
Direct deaths (as of May 2025)
385,000 - 545,000
Total deaths, including indirect deaths
Indirect deaths include deaths resulting from disease, destroyed health-care infrastructure, severe shortages of food and water, and the lack of humanitarian aid.
Indirect deaths from recent conflicts range from 3-15x direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of 4 times the reported death toll, researchers estimated “up to 186,000 or even more” deaths as of June 2024 (The Lancet). A year later, this calculation leads to a total of 385,000 - 545,000 people who have or will die as a result of the current violence, a shocking number that represents up to 24% of the population of the Gaza Strip.
Genocide scholar Raz Segal testified that “Israel has killed directly about 120,000 Palestinians in Gaza so far and has created the conditions of a painful death of around 360,000 more — almost half a million people out of a population of nearly 2.3 million, more than 20 per cent.” Israel's Army Chief of Staff during the majority of the genocide confirmed over 200,000 casualties in Gaza, saying the law had “not once” constrained the Israeli military.
An explanation of the direct and indirect death tolls in Gaza as of January 2025.
Understanding the Lancet estimate of 186,000 deaths in Gaza.
A description of various efforts to estimate the death toll in Gaza as of October 2024.
An open letter by 45 US medical workers describing the health crisis in Gaza, including a death toll that likely exceeded 4% of the population by July 2024.
The scale of the killing is devastating. Entire families and bloodlines have been erased, including over 100 members of a single family. After just 2 months, in December 2023, the death toll was already so high, that if such attacks occurred in the same proportion to America's population, 2.4 million Americans would be dead and 6.3 million wounded. Some 65 million homes would have been destroyed.
That same month, Jan Egeland, the Secretary General of the Norwegian Refugee Council, a humanitarian NGO, said: “The pulverising of Gaza now ranks amongst the worst assaults on any civilian population in our time and age. Each day we see more dead children and new depths of suffering for the innocent people enduring this hell.” That was over two years ago. The situation has only gotten worse.
Numbers can become numbing. They are cold and impersonal. Behind every number is a story of love and incomprehensible loss. Behind these stark figures lies a world of pain. For this reason, in 2015, a nonprofit was created to give Palestinians a voice and a platform to share their stories: We Are Not Numbers. The scholar and poet Dr. Refaat Alareer was a key source of inspiration and guidance from its inception. Sadly, he too was targeted and killed by Israel during the Gaza genocide.
Professor Michael Spagat, an economist at the University of London and a world-class expert on mortality in violent conflicts, published a comprehensive study on mortality in the Gaza Strip. He and colleagues found that at the time the Health Ministry identified the number of killed at 45,660, the real number of violent deaths was likely closer to 75,200. That means the Health Ministry’s data undercounted the true total by about 40%. Another study published several months earlier in the prestigious Lancet medical journal also found the true death toll to be ~40% higher than reported.
This is the first “war” in which the Israeli army has not provided an estimate of the number of civilians killed. It claims it has killed 20,000 Hamas fighters, but this number is “not backed up by a list of names or other proof or sourcing.” Spagat and his team could only count a few hundred. Meanwhile, Israeli soldiers have said that anyone killed in certain areas - even children and unarmed individuals - are automatically counted as “terrorists.”
This underreporting is likely a result of several factors - including untold thousands still buried beneath the rubble of thousands of buildings, others whose bodies were likely eviscerated by the explosions of industrial-sized bombs and missiles, and still others whose families may have buried loved ones without bringing the bodies to hospitals. A UN official described the aftermath of the bombing on a refugee camp saying, “It looks like Nagasaki. They counted the bodies, but there were people who were simply vaporized.” A researcher surmised, “Maybe the parents die, and the children, an 8-year-old remains. How is the 8-year-old going to report this?”
Beyond the Death Toll: Life-Changing Injuries
The deaths are not the whole story. More than 171,000 people have been injured, many critically wounded. They have suffered life-changing injuries, such as limb amputations, severe burns, disfiguration, and brain damage. Each day that passes, these numbers continue to grow, more and more lives are shattered. Gaza now has the largest concentration of child amputees in the world.
Unprecedented Killing of Children
Overview: An Unprecedented Horror for Children
The first month of Israel’s onslaught was so deadly that the UN called Gaza a “graveyard for children.” The World Health Organization reported that 1 child was killed every 10 minutes. UNICEF’s Executive Director christened Gaza “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child.” UNICEF Spokesperson James Elder called it a “horror story for children” and “a war on children.” In December 2023, Save the Children said: “We’re running out of words to describe the horrors unfolding for Gaza’s children. ... The conditions in Gaza are unprecedented.”
