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From Guernica to Gaza, Air War Is a Horror That Lets Its Perpetrators off the Hook
An idea has emerged among US leaders that it’s not really a war if Americans are above it all and aren’t dying. But what is it to the civilians below?
Aug 29, 2025
Killing from the sky has long offered the sort of detachment that warfare on the ground can’t match. Far from its victims, air power remains the height of modernity. And yet, as the monk Thomas Merton concluded in a poem, using the voice of a Nazi commandant, “Do not think yourself better because you burn up friends and enemies with long-range missiles without ever seeing what you have done.”
Nine decades have passed since aerial technology first began notably assisting warmakers. Midway through the 1930s, when Benito Mussolini sent Italy’s air force into action during the invasion of Ethiopia, hospitals were among its main targets. Soon afterward, in April 1937, the fascist militaries of Germany and Italy dropped bombs on a Spanish town with a name that quickly became a synonym for the slaughter of civilians: Guernica.
Within weeks, Pablo Picasso’s painting “Guernica” was on public display, boosting global revulsion at such barbarism. When World War II began in September 1939, the default assumption was that bombing population centers—terrorizing and killing civilians—was beyond the pale. But during the next several years, such bombing became standard operating procedure.
Dispensed from the air, systematic cruelty only escalated with time. The blitz by Germany’s Luftwaffe took more than 43,500 civilian lives in Britain. As the Allies gained the upper hand, the names of certain cities went into history for their bomb-generated firestorms and then radioactive infernos. In Germany: Hamburg, Cologne, and Dresden. In Japan: Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
“Between 300,000-600,000 German civilians and over 200,000 Japanese civilians were killed by allied bombing during the Second World War, most as a result of raids intentionally targeted against civilians themselves,” according to the documentation of scholar Alex J. Bellamy. Contrary to traditional narratives, “the British and American governments were clearly intent on targeting civilians,” but “they refused to admit that this was their purpose and devised elaborate arguments to claim that they were not targeting civilians.”
Past Atrocities Excusing New Ones
As the New York Times reported in October 2023, three weeks into the war in Gaza, “It became evident to US officials that Israeli leaders believed mass civilian casualties were an acceptable price in the military campaign. In private conversations with American counterparts, Israeli officials referred to how the United States and other allied powers resorted to devastating bombings in Germany and Japan during World War II—including the dropping of the two atomic warheads in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—to try to defeat those countries.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told then-US President Joe Biden much the same thing, while shrugging off concerns about Israel’s merciless killing of civilians in Gaza. “Well,” Biden recalled him saying, “you carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died.”
Routine reverence for America’s high-tech arsenal of air power has remained in sync with the assumption that, in the hands of Uncle Sam, the world’s greatest aerospace technologies would be used for the greatest good.
Apologists for Israel’s genocide in Gaza have continued to invoke just such a rationale. Weeks ago, for instance, Mike Huckabee, the American ambassador to Israel, responded derisively to a statement by British Prime Minister Keir Starmer that “the Israeli government’s decision to further escalate its offensive in Gaza is wrong.” Citing the US-British air onslaught on Dresden in February 1945 that set off a huge firestorm, Huckabee tweeted: “Ever heard of Dresden, PM Starmer?”
Appearing on Fox & Friends, Huckabee said: “You have got the Brits out there complaining about humanitarian aid and the fact that they don’t like the way Israel is prosecuting the war. I would remind the British to go back and look at their own history. At the end of World War II they weren’t dropping food into Germany, they were dropping massive bombs. Just remember Dresden—over 25,000 civilians were killed in that bombing alone.”
The United Nations has reported that women and children account for nearly 70% of the verified deaths of Palestinians in Gaza. The capacity to keep massacring civilians there mainly depends on the Israeli Air Force (well supplied with planes and weaponry by the United States), which proudly declares that “it is often due to the IAF’s aerial superiority and advancement that its squadrons are able to conduct a large portion” of the Israeli military’s “operational activities.”
