The monitoring group Airwars, which tracks and records casualties from airstrikes around the world, released a new report on Thursday that found that Israeli forces killed at least 5,139 civilians during the first 25 days of the bombing campaign in Gaza that began on October 7, 2023.

Airwars examined 606 incidents of civilian harm, finding that only 32-60 militants were killed in the same strikes (during the first 25 days of Israel’s war on Gaza). Using the higher estimate of 60 “militant” deaths, the ratio of civilians to combatants killed in the 606 incidents is about 1 in 85 at the higher estimate. Using the lower estimate of 32, the ratio is about 1 in 160.

The scale of civilian harm is unparalleled in any other conflict in the 21st century, and the number of civilians killed in the first 25 days was “almost four times more civilians reported killed in a single month than in any conflict Airwars has documented since its inception in 2014,” said London-based Airwars, based at the Media and Communications Centre at Goldsmiths, University of London.

The report detailed the massive number of children killed in Gaza during the first 25 days. “Airwars has recorded at least 1,900 children killed in Israeli bombardment of Gaza. This is nearly seven times higher than even the deadliest month for children recorded by Airwars previously,” the report said.

Airwars recorded a lower number of 1,213 women killed in 606 incidents it reviewed. Women and children were mainly killed in residential buildings in strikes that often slaughtered multiple members of a single family.

“Families were killed together in unprecedented numbers, and in their own homes. More than nine out of ten women and children were killed in residential buildings, and in more than 95 per cent of all cases where a woman was killed, at least one child was also killed,” the report said.

The report stated that Airwars assumes that everyone killed is a civilian unless there is evidence to the contrary. The report stated: “Using publicly available information, Airwars makes every effort to investigate links between individuals killed and armed groups. Evidence includes any suggestion in local sources that directly links individuals to participation in hostilities or membership in an armed group.”

Airwars said it does not “capture” incidents in which militants were killed and there is no evidence of civilian harm. The group asserts in the report that the 5,139 civilian deaths recorded are a minimum, based on 606 incidents. Airwars is still assessing other incidents that caused civilian harm during that 25-day period.

“This report considers the most conservative or lowest possible estimates. The highest estimates of civilian harm for each published incident are included in the full public Airwars archive,” the report states.

The Airwars report is in line with a November 2023 report from 972 Magazine, an Israeli publication, which revealed last year that the Israeli military was deliberately bombing civilian targets, including high-rise apartment buildings, public buildings and infrastructure, which it described as “hard targets.”

The 972 report said the purpose of bombing “hard targets” was primarily to “harm Palestinian civil society: to ‘create a shock’ among other things, which would resonate strongly and ‘motivate civilians to put pressure on Hamas’.” Israeli sources said the IDF was generally aware of how many civilians would be killed in a given strike and would launch an attack to kill a Hamas operative, knowing that hundreds of civilians would be killed.

“Nothing happens by chance,” a source told 972. “When a 3-year-old girl is killed in a house in Gaza, it’s because someone in the army decided that it’s not a big deal to kill this child as a price worth paying for hitting [another] target. We’re not Hamas. These are not random rockets. Everything is deliberate. We know exactly how much collateral damage there is in every house.”

Earlier this year, another 972 report revealed how the Israeli military was using AI to track Hamas fighters and create targets, making mistakes and potentially mislabeling people as fighters when they were not. One system, called “Where is My Father,” was used to track Hamas members to bomb them when they were at home with their families. In one incident, the Israeli military authorized the killing of nearly 300 civilians to kill a single Hamas commander.

The international community has raised grave concerns about Israel’s military practices and the unprecedented scale of civilian harm, with the United Nations repeatedly warning that Israel is violating international law, and even US President Joe Biden, a staunch ally of Israel, eventually describing the military response as “overblown.” In January 2024, South Africa filed a genocide lawsuit against Israel at the International Court of Justice.

Israeli officials claim the military does its utmost to avoid harming civilians, and say Hamas’s tactic of embedding itself among the civilian population makes harming civilians an inevitable consequence of the effort to destroy Hamas’s military infrastructure. Israel also claims that the level of civilian harm in Gaza is broadly consistent with, and even in favor of, other similar conflicts in recent decades, including the U.S.-led bombing campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

“Since Israeli strikes in Lebanon initially reflected the pace and intensity of the Gaza campaign, the way Israel has conducted the war in Gaza may indicate the development of a disturbing new norm: a way of conducting air campaigns with greater frequency of strikes, greater intensity of damage, and a higher threshold of acceptance for harm to civilians than was the case before,” the report notes.

The Biden administration has continued to provide arms and political support to Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza despite overwhelming evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Israeli officials have acknowledged that without American support, the IDF could not sustain operations in Gaza for more than a few months.