More civilians were recorded as being killed or injured by airstrikes, bombs or artillery during 2023 than in any other year for more than a decade due to the high number of casualties from the three-month war in Gaza, an annual study has said.
Action on Armed Violence (AOAV), a monitoring group, said 33,846 non-combatants had been killed or wounded during 2023, an increase of 62% on last year, and the largest amount it had counted since it began its annual survey in 2010.
The total exceeds the casualty levels recorded at height of the Syrian civil war and early western campaign against Islamic State, between 2013 and 2017, when the total killed and wounded was regularly over 30,000.
AOAV’s figures are based on English-language reports of global incidents of explosive violence, although it is almost certainly an undercount of the numbers killed and wounded, partly because media accounts do not capture all the dead and wounded and partly because initial fatality and injury reports are normally underestimates.
Nonetheless, the group’s use of the same methodology since 2010 allows for a comparison of civilian casualties and the harm caused by explosives globally between each year.
“Last year proved to be the most harmful to civilians from explosive violence since our monitor began in 2010,” said Iain Overton, the group’s executive director. Wars in Ukraine and Sudan also contributed significantly to the total.
Overton said that since 7 October, when the Israel-Gaza war began with Hamas’s surprise attack on southern Israel, there had been “a massive spike” in incidents during the Israeli assault on the territory. He added: “Gaza almost overwhelmed our capacity to record each individual and injurious reported strike.”
AOAV said Israel’s Swords of Iron operation accounted for 37% of all civilian casualties in 2023. In Gaza, where western media do not have access, its data records 9,334 civilians killed and 3,616 injured.
The ministry of health in Gaza, which does not distinguish between combatants and civilians, on Monday recorded that 22,835 people had been killed in Gaza and a further 58,416 as wounded since 7 October.
The intensity of the Middle Eastern conflict, in which Israel has struck hundreds of targets a day, meant that the numbers reported as killed and wounded in the Palestinian territory exceeded a whole year’s fighting in Ukraine on 8,351 and Sudan, where civil war broke out in April, on 2,546.
The total number of casualties from explosive violence reported globally was 46,500 people, of which 73% are recorded as civilians, a proportion that rises to 90% in built-up areas. Some 15,305 were reported as killed and the rest, 18,541, were said to be wounded.
Overton said each airstrike in Gaza where civilian harm was reported saw an average of 11.1 civilians reported killed, higher than a previous estimate and more than four times more deadly than the most aggressive previous Israeli operations. Previously the highest equivalent average was 2.5 deaths.
Overall, 12,950 civilian casualties from explosive violence – death or injury from airstrikes, artillery attacks or other bombs – were recorded by the group in Gaza during 2023 plus a further 420 in Israel. Casualties from shootings, stabbings are not counted in the data.
