BRANKO MARCETIC

This article was first published by Jacobin on 5 August 2025 and is re-published in herri with kind permission of the editors.

Israel’s war in Gaza combines a staggeringly high death rate, shocking violence toward children, unparalleled physical destruction, and now a world-historical famine. The world has, by objective measure, never seen anything like this.

To try and understand how bad things are in Gaza, you have to think about all the people you grew up with and came to know: your mom and dad and siblings, but also your grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins; the friends you knew since you were kids, and the friends of friends you knew for just as long; your neighbours, the people you went to school with, the shopkeeper you shared an inside joke with, or the restaurant owner who liked you and always gave you a little something extra with your order.

Now imagine they’re all gone. Maybe they died in air strikes — that’s how all of your family died, buried under the rubble of your house with your brothers, your parents, your grandmother, your dog, leaving, miraculously, only you and your youngest sister. In an instant, the entire world you know is gone, and the same goes for your neighbours and your friends. They’re dead too, along with their families, and if any of them survived, you won’t know, because you have to get moving.

Over the next year and a half, you and your little sister have to move three more times, pitching makeshift tents then abandoning them to walk miles and miles to the next “safe zone,” although you’ve heard that they bomb those too. Death is everywhere, and you spend hours every day trying to find food or clean water to keep your little sister alive, who, in the meantime, has lost both legs in a separate bombing you somehow survived, and whose hand you gripped while she had them amputated because the hospitals had run out of anaesthesia.

You don’t know what happened to most of the people you’ve ever known in your life, or worse, sometimes you find out. But by the time a year is up, the place you grew up is gone: the familiar warmth of your home, the school you spent your childhood at, the university you got your degree from, the streets you biked on, the places you played growing up, the friends’ houses where you celebrated birthdays, the spot you went to on your first date — all of it has disappeared, replaced by an endless grey expanse of charred ruins.

Today famine has set in and you haven’t eaten for days. You’ve heard they shoot people at the aid sites, but your little sister is very sick and has become a skeleton, so in desperation, you go. While pushing through the sweaty, desperate crush of people just like you pleading for a bag of flour, you hear gunfire and fall to the ground. Your last thoughts are about your starving little sister, and who will take care of her now.

This is not a real story in the sense that it’s something that happened to a specific person. But it does describe — as you will see, in sanitized terms, if anything — the very real things that have been inflicted on people and society in Gaza over the past nearly two years.

Two months into the war, Jacobin warned that, based on the mountain of horrific facts, figures, and testimony coming out of it, what we were seeing in Gaza was “not ‘just another terrible war’ but something altogether different.” It has been another nineteen months since then, and it is now clearer than ever that what Israel has done to Gaza is — objectively, by the numbers — one of the worst things any group of human beings has done to another group of humans in modern history.

Milestone After Milestone of Cruelty

The words “unprecedented” and “worst ever” come up a lot around Gaza, usually out of the mouths of officials, doctors, aid workers, experts, and others who have spent their careers observing some of the worst war zones in human history. This is backed by the numbers.

Just three months into the war, the average death rate at the hands of the Israeli military, 250 deaths per day, was worse than every major armed conflict this century, including Ukraine, Iraq, and Yemen. The next highest, the notoriously bloody Syrian civil war, had a rate (96.5 per day) less than half this. To find a conflict whose first hundred days were as deadly as Gaza’s, you have to go all the way back to the Rwandan genocide in 1994. The runners-up are not even close.

Since then, the death rate has “slowed,” in reality, only because Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza’s hospitals has made it harder to keep track of the number of dead. Yet if we use the official death toll as of July 30 — which has passed 60,000 and is almost certainly a drastic undercount — that still leaves a death rate of ninety-one Gazans killed per day, higher than all but Syria. As Peter Beinart pointed out, this is also more Palestinians killed every day than people killed in some of history’s most famous massacres, incidents that shocked the world’s collective conscience and triggered a sea change in policy and attitudes: massacres like Sharpeville in South Africa (sixty-nine killed) or Bloody Sunday in Ireland (twenty-six killed).

But it is not even the scale of killing, so much as who is being killed. After a year, the number of family bloodlines that had been ended entirely — erased from Gaza’s civil registry, with not a single surviving relative and the family name permanently retired — was 902. This is the lower of multiple estimates. Nearly 3,500 families had only two members left, while 1,364 had only a single survivor. At times, Israel has killed three or four generations of one family in a single air strike. This has happened in other wars, but not remotely on this scale.

Israel has killed an exceptionally high proportion of civilians. By September 2024, when the death toll was far smaller than it is today, more women and children had already been killed than in the equivalent period of any other conflict in the last two decades.