Since then, conditions have only gotten immeasurably worse. Children's bodies are continually being shredded and burned by Israeli bombs. Parents write their children's names on their limbs so they can be identified if killed. For two years, those who survived were being starved and terrorized.
As one journalist wrote: “Every day, those of us who choose to look are inundated with a barrage of little mutilated bodies, charred to their bones, limbs torn off, many dead, the ones still alive shaking in fear, crying because they’re in pain, hungry, orphaned, clinging to corpses of loved ones.”
By July 2025, the UN reported that “Every single day since the start of the war, on average, a classroom full of children have been killed” - over 1 child each hour for nearly two years. By the two year anniversary of the genocide, Israel had killed over 20,000 children.
This section proceeds in three parts, exploring:
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The unprecedented rate of killing children
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The tens of thousands of children who have been orphaned by Israel.
~36 Israeli children were killed in the October 7 attacks.
Israel has killed over 20,000 Palestinian children in Gaza since then.
That number continues to grow every day.
1 Palestinian child killed every 30 minutes during the first year
On average, 41 Palestinian children killed each day in 2024
In other words, the lie of “40 beheaded babies” (Ha'aretz) was used by Israel and the West to justify killing more than 40 Palestinian children every day for a whole year. In reality, only 2 babies died as a result of the October 7 attacks - none were beheaded.
While international journalists are banned from Gaza, American and British doctors who have traveled to Gaza as volunteers have been vocal about the horrors they witnessed. Their testimonies are beyond heart-breaking. They speak of snipers deliberately targeting children with shots to the head and chest, of shredded bodies, of emaciated children, and of children who no longer want to live.
American trauma surgeon Feroze Sidhwa, speaking to the UN Security Council in May 2025
Doctors Without Borders' Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care doctor, in April 2025
American Jewish orthopedic surgeon Mark Permutter speaking in April 2024
“A Graveyard for Children”: Israel's Massacre of Children in Gaza
Israel has slaughtered over 20,000 Palestinian children in Gaza. According to Save the Children, another 20,000 children are missing - meaning they are lost, disappeared, detained, buried under rubble or in mass graves.
The rate at which Israel has killed Palestinian children is unprecedented in modern conflicts.
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In the first month, the number of Palestinian children killed in Gaza was over 10 times more than the number of children killed in the entire first year of the Russia-Ukraine war.
The sheer horror of these numbers is hard to capture. In February 2024 - only 4 months into the genocide - Al Jazeera published a 7-minute list of the names of each child killed in Gaza. Save the Children published a graphic showing the hundreds of newborns murdered by Israeli forces. +972 Magazine told the stories of 6 infants who never saw their first birthday. As of July 17, 2025, 953 infants were killed by Israel before their first birthday - 9 on the same day they were born.
These children were not numbers. For those who loved them, they were entire universes. Here, we share the stories of just 5 of them.
Khaled Nabhan & His Granddaughter Reem
Khaled came to global attention when he lost his 3-year-old granddaughter Reem, who he called “the soul of my soul.” She was killed by Israeli airstrikes in November 2023. A video of him hugging her lifeless body and kissing her eyes went viral, and CNN published a report about Khaled and Reem's special bond. Reem was killed alongside her 5-year-old brother Tarek.
Khaled himself was killed in an Israeli strike a little over a year later. His last embrace with Reem, his love for his children and grandchildren, became a symbol of Palestinian love and humanity at a time when Israel has systematically dehumanized Palestinians in order to justify their genocide, claiming over and over again that there are no innocents in Gaza.
Mohammad Abu Al-Qumsan
Two newborn twins, Asser and Ayssal, were killed with their mother - a doctor - and their grandmother in an Israeli strike while their father, 26-year-old Mohammad, was out collecting their birth certificates. Their home appeared to have been intentionally targeted (see the video below). This would not be the first or last time Israel intentionally targeted Palestinian doctors.
Khaled Joudeh
The war in Gaza had barely begun when 9-year-old Khaled Joudeh suffered an unimaginable loss. His mother, father, older brother and baby sister, along with dozens of other relatives, were all killed in an Israeli airstrike on their home.
In the months that followed, Khaled tried to be brave, his uncle, Mohammad Faris, recalled. He would comfort his younger brother Tamer, who, like Khaled, had survived the Oct. 22 strike that killed their family. But Tamer, 7, was left badly injured with a broken back and a broken leg, and was in constant pain.