The “Grace and Panache” of the “Indispensable Nation”
The benefactor making possible Israel’s military prowess, the US government, has compiled a gruesome record of its own in this century. An ominous undertone, foreshadowing the unchecked slaughter to come, could be heard on October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas attack on Israel resulted in close to 1,200 deaths. “This is Israel’s 9-11,” the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations said outside the chambers of the Security Council, while the country’s ambassador to the United States told PBS viewers that “this is, as someone said, our 9-11.”
Loyal to the “war on terror” brand, the American media establishment gave remarkably short shrift to concerns about civilian deaths and suffering. The official pretense was that (of course!) the very latest weaponry meshed with high moral purpose. When the US launched its “shock and awe” air assault on Baghdad to begin the Iraq War in March 2003, “it was a breathtaking display of firepower,” anchor Tom Brokaw told NBC viewers with unintended irony. Another network correspondent reported “a tremendous light show here, just a tremendous light show.”
As the US occupation of Iraq took hold later that year, New York Times correspondent Dexter Filkins (who now covers military matters for The New Yorker) was laudatory on the newspaper’s front page as he reported on the Black Hawk and Apache helicopter gunships flying over Baghdad “with such grace and panache.” Routine reverence for America’s high-tech arsenal of air power has remained in sync with the assumption that, in the hands of Uncle Sam, the world’s greatest aerospace technologies would be used for the greatest good.
In a 2014 commencement speech at West Point, then-US President Barack Obama proclaimed: “The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation. That has been true for the century passed and it will be true for the century to come.”
After launching two major invasions and occupations in this century, the United States was hardly on high moral ground when it condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and frequent bombing of that country’s major cities. Seven months after the invasion began, Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to justify his reckless nuclear threats by alarmingly insisting that the atomic bombings of Japan had established a “precedent.”
Whoever Doesn’t Count Goes Uncounted
Journalist Anand Gopal, author of the brilliant book No Good Men Among the Living, spent years in Afghanistan after the US invasion of that country, often venturing into remote rural areas unvisited by Western reporters. While US media outlets were transfixed with debating the wisdom of finally withdrawing troops from that country in August 2021 and the flaws in the execution of the departure, Gopal was rendering a verdict that few in power showed the slightest interest in hearing: The US war effort in Afghanistan had involved the large-scale killing of civilians from the air, and civilian deaths had been “grossly undercounted.”
In Helmand Province (“really the epicenter of the violence for the last two decades”), Gopal investigated what had happened to the family of a housewife named Shakira, who lived in the small village of Pan Killay. As he explained during a DemocracyNow! interview, she had lost 16 members of her family. “What was remarkable or astonishing about this was that this wasn’t in one airstrike or in one mass casualty incident,” he pointed out. “This was in 14 or 15 different incidents over 20 years.” He added:
So, people were living—reliving tragedy again and again. And it wasn’t just Shakira, because I was interested, after interviewing her, to see how representative this was. So, I managed to talk to over a dozen families. I got the names of the people who were killed. I tried to triangulate that information with death certificates and other eyewitnesses. And so, the level of human loss is really extraordinary. And most of these deaths were never recorded. It’s usually the big airstrikes that make the media, because in these areas there’s not a lot of internet penetration, there’s not—there’s no media there. And so, a lot of the smaller deaths of ones and twos don’t get recorded. And so, I think we’ve grossly undercounted the number of civilians who died in this war.
Citing a UN study of casualties during the first half of 2019, the BBC summed up the findings this way: “Some 717 civilians were killed by Afghan and US forces, compared to 531 by militants… Air strikes, mostly carried out by American warplanes, killed 363 people, including 89 children, in the first six months of the year.”
During my brief trip to Afghanistan 10 years earlier, I had visited the Helmand Refugee Camp District 5 on the outskirts of Kabul, where I met a 7-year-old girl named Guljumma. She told me about what had happened one morning the previous year when she was sleeping at her home in southern Afghanistan’s Helmand Valley. At about 5:00 am local time, the US Air Force dropped bombs. Some people in her family died. She lost an arm.
As Guljumma spoke, several hundred people were living under makeshift tents in the refugee camp. Basics like food arrived only sporadically. Her father, Wakil Tawos Khan, told me that the sparse incoming donations were from Afghan businessmen, while little help came from the government of Afghanistan. And the United States was offering no help whatsoever. The last time Guljumma and her father had meaningful contact with the US government was when its air force bombed them.
