LONDON: Nearly 3,000 Palestinians killed in Israel's war on Gaza have been identified by an independent monitor.
The British organization Airwars, which assesses the impact on civilians in conflicts worldwide, analyzed nearly 346 incidents in the first 17 days of the war and named 2,993 victims of Israeli attacks.
That included 65 people killed in an airstrike on the Jabalia refugee camp on October 9, the deadliest incident in the early days of the campaign.
Investigators used evidence including social media posts to identify the dead, including 19-year-old Imad Hamad after his father Ziyad posted on Facebook that his son had died while out buying bread.
“To lose my son, to lose my house, to sleep on the floor of a classroom? My children wet themselves, from panic, from fear, from cold. We have nothing to do with this. What mistake have we made? I raised my child, my whole life, for what? Seeing him die while buying bread,” wrote Ziyad.
Emily Tripp, director of Airwars, said: “Militaries often tell us that it's impossible to know who has been killed and how – but one of our key messages is to show that it is possible. The only thing holding us back is the size of our teams.”
She added: “Our job is to act as a bridge between chaos and justice, to serve civilian victims of military actions around the world. We see what we are doing as important preliminary work before further investigations can be done.”
In addition to the attack on Jabalia, Airwars identified several other high-casualty attacks, including Al-Taj and the Nuseirat refugee camp.
“Prior to this conflict, it was very rare to find cases where there were more than 10 civilians killed,” Tripp said.
“But here we suddenly found that in a third of our cases there were reports of ten civilians killed.” She added: “We know how and when each person was killed.”
In total, 37.7 percent of the registered victims were children and 23.5 percent were women.
In the early days of the war, Gaza health officials said as many as 7,000 people were killed by Israeli strikes, which Airwars said it believed to have been reasonably accurate.
Tripp said: “It is possible to believe the (Ministry of Health) numbers, and you don't have to wait many years to be sure.”
But as the war has dragged on, the authorities' ability to count casualties has broken down as the infrastructure comes under ever-increasing strain, with hospitals and morgues overwhelmed.
Airwars says it has recorded over 4,450 incidents since the start of the war, but has only been able to assess 550 so far, with its team of investigators numbering just 10-15.