“Where’s my mom?” he cried next to a photographer for The New York Times. “I want to see my mom.”
“Where is Khalil?” he continued, barely audible between sobs as he asked for his 12-year-old brother. A morgue worker opened a white shroud, so Khaled could kiss his brother one final time. Then, he bid farewell to his 8-month-old sister. Another shroud was pulled back, revealing the blood-caked face of a baby, her strawberry-red hair matted down. Khaled broke into fresh sobs as he identified her to the hospital staff. Her name was Misk, Arabic for musk.
“Mama was so happy when she had you,” he whispered, gently touching her forehead, tears streaming down his face onto hers.
“He would always quiet his brother when he cried,” Mr. Faris told The New York Times in a recent phone interview. “He would tell him: ‘Mama and Baba are in heaven. Mama and Baba would be sad if they knew we were crying because of them.’”
At night, when the unrelenting Israeli airstrikes on Gaza would start up again, Khaled would wake up shaking and screaming himself, sometimes running to his uncle to seek comfort.
It was a short and terrifying existence for the young brothers that ended when another airstrike hit the family home where they were sheltering on Jan. 9, killing Khaled, Tamer, their 2-year-old cousin, Nada, and three other relatives, according to two family members.
Khaled, mourning his sister Misk.
Photo by Samar Abu Elouf for The New York Times
Khaled's sister Misk.
Hussein Odeh
Body-building champion Hussein Odeh left his home in search of a car to take his children to a safe place. When he returned, he found his children beneath the rubble of their home, destroyed by Israeli shelling. There was no way to get them out; the tools that exist elsewhere for such purposes have been banned by Israel. Khaled, Youssef, and Mohammed were all killed. In the video below, Hussein describes what happened.
These stories are not unique. All across Gaza parents are mourning children killed by Israel. Scenes of grief, like the ones below, are terrifyingly common.
DISTRESSING IMAGE
Tens of Thousands of Wounded Children
In May 2025, UNICEF reported that over 50,000 children were either killed or injured in Gaza. Those who survived suffered severe burns, shrapnel wounds, and lost limbs, often undergoing surgery without anesthetic. UNICEF estimates that 3,000-4,000 children in Gaza have had at least one limb amputated. A UN-backed report puts the toll higher: estimating that ten children per day lose one or both of their legs. Because of Israel's genocide, Gaza is now home to the highest concentration of child amputees in the world.
In November 2023, Dr. Tanya Haj-Hassan, a pediatric intensive care and humanitarian doctor with Doctors Without Borders, reported that doctors at Al-Shifa Hospital were seeing children with the majority of their body and faces burned, missing limbs, and other suffering from catastrophic injuries. By January 2024, Save the Children reported that more than 10 children per day were losing a limb in Gaza.
Human Rights Watch has also reported the use of white phosphorus, a substance that can cause excruciating burns and lifelong suffering.
Examples of the kinds of life-changing injuries, including amputations and burns, that Israel is inflicting on the children of Gaza in record numbers - all while destroying the ability of the health system to care for them.
It can be difficult for the human brain to understand the sheer pain and heartbreak of such injuries, especially when living in safety thousands of miles away. That's why these videos, no matter how difficult to watch, are so important to see. Videos like one of an 8-year-old boy - his leg amputated, his face burned, with a shrapnel injury to the right eye and internal bleeding, who has also lost his mother, sister, and grandmother. Or two young girls, only toddlers, their legs amputated, calling out for their mother, not yet aware that she has been killed. Or a 3-year-old girl the day she learned she didn’t have legs anymore. What is this were your child? What if this was you?
For the children who survive, they face a terrifying future: virtually no hospital care, parents and loved ones who have been killed, no homes left standing, no schools, no safety, all while Israeli bombs continue to rain down all around them and blocks aid to Gaza.
The Children Israel Has Orphaned
It's not just the children who are killed or injured. According to a study by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, over 39,000 children have lost one or both of their parents. 17,000 children have been orphaned. (Already in February 2024, UNICEF estimated that at least 17,000 children were orphaned or separated from their parents.) Such a loss is profound and painful in the best of times - but these children have lost their parents during a genocide, when the love and guidance of a parent may be the only comfort they can find in the world. The frequency of such catastrophic loss has become so common in Gaza that doctors coined a new acronym: WCNSF - “Wounded Child, No Surviving Family.” Such an acronym had never been required before.