Normal and Lethal
When Shakira and Guljumma lost relatives to bombs that arrived courtesy of the US taxpayer, their loved ones were not even numbers to the Pentagon. Instead, meticulous estimates have come from the Costs of War project at Brown University, which puts “the number of people killed directly in the violence of the post-9-11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and elsewhere” at upwards of 905,000—with 45% of them civilians. “Several times as many more have been killed as a reverberating effect of the wars—because, for example, of water loss, sewage and other infrastructural issues, and war-related disease.”
The increasing American reliance on air power rather than combat troops has shifted the concept of what it means to be “at war.” After three months of leading NATO’s bombing of Libya in 2011, for instance, the US government had already spent $1 billion on the effort, with far more to come. But the Obama administration insisted that congressional approval was unnecessary since the United States wasn’t actually engaged in military “hostilities”—because no Americans were dying in the process.
The daily horrors in Gaza still echo the day when bombs fell on Guernica.
The State Department’s legal adviser, former Yale Law School dean Harold H. Koh, testified at a hearing of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the nation’s actions targeting Libya involved “no US ground presence or, to this point, US casualties.” Nor was there “a threat of significant US casualties.” The idea was that it’s not really a war if Americans are above it all and aren’t dying. In support of Koh, a former colleague at the Yale Law School, Akhil Reed Amar, claimed that the United States truly wasn’t engaged in “hostilities” in Libya because “there are no body bags” of American soldiers.
Ten years later, in a September 2021 speech at the United Nations soon after the last American troops had left Afghanistan, President Biden said: “I stand here today, for the first time in 20 years, with the United States not at war.” In other words, American troops weren’t dying in noticeable numbers. Costs of War project codirector Catherine Lutz pointed out in the same month that US engagement in military actions “continues in over 80 countries.”
Seeking to reassure Americans that the Afghanistan withdrawal was a matter of repositioning rather than a retreat from the use of military might, Biden touted an “over-the-horizon capability that will allow us to keep our eyes firmly fixed on any direct threats to the United States in the region and to act quickly and decisively if needed.” During the four years since then, the Biden and Trump administrations have directly sent bombers and missiles over quite a few horizons, including in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, and Iran.
Less directly, but with horrific ongoing consequences, stepped-up US military aid to Israel has enabled its air power to systematically kill Palestinian children, women, and men with the kind of industrial efficiency that fascist leaders of the 1930s and 1940s might have admired. The daily horrors in Gaza still echo the day when bombs fell on Guernica. But the scale of the carnage is much bigger and unrelenting in Gaza, where atrocities continue without letup, while the world looks on.
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Israeli Bombing of Gaza Ranks Among 'Most Devastating' in History
"Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history," said a U.S. military historian as Israel's use of arms including 2,000-pound "bunker-buster" bombs pushed the Palestinian death toll over 20,000.
Dec 23, 2023
As the Palestinian death toll from Israel's 10-week annihilation of the Gaza Strip passed 20,000, warfare experts said this weekend that the retaliatory campaign ranks among the deadliest and most destructive in modern history.
Gaza health officials said Friday that 390 Palestinians were killed and 734 others wounded in the besieged strip over the previous 48 hours, driving the death toll from 77 days of near-relentless Israeli attacks to 20,057, with another 53,320 people injured. More than 6,000 women and over 8,000 children have been killed—approximately 70% of all fatalities.
That's more than twice the number of civilians—and over 14 times as many children—as Russian forces have
killed in Ukraine since February 2022.
Thousands more Palestinians are missing and feared buried beneath the rubble of the hundreds of thousands of buildings destroyed or damaged by Israeli bombardment.
"The scale of Palestinian civilian deaths in such a short period of time appears to be the highest such civilian casualty rate in the 21st century," Michael Lynk, who served as the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories from 2016 to 2022, told The Washington Post on Saturday.
Robert Pape, a U.S. military historian and University of Chicago professor, told The Associated Press that "Gaza is one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history."
"It now sits comfortably in the top quartile of the most devastating bombing campaigns ever," he added.