Take an extremely conservative estimate, which leaves out bodies that haven’t yet been identified and accepts Israel’s absurd claim that it has killed 20,000 Hamas fighters (which, if true, would mean almost all the men it has killed were Hamas). As of July 30, that would put the number of women, children, elderly, and non-Hamas men killed at 64 percent of the total Gazan death toll. This gross underestimate would still put Gaza above most of the worst conflicts of the last seventy years in terms of the percentage of noncombatants killed — including Vietnam, the Yugoslav wars, Syria, and Yemen — and well above the 50 percent average that prevailed in wars from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.

The violence inflicted on children in particular has been extraordinary. Only four months in, Gaza had by far the worst rate of child deaths of any recent conflict — nearly ten times that of Syria, and forty-five times that of Yemen.

As of July 30, that was a rate of one child killed per hour, or as UNICEF’s executive director explained it, “a whole classroom of children killed, every day for nearly two years.”

That includes thousands of infants and toddlers under two years old. When this past June the Gaza Health Ministry published an updated, detailed list of everyone killed in the war, arranged from youngest to oldest, it took eleven pages and 486 names to find the first child over six months old.

Three months into the war, an average of more than ten children a day had lost one or both of their legs in Gaza, which is now home to more child amputees per capita than any other place in the world. Owing to Israel’s siege, many, if not most, of those amputations were performed without anesthesia. Some of these children are among the more than 17,000 orphans created by the war. A whole new term has had to be coined for the war: WCNSF, or Wounded Child, No Surviving Family, owing to how stunningly routine this phenomenon had become in this war. Visiting doctors have reported hearing these children, who have life-altering injuries and no one left to care for them, asking to die.

Evidence shows Gazan children have been deliberate targets of sadism. There have been widespread reports from health professionals for more than a year of treating children who had been deliberately shot in their heads, necks, chests, and testicles, saying that it appeared Israeli soldiers were using them as “target practice.” Israeli soldiers have used young boys as human shields, and hundreds of Gazan children have been arrested and detained in Israeli prisons. While there, many of them were tortured. This is alongside the regular, widespread torture of detained, adult Gazans, dozens of whom have died under torture that has included the use of electric shocks and attack dogs and sexual violence so extreme, it left victims hospitalized.

Now, with 100 percent of the population facing acute food insecurity, the death toll in Gaza and of children there specifically is set to further explode. One famine expert has said of the famine that’s now started in Gaza that “there is no case since World War II of starvation that has been so minutely designed and controlled,” and it has already officially claimed dozens of lives — another undercount that could be as little as 10 percent of the real total.

Thousands of children have passed the point of no return and will die or end up permanently disabled over the coming weeks and months. The UN World Food Programme’s emergency director has said it is “unlike anything we have seen in this century,” comparing it only to decades-old instances of famine from the twentieth century.

It’s yet another milestone of cruelty on top of cruelty for Israel’s war, as all the while, the Israeli military has continued massacring Palestinians by the dozens each day with bombs and bullets.

Unparalleled Physical Devastation

But it is not just the mass killing of people that makes Gaza stand out. It is the scale of its physical devastation, which amounts to a vast, systematic campaign of destruction aimed at every structure and institution that makes organized life in the enclave possible.

By February 2025, 92 percent of Gazan homes were damaged or destroyed, with two-thirds of the territory’s total housing stock annihilated. The UN has said this “unprecedented” destruction of housing hasn’t been seen since World War II and would take until 2040 to restore if the war ended right away — and they said that fourteen months ago.

Within only a month, thanks to the Israeli siege blocking electricity and fuel to Gaza, all five of its wastewater treatment plants and most of its sewage pumping stations were shut down, leading to untreated sewage contaminating coastal waters, soil, and freshwater. After a year, 70 percent of its water and sanitation plants were damaged or destroyed. As of this past June, only 49 percent of its drinking water production facilities were still functional.

Terms we have rarely or never heard before have had to be deployed to describe what has been damaged or destroyed in Gaza: “urbicide,” for the 92 percent of primary roads and the 70 percent of all structures; “scholasticide,” for the 90 percent of Gaza’s schools and universities; “domicide,” for the majority of households that have experienced the complete destruction of their homes; “ecocide” for what the UN called the “unprecedented” and possibly “irreversible” damage to its natural ecosystems.

That ecocide includes, as of April 2025, damage to 83 percent of Gaza’s cropland, and the killing of 95 percent of its cattle and roughly two-fifths of both its sheep and goats. Northern Gaza, once two-thirds agricultural land, has been turned into a wasteland. Together with the bombing of its only wheat mill, the closing of every one of its bakeries, and the destruction of 72 percent of its fishing fleet and overall closure of its fishing sector, it represents the annihilation of Gaza’s ability to feed itself, now and in the future.

