In a year of war in Gaza, nearly 2% of the Strip’s residents have been killed by Israeli army attacks, according to Hamas authorities. That figure does not count the many dead—it is estimated at several thousand—who remain under the rubble.
365 days after Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups stormed into Israeli territory and killed nearly 1,200 people, most of them civilians, Israel’s military operations in Gaza are causing a level of destruction for which it is difficult to find precedent in the world.
The bombs
In August 2017, the US-led coalition fighting the Islamic State carried out one of the largest bombing operations in recent history. It dropped 5,075 devices on Iraq and Syria, an average of 164 per day, seven bombs every hour. In Ukraine, during the first month of the Russian invasion, there were at least 3,007 bombings, 100 a day.
These are extraordinary numbers, but they pale in comparison to those of Israel’s aviation over Gaza, as seen in the graph above. There is no official data on how many bombs have been dropped in a year, but in November 2023, Israeli aviation reported having carried out attacks against 22,000 targets. That is, 846 attacks daily. At least two projectiles are launched in each bombardment.
As recalled in the magazine Foreign Affairs Robert Pape, an American historian who has analyzed the largest bombings since World War II, “we are in the highest quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns in history.”
This is also confirmed by the number of airstrikes with documented civilian casualties. It is something that the international organization ACLED has been dedicated to documenting and verifying since 2015: attacks of this type in Gaza in November 2023 have exceeded the highest figure until then, recorded in Syria.
The deaths
How many people have died in Gaza? Only with data from three months of war in 2023, Palestine became the conflict with the most deaths in the world that year, according to the results of the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, an academic project dedicated to counting conflict victims. Its calculations for Gaza and the West Bank are 37,000 deaths until August of this year, 22,600 of them in the first three months of the war alone.
In the following graph we compare this number of deaths (partial, because it does not measure the entire year) with the year with the most deaths in other conflicts analyzed by that research center. It includes all deaths, regardless of whether they were civilians or military, since 1989.
The Gaza Ministry of Health counts 41,788 deaths as of October. 40% of them were minors. This institution published in August, for the third time since the beginning of the war, a list with all the names of those who have lost their lives (the first 14 pages of that report in Arabic were of babies under one year old). The British organization Airwars has managed to verify the identity of almost 80% of the listed deaths using open sources on the internet.
The high number of deaths in Gaza is explained, in part, by the territory that is being attacked: 2.2 million people live in the Strip in an area of 365 square kilometers. This implies that nine times more people live in one square kilometer of the enclave than in a territory of the same size in Spain. Furthermore, in Gaza, almost one in two inhabitants is under 18 years old, a proportion that explains why it is easy for so many children to die in indiscriminate bombing.
Even so, it is not the first time that Israel attacks the Strip and figures like those of the last year have never been seen. “The main difference with previous conflicts between Israel and Gaza is one of scale,” says Jorgen Jensehaugen, a researcher at the Oslo Peace Research Center (PRIO). “In previous wars in the Strip, there was talk of at most 2,000 deaths, as in 2014. But today, in addition to the estimated 41,000 deaths, we know that there are 10,000 missing. We would be talking about Israel having killed 2% of the population,” he recalls.
More destruction than in Aleppo or Mariupol

Measuring the destruction of a city is complex. In the last decade, academics and historians have increasingly relied on the analysis of satellite images, comparing the before and after of a bombed city. Aleppo, in Syria, was one of the first places where destruction with this technique was documented, after for four years (2012-2016) the city was the center of the largest clashes between the Syrian Government and the opposition. Then, UNITAR, the UN research center, calculated that 33,251 properties in the city had been damaged, that is, between 50% and 65% of all those there were.
The same UN center now estimates that 163,778 buildings have been destroyed in the entire Gaza Strip, that is, 66% of the total. An estimate from the University of Oregon (whose data is reflected in the map at the top of this article) points to a similar figure: 58.7%. As seen in the graph above, this affects infrastructure of all types, from schools to hospitals.
In Mariupol, a Ukrainian city besieged for three months by the Russian army and a symbol of the war in that country, the same United Nations analysis estimated that 32% of all buildings had been damaged.
The destruction in Gaza is not limited to the cities. As also happened in Ukraine, crops are directly attacked: the University of Oregon estimates that between 64% and 70% of tree crop fields have been destroyed. As Jensehaugen emphasizes, this allows us to see one of the other distinctive aspects of this war: “The level of destruction and the use of hunger as a method of war.” And he adds: “There is a logic that has changed in the Israeli Government with respect to previous conflicts: the fact that destroying Hamas is a war objective.”