By comparison, the 2017 U.S.-led coalition battle for Mosul, Iraq during the war against the so-called Islamic State—widely viewed as among the most intense urban assaults in recent decades—killed approximately 10,000 civilians, around a third of them from aerial bombardment.
Pape said that by some measures, Israel's bombing of Gaza is surpassing the Allied "terror bombing" of German cities during World War II.
He noted that U.S. and U.K. airstrikes obliterated about 40-50% of the urban areas of the 51 German cities bombed between 1942-45, and that around 10% of all buildings in Germany were destroyed. In Gaza, approximately 1 in 3 buildings have been destroyed. In northern Gaza, over two-thirds of all buildings have been leveled.
"Gaza is now a different color from space. It's a different texture," Corey Scher, who studies natural disasters and wars using satellite remote sensing at the City University of New York's Graduate Center, told the AP.
Experts point to the types of munitions being used by Israeli forces as a major reason why so many Gazans are being killed and injured. These include U.S.-supplied 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound guided "bunker-buster" bombs, which Israel says are necessary to target Hamas' underground tunnels.
These massive bombs turn "earth to liquid," Marc Garlasco, a former Pentagon defense official and war crimes investigator for the United Nations, told the AP. "It pancakes entire buildings."
Garlasco said that 2,000-pound bombs mean "instant death" for anyone within about 100 feet of the blast, with shrapnel posing a deadly danger for people up to 1,200 feet away.
In a separate interview with CNN, Gerlasco said that the intensity of Israel's bombardment of Gaza has "not been seen since Vietnam," when U.S. airstrikes killed up to hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians. The U.S. dropped more bombs on tiny, non-belligerent Laos than all sides combined unleashed during World War II.
"You'd have to go back to the Vietnam War to make a comparison," Garlasco added. "Even in both Iraq wars, it was never that dense."
The use of such heavy ordnance in close proximity to critical civilian infrastructure like hospitals has alarmed observers.
"What we have been witnessing is a campaign that was planned, it was a plan, definitely, to close down all the hospitals in the north," Léo Cans, head of mission for Palestine with Doctors Without Borders, told the Post.
Aided by AI-based target selection systems, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) commanders are approving bombings they know will cause large numbers of civilian casualties. In a bid to assassinate a single Hamas commander, the IDF dropped at least two 2,000-pound bombs on the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp on October 31, killing more than 120 civilians.
Although the United States—which has killed more foreign civilians this century than any other armed force in the world—provides Israel with thousands of 1,000 and 2,000-pound bombs, its own military avoids using such massive ordnance in civilian areas due to the devastation they cause.
"It certainly appears that [Israel's] tolerance for civilian harm compared to expected operational benefits is significantly different than what we would accept as the U.S.," Larry Lewis, research director at the Center for Naval Analyses and a former U.S. State Department senior adviser on civilian harm, told CNN.
That includes the risk of killing Israel's own citizens and others held hostage by Hamas in Gaza.
Lewis added that the Jabalia strike was "something we would never see the U.S. doing."
That isn't entirely true; during the 1991 Gulf War the U.S.
dropped a pair of 2,000-pound Raytheon GBU-27 Paveway III laser-guided bombs on the Amiriyah air raid shelter in Baghdad, killing at least 408 Iraqi civilians in one of the deadliest single airstrikes in modern history. U.S. officials claimed they thought the shelter, which was used during the Iraq-Iran war, was no longer a civilian facility.
"The use of 2,000-pound bombs in an area as densely populated as Gaza means it will take decades for communities to recover," John Chappell, advocacy and legal fellow at the Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group Center for Civilians in Conflict, told CNN.
Even more concerning for some experts is Israel's use of unguided, or "dumb" bombs, against civilian targets in Gaza.
While IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said that "we choose the right munition for each target so it doesn't cause unnecessary damage," the death and destruction in Gaza—and Israeli officials' own words—tell an entirely different story.
Early in the war, Hagari declared that "Gaza will never return to what it was," clarifying that "the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy."
Meanwhile, numerous Israeli officials advocated the complete destruction of Gaza, with more than a few government figures—including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Cabinet members—making statements supporting genocide against the Palestinian people.
