Du kan läsa mer om projektet ”Minskat lidande för civilbefolkningen i Gazakonflikten” här.
Vi har pratat med Joe Dyke, Director of Progammes, på Airwars International, som berättade om arbetet med Airwars pågående projekt. Läs intervjun här.
When war in Gaza broke out after the horrific Hamas attack in October 2023, it immediately became clear that harm to civilians was extensive and likely to continue to escalate. While detailed work was being carried out for victims killed inside Israel, including on October 7th, there was no comprehensive documentation of civilian harm in Gaza, particularly as the Israeli government prevented international journalists entering the strip and Palestinian organisations were unable to conduct field research due to the intensity of bombing.
As an organisation, we have been using open-source techniques to document civilian harm in conflicts across the globe since 2014, including Iraq, Syria, Somalia and Ukraine. We document harm, and refer those cases to responsible parties, justice mechanisms and media. We documented all public reports of civilians killed on both sides of the 2021 Israel-Gaza war. In Gaza in this war, our emergency response focused on the casualty recording gap, with a view to building an archive for acknowledgement, justice and accountability.
To date, Airwars has gathered, verified and published more than 1,000 incidents of civilians killed in Gaza. These range from small incidents with one or two civilians harmed, to mass casualties in which more than 100 civilians were reportedly killed.
Each incident report goes through a multi-stage review process before being published, including geolocation – to verify the exact location – and in-depth contextual research in both Arabic and English.
This is by far the largest project we have undertaken as an organisation as the scale of civilian harm has been vast. Our trusted research has provided the basis for important interventions to counter mis- and disinformation about the scale of harm in the war. Our major report of our findings produced in December last year was ultimately cited in the U.S. Congress.
We have shared our work with US officials and others investigating Israel’s compliance with the laws of war, including sharing details on the use of US-made munitions in particular civilian harm events. We have also shared our public reporting with Israel’s allies in Europe, and always ensure that we disseminate our findings to those able to influence the highest levels of government.
A major report from the Independent Task Force on the Application of National Security Memorandum-20 (a US policy governing arms transfers) cited 15 Airwars allegations of civilian harm, and heavily drew on our analysis..
Another key part of this work has been our investigations digging deeper into these findings and raising awareness of the scale of loss. This includes our analysis article proving that the figures put out by the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza are broadly reliable, and an investigation linking evidence of civilian harm to strike footage released on social media by the Israeli military (more detail below).
Despite decades of work to protect civilians dating back as far as the 1949 Geneva Conventions, harm to civilians caught up in war remains one of the tragedies of modern conflict. When it does happen, it’s essential that it is documented for a number of reasons.
A transparent and comprehensive evidence base of harm is needed to assess competing claims about civilians being killed in war. For example, there has been intense dispute about the scale of the loss in Gaza – with Israel and its allies downplaying the damage or claiming that most of those killed are militants, while Palestinians and others have labelled the war as a genocide.
By independently and methodically verifying accounts across a complex information environment, we are able to provide this reliable evidence base for this conflict and in comparison to other wars. Our report late last year showed that the scale of harm recorded in Gaza is beyond that of all other 21st century conflicts Airwars has documented.
This trusted documentation is also crucial for accountability. We know from historic examples that accountability in conflicts – whether an apology, compensation or legal proceedings – rarely occurs on a macro level but can be achieved for specific incidents of harm. So our documentation lays the ground for immediate and future accountability.
This work often takes years. For example the Dutch government recently announced an inquiry into a civilian harm incident Airwars documented in Iraq in 2016 in which a university professor’s wife, daughter and three other family members were killed. The inquiry was sparked after courageous journalists were finally able to prove it was a Dutch strike – something the Dutch Ministry of Defence had withheld for nearly a decade. Without our documentation in 2016, this pursuit of accountability would have been impossible.
And at the heart of all our work is acknowledging those men, women and children that are killed and the families and communities affected. Knowing and recording the details of this loss does not bring their loved ones back, but family members often report finding this recognition to be important – that these deaths are not merely forgotten.
This prize is recognition that our efforts to continuously innovate our practices and determination to uncover the stories of civilians in war is working. We have made significant efforts over the last couple of years to try and find new ways to cut through an increasingly crowded and complicated media landscape, and awards like this show that work is paying off.
This story was also a really important one for us. It brought together our in-depth casualty recording work, where our wider research team have been documenting and locating incidents of civilian harm throughout the war, with our investigative journalism, where our team linked these cases to grainy strike footage published by the Israeli military. Since this war began, the Israeli military has published an unprecedented amount of footage of airstrikes in Gaza on social media – often blurry, black and white clips with no context or detail of where they took place. They are released to suggest that the Israeli military is conducting a precise and accurate campaign.
The final investigation identified more than 400 civilians killed in incidents in these social media posts that the Israeli military itself had published.
This prize is very significant to us and to our supporters, partly as all the other winners are major international media organisations, including The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. For our work to be recognised on this international stage is high praise and was only possible with the support of The Swedish Postcode Lottery Foundation.
Airwars exists to ensure that children, women and men caught up in war do not disappear behind numbers and disputed narratives. This project has enabled a major step forward in laying the groundwork for accountability – on a range of levels – in a war that has resulted in the extraordinarily high levels of civilian harm. Even under the most challenging circumstances, routes to recognition and access to justice are being pursued with our findings used as evidence, including through legal cases and research by Human Rights Watch and others. Recently our documentation was cited more than a dozen times in South Africa’s official submission to the United Nations Security Council – the public access part of the country’s evidence to the International Court of Justice.
More widely, findings from this project have been cited more than 100 times in international media, including in almost every major international newspaper, providing accurate information about the speed and scale of harm to families and communities in Gaza. Our support has been requested by some of the world’s largest organisations to help them investigate civilian harm from this powerful NPR investigation into a single incident in Gaza to specialist reporting by leading medical journal The Lancet.
The evidence uncovered through this project and our wider work will continue to be used from local to international levels to strengthen calls for action on accountability, human rights protections and access to justice.
Under 2024 fördelade Postkodlotteriets Stiftelse 213 miljoner kronor till 241 nya projekt!
I mars vann organisationen Airwars, det prestigefyllda Kim Wall-priset för
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