Under Israel's genocidal onslaught, newborns are alone in the world - the sole survivors of Israeli airstrikes. A Palestinian boy visits his mother's grave every day to sleep: “I dream of her,” he says. A 4-year-old boy lost his entire family - and his arm - in an Israeli airstrike. Orphaned children take care of younger siblings, babies even, during a genocide.
Before he was killed by Israeli in a targeted strike, Journalist Hossam Shabat wrote:
Indiscriminate Bombing
One look tells you everything.
Seeing such complete destruction makes it obvious that Israel intended to make Gaza uninhabitable for Palestinians, just as it said it would. This is the deliberate obliteration of a people’s ability to live.
This section explores the indiscriminate nature of Israel's onslaught, including:
Israel Deliberately Set Out to Destroy Gaza
Israel's desire to “flatten Gaza” has been openly expressed from Day 1 - and continues to be touted within the country today, even as Israel disingenuously makes pro forma statements to the international community that it is doing its best to protect civilians and only Hamas should be blamed for their suffering.
On October 9, Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari openly stated: “The emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.” Two days later, an Israeli army official said: “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings.”
These were not just heat of passion statements in the immediate aftermath of October 7. Over a year later, in early 2025, Israel's Finance Minister declared: “Our goal for 2025 is to destroy more than what the Palestinians have built.” Months later, he boasted: “We are disassembling Gaza, and leaving it as piles of rubble, with total destruction [which has] no precedent globally. And the world isn’t stopping us.” National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir urged: “Now is time for destruction, annihilation and devastation. This is our time. This is our opportunity.” Netanyahu confirmed to members of the Israeli Parliament that Israel was destroying homes in Gaza so Palestinians would have no choice but to leave.
One look at the devastation makes clear that this intent was put into action.
Indeed, as early as late October 2023, The Washington Post reported that U.S. officials knew that Israel was regularly bombing buildings without solid intelligence that they were legitimate military targets. This was confirmed by Israeli intelligence sources who told +972 Magazine that the army regularly attacked civilian “power targets.” These were deliberate attacks on Palestinian society - hospitals, residential buildings, and civilian institutions - that served no military purpose but were done to “create a shock” in Palestinian society in the hopes they would put “civil pressure” on Hamas.
By May 2025, the devastation was so extreme that former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert wrote an op-ed in Ha'aretz accusing the government of waging a war marked by war crimes, starvation, indiscriminate killing, and destruction. Breaking the Silence published testimonies of Israeli soldiers admitting to methodical mass destruction. And a UN report concluded that Israel was bombing civilian locations “widely and indiscriminately,” reducing “entire residential blocks and neighborhoods to rubble” as part of a collective punishment campaign. It found that Israel often attacked aid convoys, organizations, and refuge sites without even verifying the presence of military targets.
The Carpet-Bombing of Gaza
~ Doctors Without Borders International President
One look at the scale of destruction tells you everything you need to know. In the words of one journalist, this is “scorched-earth terror bombing.”
The destruction is so complete, civilian life so utterly obliterated, the scenes so apocalyptic, that the idea of precision-targeting or keeping civilians safe are immediately apparent for what they are: obvious lies, Orwellian gaslighting in the extreme.
Israel has attacked 92% of homes and 95% of schools. Not a single university still stands. According to +972 Magazine, an independent Israeli news outlet, “hospitals have been repeatedly besieged and destroyed, their patients killed and their medical staff kidnapped, dozens have starved to death as a result of an intentionally calculated famine; and lifeless children are still being pulled from the rubble every day as a result of unceasing Israeli attacks on homes, schools, and refugee camps.” Israel’s assault includes agricultural fields, bakeries, orchards, and greenhouses. Water sanitation facilities, electricity plants, and solar panels. Whole neighborhoods have been obliterated.
Schools, universities, UN facilities, churches, mosques, refugee camps and homes, sewage systems and electricity networks - nowhere is safe from the genocidal onslaught. Not a single sewage treatment plant still functions. Much of the destruction occurs by controlled demolitions where no fighting is taking place.
In no imaginable world can such extensive destruction be justified by military necessity or legitimately described as “extreme care to protect civilians.” It is, instead, exactly what Israel has said it was designed to be – a civilian punishment campaign designed to make Gaza uninhabitable, to make Palestinians leave and allow Israel to take over and settle Gaza. (For more on Israeli intent, click here.)
Aid groups say Israel has “succeeded” - Gaza is effectively uninhabitable. It is a level of destruction not seen since World War II.
Israel has utterly destroyed Gaza from North to South.
Satellite imagery is unmistakable.
CNN analysis of likely damage to human settlements in Gaza up until September 2024.
