2024-01-09T13:09:07+00:00
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/ An annual study, published by an unofficial institution, revealed that a greater number of civilians were killed or injured due to air strikes, bombs, or artillery during the year 2023 “compared to any other year in more than a decade,” due to the large number of casualties resulting from the war. This has been ongoing for 3 months in Gaza, while it showed that Israel killed 37% of civilians last year.
The Action Against Armed Violence (AOAV) group reported that 33,846 non-combatants were killed or injured during 2023, “an increase of 62 percent over last year,” the largest number counted since the group began its annual survey in 2010.
The total number exceeds the casualty levels recorded at the height of the war in Syria and the international campaign against ISIS between 2013 and 2017, when the total number of dead and wounded exceeded 30,000.
The Armed Violence Action Group’s figures are based on English-language reports of global explosive incidents of violence, although this number is almost certainly an undercount of the dead and wounded, partly because media statistics “do not capture all the dead and wounded.” According to the British newspaper The Guardian.
However, the group’s use of the same methodology since 2010 allows for a comparison of civilian casualties and damage caused by explosives globally by year.
The group’s executive director, Ian Overton, said: “The past year proved to be the most damaging to civilians due to explosive violence since we began our monitoring in 2010,” noting that battles and clashes in Ukraine and Sudan have contributed to raising the number of casualties.
Overton said that since October 7, when the war between Hamas and Israel began, there has been a “huge rise” in civilian deaths.
The organization said that the “Iron Swords” operation launched by Israel, in response to the attack, caused “37 percent of the total civilian casualties in 2023.”
The Gaza Ministry of Health reported on Monday that 22,835 people were killed in the Strip, the majority of them women and children, while 58,416 were injured since October 7.
According to the study, the intensity of the conflict in the Middle East, where Israel bombs hundreds of targets daily, has led to a rise in the number of deaths and injuries reported in the Palestinian territories, exceeding the number of civilian deaths during a year of war on Ukraine, which numbered 8,351 people.
As for Sudan, where clashes broke out in mid-April of the year 2020, the number of victims last year reached 2,546 people.
The total number of casualties resulting from explosive violence reported globally reached 46,500 people, 73 percent of whom were registered as civilians.
“Every airstrike in Gaza in which civilian damage was reported saw an average of 11.1 civilian deaths, which is higher than the previous estimate and four times more lethal than previous Israeli operations, where the highest equivalent average was 2.5 deaths,” Overton explained.
Overall, the group recorded 12,950 civilian casualties due to explosive violence – death or injury due to airstrikes, artillery attacks or other bombs – in Gaza during 2023, in addition to another 420 in Israel. These numbers do not include casualties resulting from shooting attacks. He was run over and stabbed.