More than two months into the war in Gaza, security experts believe that it has become one of the deadliest and most destructive wars in history.
According to an investigation by the British Independent, the IDF has caused greater destruction in Gaza than the destruction caused to Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, the city of Mariupol in Ukraine, and even greater destruction than the Allies caused to Nazi Germany. The investigation included an analysis by military and defense experts of images of the IDF's airstrikes and the pits, craters, and blast sites they caused.
"The decisive majority of the bombs used were made in the USA, including 900-kilogram 'bunker-buster' bombs. The bombs killed hundreds of people in densely populated areas," the investigation claims.
An analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University, experts in mapping damage during wartime, claims that Israeli attacks have destroyed more than two-thirds of all the buildings in the north of the Gaza Strip and a quarter of the buildings in the Khan Younis region. The percentage of buildings in Khan Younis that have been damaged doubled in just the first two weeks of the Israeli attacks on southern Gaza. This amounts to tens of thousands of houses. "Gaza is now a different color from space. It’s a different texture," Scher adds.
Robert Pape, a U.S. military historian, says that the destruction outpaces that of Nazi Germany during Allied bombings in World War Two: "Between 1942 and 1945, the allies attacked 51 major German cities and towns, destroying about 40-50% of their urban areas. This amounted to 10% of buildings across Germany, compared to over 33% across Gaza, a densely populated territory of just 140 square miles (360 square kilometers)."
Airwars, a London-based independent group that tracks recent conflicts, says that the attacks in Gaza also rival the damage caused by the US-led coalition to expel ISIS from Mosul. From 2014-2017, the US coalition carried out nearly 15,000 strikes across the country. By comparison, the Israeli army said last week it had conducted 22,000 strikes in Gaza.