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civilian casualties
As in Gaza, Israel's 'Deliberate' Bombing of Lebanese Civilians Takes Heavy Toll
"When the international community didn't stop Israel as it deliberately killed nearly 75,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including 20,000 children, Israel knew they could kill civilians with impunity," said one critic.
Mar 20, 2026
Eighty percent of Lebanese people killed in Israel's renewed airstrikes on its northern neighbor were slain in attacks targeting only or mainly civilians, a leading international conflict monitor said Friday.
Reuters, using data provided by the Madison, Wisconsin-based Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), reported that 666 people were killed by Israeli strikes on Lebanon between March 1-16. As of Thursday, Lebanese officials said the death toll from Israeli attacks had topped 1,000.
While Lebanese authorities do not break down the combatant status of those killed and wounded during the war, Israel's targeting of civilian infrastructure, including entire apartment buildings, and reports of whole families being wiped out, have belied Israeli officials' claims that they do everything possible to avoid harming civilians.
Classified Israel Defense Forces (IDF) data leaked last year revealed that—despite Israeli government claims of a historically low civilian-to-combatant kill ratio—83% of Palestinians killed during the first 19 weeks of the genocidal war on Gaza were civilians.
According to Gaza officials, 2,700 families were erased from the civil registry in the Palestinian exclave during Israel's genocidal assault.
"When the international community didn't stop Israel as it deliberately killed nearly 75,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including 20,000 children, Israel knew they could kill civilians with impunity," Lebanese diplomat Mohamad Safa said on social media earlier this week. "The result is exactly what we're seeing in Lebanon and Iran right now."
US-Israeli bombing of Iran has killed at least 1,444 people, according to officials in Tehran. The independent, Washington, DC-based monitor Human Rights Activists in Iran (HRAI) says the death toll is over twice as high as the official count and includes nearly 1,400 civilians.
The February 28 US massacre of around 175 children and staff at an elementary school for girls in the southern city of Minab—which US President Donald Trump initially tried to blame on Iran—remains the deadliest known incident of the three-week war.
As Israeli airstrikes intensify and the IDF prepares for a possible ground invasion of southern Lebanon—which Israel occupied from 1982-2000—experts are warning that noncombatants will once again pay the heaviest price.
United Nations officials and others assert that Israel's intentional attacks on civilians are war crimes. Israel is the subject of an ongoing genocide case filed by South Africa at the International Court of Justice, and the International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, who are accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza.
"Deliberately attacking civilians or civilian objects amounts to a war crime," UN High Commissioner for Human Rights spokesperson Thameen al-Kheetan said earlier this week. "In addition, international law provides for specific protections for healthcare workers, as well as people at heightened risk, such as the elderly, women, and displaced people."
As was the case during Israel's bombing of Gaza and Lebanon following the October 7, 2023 attack, journalists are apparently being deliberately targeted again. Reporters Without Borders said in December that, for the third straight year, Israel was the world's leading killer of journalists in 2025.
"This was a deliberate, targeted attack on journalists," said RT correspondent Steve Sweeney after narrowly surviving an IDF airstrike on Thursday. "There's no mistake about it. This was an Israeli precision strike from a fighter jet."
"But if they think they’re going to silence us, if they think we're going to stay out of the field, they’re very, very much mistaken," he added.
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'They Were All I Had': Lebanese Father Buries Parents, 4 Daughters Killed by Israeli Bombing
One journalist said that "the massacres are multiplying" as IDF bombing kills hundreds of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, and US-Israeli strikes kill and wound thousands of Iranians.
Mar 13, 2026
A grieving Lebanese father said he buried his parents, four young daughters, and other relatives on Friday after they were killed by an Israeli airstrike—one of many that have wiped out families in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran.
"I lost four of my children, four daughters, they were all I had," the unidentified man—whose face and head were visibly injured from what he said was the same Israeli strike—told Al Jadeed TV, an independent Lebanese outlet. "Four daughters: Zainab, Zahraa, Maleeka, and Yasmine."
"And my mother and father," he added. "Praise be to God. God's greatness is abundant."
According to Al Jazeera, the man's brother-in-law and nephew were also killed in the strike.
"The Israeli enemy says every day that it is targeting infrastructure," he told the Qatar-based news network. "Is this the infrastructure?"
It was a devastating scene repeated in other parts of Lebanon, including the south, were a distraught mother on Friday reportedly buried five sons killed by Israeli bombing, and in the Ghobeiry neighborhood of central Beirut earlier this week, when an Israeli airstrike destroyed the home of the Hamdan family, reportedly killing father Ahmad Hamdan, his three daughters, and two grandchildren. As of Tuesday, Hamdan's wife was missing beneath the rubble of their bombed-out home.
