It has been 30 days since Hamas militants carried out an unprecedented operation in Israeli territory. In a ground incursion, which met little resistance, they killed hundreds of civilians in Israel's deadliest single-day attack. Beginning in the afternoon of the same day, Israel launched an unprecedented series of attacks on the Gaza Strip and its population.
Below, we review the figures of bombings, the deaths of adults and children and buildings lost after a month of conflict that are difficult to compare with other recent clashes.
Airstrikes
In the first 30 days of the war between Israel and Hamas, Israeli forces claim to have launched 11,000 airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, a territory of just 365 square kilometers. The first 6,000 were concentrated in one week (between October 7 and 13). While Israeli forces do not make it clear whether multiple missiles, rockets and shelling are included in each attack, it is most likely.
Is 11,000 airstrikes a lot? For comparison, that's nine times more than Russia's efforts in Ukraine during the first month of the invasion. And 18 times more than the U.S. launched on average each month in Afghanistan in 2019, one of the years with the highest number of U.S. offensives.
On the other hand, Hamas said it launched 7,000 airstrikes on Israel on October 7, 3,000 according to Israeli officials. The vast majority were repelled by Israel's missile shield.
The scale of Israel's offensive in Gaza is the most intense seen in the Middle East since Syria in 2019. The Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED) has documented at least 761 bombing operations over Gaza and the West Bank since October 7. This figure, partial since it only includes bombings accredited after a long verification process, is one of the highest recorded in a single month in the area since data began. These figures only come close to those of the US bombing of Syria in 2017 (1,257 air strikes in the month of April alone) or in May 2019 (1,119 bombings).
Deceased
Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which shook Western public opinion and created a united front of countries against the Kremlin, continues to claim civilian lives more than a year and a half after it began: 9,806 people have died as of mid-October.
In Gaza, according to figures from the Ministry of Health that are also used by the United Nations, the death toll is now more than 10,000. The rapidity at which they have been accumulating is incomparable to the conflict in Eastern Europe. It is worth remembering that you can leave from Ukraine: in the first week alone, about a million people left the country. In Gaza, residents are not allowed to leave the Strip.
In Israel, 1,400 civilians have been killed so far, a record since official data on the conflict in the area began to be collected by the United Nations. They were all in the first week of the war: local authorities have not updated that figure since October 15.
Despite the fact that countries such as the United States questioned the reliability of the death toll in the Gaza Strip, all international organizations recognize and use them. "The numbers from the Ministry of Health in Gaza are generally reliable," Omar Shakir, director of Human Rights Watch (HRW) for Israel and Palestine, an organization that has worked on the ground for more than 30 years, told El País. "We have done our own verification on specific attacks and found that the number generally matches the one given by the ministry," Shakir said. In fact, these are data also used by the United Nations and the U.S. State Department in their annual report.
The children
The high number of deaths in Gaza is partly explained by the territory that is under attack: about five million people live in the Strip in an area of 365 square kilometers. This means that nine times more people live in one square kilometre of the Gaza Strip than in a territory of the same size in Spain, and eleven times more than in Ukraine.
Nor is the number of children who have been victims of Israeli bombardment unprecedented. In Gaza, almost one in two inhabitants is under the age of 18.
It is sadly logical that, in the face of an indiscriminate bombing in such a small territory, almost one out of every two deaths is a minor.
Destroyed buildings
According to United Nations data, there are more than 40,000 buildings in the Strip that have been destroyed or are uninhabitable, in addition to some 220,000 that are damaged. That's right, about 45 percent of Gaza's residential buildings are hit by bombs.
In the first four months of the invasion of Ukraine (more than 1,000 times the size of Gaza), the World Bank estimated that some 817,000 residential buildings had been damaged, about 4% of all buildings in the country. In one of the worst-hit areas, the eastern Donetsk region, nearly 30% of homes were severely damaged.
One of the symbols of war of the harshness of that conflict was the long siege of the city of Mariupol: for almost three months the Russian army encircled the city until it took over. A United Nations analysis of satellite photos estimated that 32 percent of all buildings in the city on the Sea of Azov had been damaged. For Gaza City, there are still no official estimates, but satellite imagery already shows the extent of the destruction in neighborhoods and residential areas, as well as refugee camps.
Follow all the international news on Facebook and X, or in our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Read more
I'm already a subscriber
_