U.S. President Joe Biden—who has affirmed his "unwavering" support for Israel and is seeking $14.3 billion in additional military aid for the country, which already gets almost $4 billion annually from Washington—has implored Israeli leaders to stop the "indiscriminate" bombing of Gaza, even as his administration thwarts international cease-fire efforts and restocks the IDF's arsenal.
Chappell stressed that "the devastation that we've seen for communities in Gaza is, unfortunately, co-signed by the United States."
"Too much of it is carried out by bombs that were made in the United States," he added.
Ahmed Abofoul—a Gaza-born, Netherlands-based attorney with the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq who has lost 60 of his relatives to Israeli bombing— said in Friday interview with Democracy Now! that "the American government is complicit in this genocide."
"There is blood of Palestinian children on their hands," he added. [Biden] said Israel is engaged in indiscriminate bombing. This is a war crime. So, the question is: Why do you then send weapons to Israel? The position of the U.S. is quite hypocritical."
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In Yemen, a Humanitarian Pause is Urgently Needed
Mar 01, 2016
As war continues to rage uninterrupted in Yemen, a humanitarian pause is badly needed as the country spirals down to chaos, leaving the majority of the population in urgent need of medical care. Restrictions on access to medical supplies and care are key impediments to improving the situation of people in need. A five-day humanitarian pause would allow supplies and care to reach those people and relieve their dire health situation.
At the same time, attacks on health facilities continue. Last October, the World Health Organization (WHO) condemned the bombing of a Medecins Sans Frontieres' (MSF) supported hospital in Saada province in northern Yemen. MSF believes that, as a consequence, 200,000 people were left without medical care. That attack, which violated International Humanitarian Law, was the second one on an MSF-run facility in a month.
Since the beginning of Saudi Arabia's attacks on Yemen, conducted with U.S. support, more than 5,700 have died (almost half of them civilians) -including hundreds of women and children- and 28,753 injuries have been reported. Several health workers have also been killed, and 47 health facilities in 11 governorates have been damaged or closed as a result of the continuous violence.
Healthcare services in all public hospitals have been reduced, especially operating theaters and intensive care units. At the same time, disrupted immunization activities have increased the risks for measles and poliomyelitis, even though Yemen is presently free of polio. The breakdown of the water supply and sanitation systems has facilitated the spread of diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, as well as acute diarrheal diseases, particularly affecting children. Also, the early warning alert system for diseases has been seriously affected because of limited communication possibilities.
The country has one of the highest rates of chronic malnutrition in the world. According to UNICEF, 1.3 million Yemeni children younger than five years now suffer from acute malnutrition, compared to 850.000 before the war started. 320.000 are severely malnourished, twice the amount before the crisis. The little cash people have is to pay for food and gas -at greatly increased prices- leaving no money to afford health care.
The Lancet reports that approximately a quarter of the country's healthcare facilities are no longer functional. To make matters worse, Ronald Kremer from MSF says, "People do not dare to go to hospitals because they are afraid that they are targeted, and even if they want to go,, they may not have the means—even where public transport does exist, it is very expensive because of the fuel problems."
Fuel problems have increased the difficulty of obtaining clean water. The lack of a proper water supply and dire sanitation and hygiene have led to outbreaks of dengue and malaria. Many Yemenis store water in open containers, which becomes an ideal breeding ground for disease-transmitting mosquitoes.
So far, there are more than 2.5 million people who have become internally displaced persons (IDPs). To compound an already difficult situation, disrupted immunization campaigns have led to an increasing number of children affected with measles and rubella, particularly among IDPs living in overcrowded conditions. As a result of the conflict, many hospitals, laboratories, health warehouses, and administrative offices have closed. Primary care facilities have minimum access to medicines, supplies, and equipment. The fuel shortage has affected the proper operations of ambulances.
In this situation, a humanitarian pause is urgently needed. As proposed by the World Health Organization, a five-day pause would allow humanitarian organizations to respond to some of the most life-threatening needs of the people, particularly women and children caught in the middle of the conflict. An MSF doctor taking care of a badly hurt child in Syria realized that the child was desperately trying to tell him something. When he asked his translator what the child was saying, the translator responded, "Don't they realize that we are children?" A similar question could be asked in Yemen today.
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