This is what North Gaza looks like.
This is Central Gaza.
This is Southern Gaza.
Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, was once President Biden's “red line.” As of May 2025, only 4% of buildings were undamaged.
To learn more, visit interactive websites by Al Jazeera and CNN.
You can also watch “before and after” videos by The New York Times and Le Monde.
Such extensive destruction is neither “precise” nor “targeted.”
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The human toll of the horrors unleashed by such bombing is unfathomable. Take just one example from May 2024. Israel dropped industrial-sized bombs on tent camps of displaced civilians near a UN facility inside a “safe zone” in what became known as the “Rafah camp massacre.” Scenes of sheer carnage soon emerged: displaced people sheltering in tents were blown apart and burnt alive by American bombs only days after the International Court of Justice ruled Israel must halt its offensive in Rafah and open the border to allow aid in. Videos showed actual beheaded babies – not those invented by Israel to justify its genocidal assault.
Eyewitnesses saw “dismembered bodies, charred bodies, children without heads, bodies as if they had melted.” One boy recounted, “I saw with my own eyes someone burning and crying for help, and I could not save his life.” Nine-year-old Omar Hamad watched his father burned alive.
This was not a unique occurrence. Israel has used bombs to turn civilian shelters into deadly infernos with terrifying frequency.
These are just a few examples.
Sha'aban al-Dalou - seen here in a selfie he took with members of his family - was killed when an Israeli strike set fire to his tent in central Gaza
The scale of Israel's bombing campaign dwarfs that of other “wars.” Take, for example, the 2014-2017 U.S. campaign to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq. Over 3 years, the U.S.-led coalition carried out nearly 15,000 strikes across the country, according to Airwars, a London-based independent group that tracks recent conflicts. Israel, by contrast, conducted 22,000 strikes in Gaza in one week. A 9-month battle to recapture Mosul from the Islamic State in 2017 killed ~10,000 civilians. Israel killed double that number - in 78 days. Israel has dropped more bombs on the tiny enclave of Gaza than were dropped on London, Dresden, and Hamburg combined during World War II.
Israel has shown it is capable of precision strikes when it wants to be. This puts the lie to the notion that civilians are simply “collateral damage” because Hamas allegedly hides in civilian areas (aside from the fact that the density of Gaza makes the entire territory a “civilian area”). When Israel assassinated Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh (which would be like Hamas assassinating Benjamin Netanyahu), it took out a specific room - rather than bringing down the whole building. It similarly did so when it killed a Palestinian doctor and her 4-day-old twins, as depicted in the video below. An Israeli officer admitted in Ha'aretz: “We are demolishing everything before entering ... it would be possible to arrive at similar achievements with 10% of the destruction we have caused.” In Israel's assault on Gaza City, Israeli paratroopers themselves say that the hours-long process of clearing houses room by room was replaced by a three-minute one in which a small drone blasts open the roof and a larger drone drops explosives inside, collapsing the structure “ceiling-to-floor.”
A photo published in The New York Times of the building where Ismail Haniyeh was assassinated.
It's difficult to call this kind of indiscriminate carpet bombing anything other than terrorism on an industrial scale. Why, after all, should terrorism be limited to non-state actors if states are by far the biggest perpetrators of organized violence against civilians? How, asks Tariq Baconi, “does one differentiate between indiscriminate violence aimed solely at terrorizing civilians and legitimate armed resistance aimed at securing internationally sanctioned rights that invariably ends up killing civilians?”
Indiscriminate Killing: 2000-Pound Bombs & Shrapnel-Packed Bombs
Israel has used 2000-pound bombs with incredible frequency in one of the most densely populated civilian areas on earth. These bombs have a blast radius of several football fields, and are capable of killing and wounding people more than 1,000 feet away. A CNN analysis of the first month of Israel's genocide found 500 craters of a size consistent with American-made 2000-pound bombs used by the Israeli airforce. In other words, in just one month, Israel used hundreds of these bombs in one of the most densely populated places on earth that is half children. Biden sent over 14,000 such bombs to Israel during his Presidency. Trump has sent 35,000 in the first half of 2025, courtesy of American taxpayers.
In an area as densely populated as Gaza, the use of such massive bombs is “inherently indiscriminate.” It is not possible to distinguish between combatants and civilians if you are dropping a bomb that size in an urban area. Experts say 2,000-pound bombs are normally used sparingly by Western militaries. The United States almost never uses such bombs in civilian areas anymore. By contrast, The New York Times demonstrated that Israel dropped these bombs in the very places it ordered civilians to move for safety, potentially as many as 200 times by December 2023.