As in Gaza—where officials say that more than 2,700 families have been erased from the civil registry during Israel's ongoing genocide and around 6,000 other families have only a single surviving member—entire Lebanese families have been wiped out by Israeli strikes since October 2023.
In one such strike on the Maronite Christian village of Aitou in October 2024, members of four generations of one family were killed, with 22 victims ranging in age from a 4-month-old infant to a 95-year-old great-grandmother.
More than 800,000 Lebanese have also been forcibly displaced by Israel's assault and attendant evacuation orders. On Friday, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders in English, issued a statement highlighting the war's impact on families.
“We are seeing a similarity to what we saw in the past two and a half years in Gaza: broad evacuation orders, constant displacement of thousands of families, and systematic bombing on densely populated areas,” said MSF Lebanon coordinator Lou Cormack. “After 15 months of a fragile ceasefire that failed to stop the violence in Lebanon, families are once again trapped between fleeing or facing bombs.”
Israel says it is attacking Lebanon to stop Hezbollah rocket and other attacks, which have killed dozens of Israeli civilians and wounded even more.
Journalist Lylla Younes told Democracy Now! on Friday that "the massacres are multiplying" in Lebanon, pointing to an Israeli airstrike on a Sidon home that reportedly killed at least 8 people and wounded at least 9 others.
"We saw Syrian refugees, displaced, already killed; 7 killed in a massacre in Tamnin in the Beqaa Valley; a massive massacre in Nabi Chit, also in the Beqaa Valley, when the Israelis tried to do a nighttime incursion by helicopter," Younes said.
Lebanon's Health Ministry said Friday that an Israeli strike on a health center in Bourj Qalawayh, southern Lebanon killed 12 medics.
Lebanese officials said Friday that 773 people—including 103 children—have been killed by Israeli forces since March 2. This, in addition to Israel’s 2023-25 attacks on Lebanon that killed more than 4,000 people, including nearly 800 women and over 300 children.
In Iran, authorities said more than 1,300 civilians have been killed and over 10,000 others injured by US and Israeli bombing since February 28. More than 200 women and over 200 children have reportedly been killed.
Most of the 175 or more Iranians killed in a February 28 cruise missile strike on a girls' school in Minab—an attack that was almost certainly carried out by the United States—were children, according to Iranian government and medical officials and international investigations.
Israeli attacks on Iran during last year’s 12-Day War also killed more than 1,000 Iranians, including 436 civilians, while Iranian counterstrikes killed 28 people in Israel.
In Gaza, 28 months of Israel's assault—for which the country is facing a genocide case at the International Court of Justice and its prime minister is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity—have left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing and around 2 million others forcibly displaced, starved, or sickened.
US-led wars in the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa have resulted in the deaths of more than 900,000 people—including over 400,000 civilians—since 2001, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
Stories from families devastated by Israel's war on Lebanon are as common as they are heartbreaking.
"I was sleeping when the Israeli jet bombed the area," one Lebanese teenager told the independent outlet [comra]. "My father, my mother, my sister-in-law, and her children were killed."
"I saw my father torn to pieces," he added. "I wish I had died instead of seeing my father like that."
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Pro-War Republican Senator Apologizes for Iran Girls' School Massacre After Trump Blames Tehran
An ongoing US military probe has determined that the United States launched the Tomahawk missile attack that killed around 175 people—mostly children—in Minab on the first day of the war on Iran.
Mar 11, 2026
A Republican senator apologized this week for what US military investigators have reportedly determined was an American missile strike on a girls' school in southern Iran that killed around 175 people—mostly children—amid continued sidestepping by President Donald Trump, who has blamed Tehran for the massacre.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.)—who supports the US-Israeli war on Iran—first apologized for the attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab during a Monday interview with NBC News senior national political reporter Sahil Kapur.
"It was terrible," Kennedy said. "We made a mistake... I'm just so sorry it happened."
Kennedy repeated his apology Tuesday on CNN, telling political correspondent Kasie Hunt: "The investigation may prove me wrong. I hope so. The kids are still dead, but I think it was a horrible, horrible mistake. I wish it hadn't happened. I'm sorry it happened."
1. GOP Senator John Kennedy on why he felt it was important to apologize and acknowledge the truth about the bombing of a school in Minab, Iran, which multiple reports indicate was caused by a U.S. military targeting error.