It has also had the perverse effect of making Gazans almost entirely dependent on aid, which Israel has turned into what one former Green Beret who worked at them described as “death traps,” where an average of two-dozen Palestinians are dying a day as they are deliberately fired on while waiting to get food. This, too, is a spectacle that has no precedent.

More than half of Gaza’s cultural heritage sites and one-third of its mosques have been damaged or destroyed, though some estimates are much higher. That includes the two oldest buildings in the strip, respectively: the sacred, centuries-old Great Omari Mosque, almost totally destroyed in an air strike; and the Samaritan Bathhouse, built by an ancient community said to be descended from the Biblical tribes of Israel and which the modern Israelis bombed and bulldozed. The destruction of cultural artifacts by groups like the Taliban and ISIS was a key plank in arguments that they were a dangerous global menace, while the Nazis’ destruction of Jewish culture is viewed, including by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, as core to their overall effort to exterminate Europe’s Jews.

Israel’s assault on Gaza’s health sector has been particularly extreme. At least 94 percent of Gaza’s hospitals have been damaged or destroyed, with the last fully functional hospital in the territory partially destroyed this past April. Nearly half are no longer functioning. This is roughly on par with nine years of the war in Yemen (50 percent not functioning), and significantly more than Syria (37 percent), Ukraine (37.5 percent), and Iraq (7 percent partially destroyed in the 2003 invasion).

Hospitals, like cultural heritage sites and schools, are protected in war, with attacks on them considered so beyond the pale that when the Obama administration accidentally bombed an Afghan hospital in 2015, the Pentagon tried desperately to find an excuse, three investigations were launched, and the president personally apologized and sixteen people were punished. It was a major, global scandal.

Israel, by contrast, has admitted to and justified its hundreds of deliberate attacks on hospitals, just as it has for its attacks on schools and religious sites.

Health care workers are protected, too, yet within two months, Israel had killed more health care workers in Gaza than had been killed in all conflicts across the entire world in a single year since 2016.

That number has gotten even higher since then. Even at the lower end of estimates, the 557 health care workers killed in Gaza from October 7, 2023, to July 30, 2025, is a little over a third of the total number of health care workers killed globally over the whole eight years leading up to the war. This is alongside the hundreds of health care workers Israeli soldiers have abducted, some of whom they tortured to death.

On the eve of the war’s first year, Israel bombed, on average, an aid distribution point and warehouse every fifteen days, a school and hospital every four days, a tent and other temporary shelter every seventeen hours, and someone’s home every four hours. As a result, Israel has racked up record after record in terms of killing: the most health care workers killed in at least a decade, most UN personnel ever killed, the deadliest war for aid workers on record, and the deadliest one for journalists in history — more reporters killed than in the past seven major US-involved wars combined, including the two World Wars and the Civil War.

Bombing on an Incomprehensible Scale

A lot of this is thanks to what has been an uncommonly indiscriminate and intense bombing campaign.

On the lower end of estimates, Israel has dropped more than 70,000 tons of bombs on Gaza since the start of the war. That’s the equivalent of roughly six Hiroshima bombings on an area less than half the size of Hiroshima, but with six times its population. The most intense period of bombing came in the first three months, with Israel dropping 25,000 tons, or about two Hiroshimas’ worth, of explosives by February 2024.

In practice, that saw Israel destroy northern Gaza on the scale of German cities like Dresden, Hamburg, and Cologne in just six weeks. By the war’s third month, Israel had destroyed more buildings (33 percent) across Gaza than the Allies had done to Germany’s urban areas (10 percent) over three years. US military historian Robert Pape, author of a landmark book on airpower in the twentieth century, deemed Gaza just by this point “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history,” which “sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever.”

In this early period alone, researchers and experts found that Gaza’s destruction outdid every modern instance synonymous with total destruction: Aleppo in Syria, Mariupol in Ukraine, Mosul in Iraq, and Grozny in Chechnya, which was once declared by the UN “the most destroyed city on Earth.” In terms of “the sheer tempo of the bombing,” one researcher who has mapped wartime damage in various wars said in December 2023, “there’s nothing that tracks [like] this in such a short timeframe.” After eighteen months, Bradford Emeritus professor Paul Rogers, who has written numerous books on modern war, declared Israel’s flattening of Gaza “unparalleled in the post–Second World War world era,” matched only by the firebombing of Tokyo in that war.

This is not surprising when you consider the ferocity of the bombing of Gaza, particularly the war’s first three months, when the destruction was at its fastest pace.