Scale of Bombing
Just two months into Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza, experts were already calling it one of the “heaviest conventional bombing campaigns” in the history of modern warfare.
In just the first 6 days of air strikes, Israel dropped over 6,000 bombs - more than the U.S. dropped in Afghanistan in an entire year. Gaza is 141 square miles; Afghanistan is 252,000 square miles.
By early January, Israel had inflicted greater devastation on Gaza than the infamous bombing of Dresden during World War II. That same month, University of Chicago Professor Robert Pape, an internally recognized expert on military air power, said Gaza will go down in history, alongside Dresden, “as a place name denoting one of history’s heaviest bombing campaigns.”
Various sources (including human rights group Euro-med Monitor, Foreign Affairs, and The New Yorker) report that Israel has dropped over 70,000 tons of explosives on Gaza, which is equal to ~5 Hiroshima atomic bombs and greater than the WWII bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined.
Scale of Bombing of Gaza compared to Afghanistan and Iraq
Israel dropped 6,000+ bombs on Gaza, which is only 141 square miles.
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Israel dropped 29,000 bombs, munitions and shells on Gaza.
vs.
According to CNN, Marc Garlasco a former U.S. defense intelligence analyst and former UN war crimes investigator, said the density of Israel’s first month of bombardment in Gaza had “not been seen since Vietnam.” Even then, the U.S. dropped ~15 tonnes of explosives per square km in Vietnam over the course of 8 years. Israel has dropped ~275 tonnes per square km of Gaza in 1.5 years.
Israel has utterly destroyed nearly every inch of Gaza. And it must be remembered, all of this is being carried out with the most deadly, advanced, U.S.-made technology against a defenseless civilian population with no state, no army, and no air force to defend them.
As shocking as this image is, it is from August 2024, and is significantly out of date.
White Phosphorus
Several human rights groups - including Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and Euro-Med Monitor - have verified Israel's use of white phosphorus in Gaza in the early days of October 2023. The use of such a deadly chemical substance in densely populated civilian areas is a war crime, the groups say, since it violates the requirement under international humanitarian law to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian injury and loss of life.
White phosphorus chemically burns people to the bone and is typically not used in densely populated civilian areas as a result. It exacerbates wounds and can cause multiple organ failure. Already dressed wounds can reignite when dressings are removed and the wounds are re-exposed to oxygen. Even relatively minor burns are often fatal.
Israel has a history of using white phosphorus, including during its 2008-2009 assault on Gaza.
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SDEROT, ISRAEL – OCTOBER 09, 2024: A view of ammunition, including what appear to be white-phosphorus artillery shells, about one kilometer from Gaza. (Photo by Mostafa Alkharouf/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Mass Graves
The mass killing in Gaza has increasingly forced Palestinians to bury their loved ones in mass graves. While this is tragic, what is more concerning is the repeated discovery of mass graves after Israeli raids on Gaza's hospitals - leading to international concern over potential war crimes and calls by the United Nations, human rights groups, the European Union, and even the United States for independent investigations. One NGO has documented over 120 mass graves across Gaza.
In April 2024, 392 bodies were discovered in a mass grave following an Israeli raid on Nasser Hospital. They included bodies of children and health care workers, bodies with hands tied behind their backs, stripped of their clothes, in hospital gowns with medical tubes still attached, and others with signs of torture and executions.
Similar mass graves have been found at Al-Shifa hospital and Kamal Adwan hospital, which were both subject to devastating sieges and raids by Israeli forces. Over 30 bodies were found in black plastic bags, blindfolded and handcuffed, near a school in northern Gaza, suggesting they had been summarily executed. Al Jazeera produced a documentary on Israel's bloody raid on Al-Shifa hospital (see below), and Israeli historian Lee Mordechai has compiled evidence of war crimes and atrocities committed by the Israeli army there.
On several occasions since October 7, Israel has also delivered trucks full of decomposing Palestinian bodies back to Gaza, with no information on who they are, or how and why they died. Israeli historian Lee Mordechai compiled a partial list including over 100 corpses of people detained in hospitals in November 2023, 80 corpses in December 2023, 100 corpses in January 2024, over 80 corpses in August 2024, and 88 corpses in September 2024. In the past, Israel has admitted to harvesting the organs of Palestinians without consent, though it claims it no longer does so. Palestinians have long said that Israel has illegally and grimly harvested organs from dead Palestinians before returning their bodies to families.