[image or embed]
— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yasharali.bsky.social) March 10, 2026 at 4:51 PM
Reuters first reported last week that US military investigators believe American forces carried out the school strike, a preliminary conclusion that came on the heels of a New York Times analysis that found the US was “most likely to have carried out the strike" due to its near-simultaneous bombing of a nearby Iranian naval base.
This week, Iranian officials displayed fragments from what is believed to be the Tomahawk missile used in the school bombing. The remnants were marked with the names of two US arms companies, a Pentagon contract number, and the words "Made in USA."
On Wednesday, Tfhe New York Times reported that the ongoing military probe has determined that the US launched the Tomahawk strike, which paramedics and victims' relatives said was a so-called "double-tap," in which the attacker bombs a target and then follows up with a second strike meant to kill survivors and first responders. Investigators attribute the strike to a "targeting error," according to the Times.
This, as Trump—who warned as his illegal war started that "bombs will be dropping everywhere"—continued sidestepping blame for the attack.
On Saturday, Trump said aboard Air Force One that "based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.”
Two days later, the president falsely claimed that Iran has "some" Tomahawk missiles and may have used one of them to bomb the school. Iran has no Tomahawks—which are highly restricted and sold only to a handful of close allies—and the US does not sell weapons to the Iranian government, with the notable exception of the Iran-Contra Affair, when the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Tehran in order to fund anti-communist Contra terrorists in Nicaragua.
Other senior Trump administration officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and US Ambassador to the United Nations Michael Waltz have declined to back the president's claims and have instead deferred to the ongoing military investigation.
Kennedy told NBC News and CNN that the school bombing was unintentional.
"Other countries do that sort of thing intentionally, like Russia," he told Kapur. "We would never do that intentionally."
Since then-President George W. Bush launched the so-called Global War on Terror following the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, more than 430,000 civilians have been killed in over half a dozen countries, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University's Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
In 2020, the Costs of War Project reported a 330% rise in civilian casualties in Afghanistan following the first Trump administration's move to loosen military rules of engagement meant to protect noncombatants. While campaigning for president in 2016, Trump infamously vowed to "bomb the shit" out of Islamic State militants and "take out their families"—a war crime—and after his election he ramped up bombing of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other countries, killing thousands of civilians.
The Biden administration subsequently attempted to tackle the issue, publishing the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response Action Plan (CHMR-AP), which laid out a series of policy steps aimed at preventing and responding to the death and injury of civilians.
However, since returning to office, Trump has effectively sidelined the plan. Prioritizing "lethality," Hegseth said at the outset of the current war that US forces won't be bound by "stupid rules of engagement."
Israel, which is bombing Iran along with US forces while simultaneously striking Lebanon and Gaza—where more than 250,000 Palestinians have been killed or wounded during 29 months of genocidal war—dramatically loosened its rules of engagement following the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack, effectively allowing for an unlimited number of civilian deaths in any strike targeting any member of the militant resistance group, no matter how low-ranking.
According to leaked Israel Defense Forces data, 5 in 6 Palestinians killed by the IDF through the first 19 months of the US-backed war were civilians.
Hundreds of Iranian and Lebanese civilians have been killed by US and Israeli attacks since February 28. US and Israeli use of artificial intelligence systems to select bombing targets exponentially faster than any person has also raised concerns regarding a lack of meaningful human oversight. One former IDF officer said AI enabled a "mass assassination factory" in Gaza.
Last year's US and Israeli attacks on Iran also killed hundreds of civilians, according to the group Human Rights Activists in Iran.
Kennedy's apology—which some observers dismissed due to the senator's support for the war and rejection of a war powers resolution meant to limit Trump's ability to attack Iran without the legally required congressional approval—is still notable, as US leaders, and especially Republicans, are usually highly reluctant to say they're sorry for civilian deaths.
For example, after the USS Vincennes accidentally shot down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988, killing all 290 civilians aboard, then-Vice President George H.W. Bush—who was running for president—infamously declared, "I'll never apologize for the United States of America, ever; I don't care what the facts are."
The history of US-Iran relations they don’t teach you:
A month after the US shot down Iran Air Flight 665, killing 290 passengers, George H.W. Bush proudly declared:
“I’ll never apologize for the United States, I don’t care what the facts are.” https://t.co/1nNvIYR9MX pic.twitter.com/iFa3Ydh4Fo
— Afshin Rattansi (@afshinrattansi) February 25, 2026
Two years later, Bush, then president, awarded the Vincennes officer in charge of air warfare a commendation medal for the “heroic achievement” of "quickly and precisely" downing the civilian airliner. The ship's captain was also honored with the Legion of Merit for his “outstanding service.”
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