The 25,000 tons of bombs dropped on Gaza in the first three months alone is far more than the Allies dropped in the firebombing of Hamburg (9,000 tons) and in the bombing of Dresden (3,900 tons), which the United States’s own National World War II Museum describes as having been “apocalyptic.” It was also more than the Nazis dropped on London during eight months of the Blitz (18,300 tons).

The 22,000 strikes Israel reported carrying out in less than two months was more than the 13,598 the US-led coalition carried out over more than four years against ISIS in Iraq: 60 percent more air strikes, in 4 percent of the time, on an area less than one-thousandth the size. It also outdid the more than 17,000 strikes on Syria in this same time frame, a country roughly five hundred times the size of Gaza. At the time, the destruction caused by this operation, nicknamed Inherent Resolve, was variously described as a “war of annihilation,” “difficult to comprehend,” and “Stalingrad,” referring to the famously brutal World War II battle.

In just the first five days, Israel boasted it had dropped six thousand bombs on Gaza. To put that into perspective, the most bombs the United States dropped on Afghanistan in a single year was more than seven thousand, which was also roughly the same amount NATO dropped on Libya over eight months in 2011. In fact, there was no year between 2013 and 2018 in which the United States dropped more than 4,400 bombs on Afghanistan, a country nearly 1,800 times the size of Gaza. The number of bombs dropped in Operation Inherent Resolve against ISIS in a single month only exceeded 5,000 once.

Just two months in, Israel had dropped 29,000 munitions in total, which the director of Airwars declared “significantly higher than what we’ve seen in any other conflict, at least in the last twenty years.” One exception is Iraq, which saw that many bombs dropped in the first month of “Shock and Awe” in 2003, but which is much larger. In fact, it was quite a bit more than the total number of bombs the United States dropped everywhere in the world for the entirety of 2016, and more than the “unprecedented” number Donald Trump dropped worldwide in his first six months in office.

At a rate of nearly five-hundred bombs a day, it’s an intensity of bombing that way outdoes the daily US average of forty-six bombs dropped on all war zones for the past twenty years. It also beat Russia’s massive expansion of bombing in Ukraine this year: the daily average of drones, missiles, and glide bombs launched by Russia this past July comes to 367, and the majority of those were intercepted by defensive weapons that Gazans don’t have.

This would have been lethal enough on its own. But Israel has also relied on an exceptionally large number of the most indiscriminately destructive explosives to carry out this bombing campaign. Around 40 to 45 percent of its first two months of air strikes used unguided “dumb” bombs, a rate one Pentagon weapons expert called “shocking” in the context of what is meant to be a liberal democracy in the twenty-first century.

While the United States has most often relied on 500-pound bombs since Vietnam — it was the largest bomb used against ISIS in Mosul and Raqqa, for instance — 1,000- and 2,000-pound bombs made up 90 percent of the munitions Israel used in Gaza in the first two weeks of the war. Israel has dropped the latter, which can kill or injure people within a radius of more than 1,000 feet and leave giant craters in the ground, on supposed “safe zones,” a crowded market, a refugee camp, residential towers, and within range of hospitals.

There Are No Words

On some level, it doesn’t really matter whether or not Israeli officials are doing all this intentionally (though they unambiguously are) or whether or not the war counts as a genocide (though it most certainly does). As even skimming these facts and figures makes clear, what Israel is doing to Gaza, however you want to define it, is intolerable and world-historically awful.

There are other wars that have had bigger death tolls or even larger proportions of civilians killed. There are other countries that have had more explosives dropped on them. Other governments have killed more kids and sadistically tortured them. Other countries have been similarly physically destroyed and environmentally poisoned. Other wars have seen health care and aid workers killed and hospitals destroyed. There are other conflicts that have seen deliberately created famines.

What sets Gaza apart is not just that it contains all of these features and more, but that it ranks among the worst, if not the worst, in all of them going back decades — and sometimes even for the full scope of history. There is a reason why people who have spent their careers living in, fighting, observing, doing humanitarian work in, and researching conflicts keep consistently saying that they have never in their lives seen something as bad as what is happening in Gaza: because what we are watching in Gaza is not just another sad and terrible thing happening in some far-off part of the world, but something unprecedentedly cruel and inhuman even in the scope of those terrible things.

What we have watched, what we are continuing to watch, is the obliteration of a society of two million people. Every facet of modern civilization, as well as the most elementary things needed for even a state of basic subsistence for a human community, has been deliberately and almost completely destroyed by the Israeli military in Gaza. And now we are watching the gradual but accelerating mass die-off of the people who once lived there, through a combination of starvation, disease, and murder.