Dan Sabbagh
The Guardian / July 29, 2024
Airwars says move is first step in effort to identify every civilian killed during Israeli military campaign.
A conflict monitor has named nearly 3,000 Palestinians killed in Gaza in almost 350 separate incidents during the first 17 days of the war – the first step in an exercise aimed at identifying every civilian killed during the Israeli military campaign.
Though the 2,993 victims named are a fraction of the overall death total of 39,000 cited by the Palestinian ministry of health in Gaza, Airwars, the group involved, says the effort shows it is possible to name those killed while a war is ongoing.
Emily Tripp, the director of Airwars, said: “Militaries often tell us it is impossible to know who has been killed and how – but one of our key messages is to show that it is possible. The only thing holding us back is the size of our teams.”
Airwars was able to name 65 people killed in what is believed to have been an Israeli airstrike on a market in Jabalia refugee camp on 9 October, the most deadly single incident covered by in the initial period, the first two and a half weeks of a war that has now lasted more than nine months.
Investigators relied on a range of reports, most notably Facebook posts from relatives and friends, to list the identities of those killed in the attack, which took place at 10.30am in a market street crowded with people.
Nineteen-year-old Imad Hamad was one of the people killed. At the time, his father, Ziyad Hamad, asked why his son deserved to be killed when he was trying to buy bread, according to a report from Amnesty International, which was collated by Airwars.
“To lose my son, to lose my house, to sleep on the floor of a classroom? My children are wetting themselves, of panic, of fear, of cold. We have nothing to do with this. What fault did we commit? I raised my child, my entire life, for what? To see him die while buying bread,” Ziyad Hamad said.
Each death recorded is linked to one of 346 specific incidents examined so far – “we know how and when each person was killed,” Tripp said – and the aim of Airwars is to produce a dossier on each episode that could serve as the basis of future efforts to achieve accountability.
“Our job is to act as a bridge between chaos and justice, to serve civilian victims of military action around the world. We see what we are doing as essential initial work before further investigations can be done,” Tripp added.
Children represented the largest single group of those recorded as killed by Airwars, at 1,129 or 37.7%, while 28.4% were men and 23.5% women. Ages of the remainder were unknown and so could not be firmly categorized.
The group was also able to further validate nearly 75% of the victims’ names it had obtained – 2,236 men, women and children – by cross-referencing them with a list of 7,000 names released by the Palestinian ministry of health in Gaza in late October.
At the time, the health ministry was seeking to rebut criticism that its casualty lists were inaccurate or too large to believe. Airwars argues its work is another demonstration that, as Tripp said, “It is possible to believe the MoH figures, and you don’t have to wait many years to be sure”.
A small number of the dead were known to be Hamas commanders but, otherwise, it is not clear how many of the group’s fighters are on the Airwars list. Israel says it does not target civilians, and accuses Hamas of using hospitals and other civilian structures for military operations.
The conflict monitor says the intensity of the Israel-Gaza war, which began after Hamas fighters unexpectedly broke out of the strip to attack Israel on 7 October, killing around 1,200, far exceeds that of any conflict it has tracked for the past decade – with thousands of deadly incidents not yet analyzed.
Airwars has so far logged more than 4,450 episodes of civilian harm since the start of the war and has analyzed 550 of them, including 346 from the first 17 days. Another 200 are under review by a team of 10 to 15 investigators who mostly work in Arabic, tracking media and social media reports.
A feature of the conflict has been the large number of casualties caused by each attack. Though outside the 17-day date range, Airwars has listed more than 100 deaths from a handful of other incidents, including three at the end of October: an airstrike at al-Taj; attacks on the Jabalia refugee camp; and the bombing of a tower east of the Nuseirat camp.
“Prior to this conflict, it was very rare to find cases where there were more than 10 civilians killed,” Tripp said. “But here, suddenly, we found that in a third of our cases, there were reports of 10 civilians killed.”
Dan Sabbagh is The Guardian’s defence and security editor
