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Israel Has Demolished Majority of Villages in Southern Lebanon—Mostly After the Ceasefire
Defense Minister Israel Katz has bragged that Israel was destroying "not one house at a time," but "the entirety of those villages."
Oct 12, 2026
When Israel and Lebanon reached a ceasefire in April, the Israel Defense Forces' systematic destruction of villages in southern Lebanon was supposed to halt. Instead, it was just getting started.
Israeli forces have largely leveled 48 of the roughly 60 villages and towns in occupied southern Lebanon, a New York Times investigation published Monday revealed, fueling fears that Israel intends to permanently prevent displaced residents from returning.
Rather than collateral damage from military attacks, the razing of Lebanese villages since April has largely been carried out through controlled demolitions by Israeli forces.
Nearly all the villages destroyed have been majority Shia—the sect from which Hezbollah draws much of its support—while those containing Christian, Druze, and Sunni Muslims have largely been spared.
In July, Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz acknowledged that Israel had destroyed at least 24 historic Lebanese villages, describing it as punishment for their residents.
“Twenty-four Lebanese villages that were hundreds of years old—with Shiite residents who acted as enemies [of Israel] on behalf of Hezbollah and threatened our borders and our residents—we destroyed all of the buildings.”
“Not one house at a time," he emphasized. "The entirety of those villages—their demolition has been completed.”
Since March, Israel's military campaign has displaced at least 1.1 million Lebanese civilians, while its forces have entrenched themselves in an occupied swath of southern Lebanon extending as far as eight miles from the border.
Roughly 270,000 people remain barred from returning home. Many have no homes to return to. In many villages, homes, roads, utilities, and public facilities no longer function.
The Times found that Israeli forces have also burned about 16,500 acres of land—roughly 11% of the total occupied area—since the April ceasefire, including farmland and olive groves. Meanwhile, thousands of trees have been bulldozed.
As this life-sustaining infrastructure has come down, Israel has erected what appear to be the fixtures of a long-term military occupation: satellite imagery shows at least three new Israeli military outposts have been at least partially built since the ceasefire began, alongside new roads connecting them to Israeli territory.
The US-brokered ceasefire expressly prohibited "offensive military operations against Lebanese targets, including civilian, military, and other state targets, in the territory of Lebanon" except in cases where it was necessary to take defensive measures against planned, imminent, or ongoing attacks.
Israel's military told the Times it received no directive “to carry out widespread damage to structures or to demolish villages" in southern Lebanon. “The IDF operates in the security zone in southern Lebanon with the aim of removing threats posed by the Hezbollah terrorist organization to the residents of Israel and to IDF troops," it added.
Israeli officials have suggested that the occupation of southern Lebanon will continue indefinitely. Katz said last month that Israel "will not withdraw from the security zone" until Hezbollah disarms.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has suggested that some of the Christian villages would like to be annexed into Israeli territory. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, meanwhile, renewed his call last month for Israel to extend its borders north to the Litani River, which encompasses most of the Lebanese territory it currently occupies.
Israel has said it has razed entire villages to destroy Hezbollah military infrastructure and prevent fighters from returning to the area near the Israeli border.
Janina Dill, a professor of global security at the University of Oxford, has said using mass destruction to carry out this objective was "manifestly illegal" under international law, which says that destroying civilian property without an imperative military necessity can constitute a war crime.
"It’s deeply implausible that imperative military necessity applies to every house in a particular village," she told the Financial Times in August.
Volker Türk, the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, said in July that Israel was engaging in the "wholesale destruction" of civilian homes, adding that "demolition of this type raises huge flags about compliance with international humanitarian law.”
"In large parts of southern Lebanon, Israel’s ‘everybody-leave’ orders were followed by ‘don’t-come-back’ orders," said Kristine Beckerle, Amnesty International's deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa in June. "Israel’s forced displacement and prevention of return of tens of thousands of civilians from southern Lebanon amounts to unlawful transfer, which is a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention and thus a war crime."
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Deep-Dive Investigation Examines Minab School Bombing: ‘One of the Worst US War Crimes Since Vietnam’
“There was no school left,” said the father of a 6-year-old girl killed in the attack. “I thought I was asleep and having a nightmare.”
Sep 30, 2026
Survivors, parents, and first responders provided harrowing firsthand accounts of the US bombing of an elementary school on the first day of the US-Israeli war with Iran as part of a new Drop Site News investigation demonstrating that the school had publicly operated as a civilian institution for more than a decade.
The report, published Wednesday, provides new eyewitness accounts from those who lost loved ones when US Tomahawk missiles hit the Shajareh Tayyebeh School in Minab, which killed 120 children and dozens of others, and has been described as “one of the worst US war crimes since Vietnam.”
“The children were five years old and all they did was yell, ‘Miss! Miss!’ and were crying. I ran to the children. I just said, ‘Get under the table!” recalled preschool teacher Hossniyeh Salem. “I didn’t think they were going to strike the school. I just thought that some place had been hit. I said, ‘Don’t be afraid, sit down.’”
“Two simultaneous sounds. They’re still in my ear. My son even describes them—‘Wooosh, boom! Woosh, boom!’—and then the explosion very close by,” Salem said. “Plaster was falling, the ground was shaking, and at that moment I just looked at my preschool girls and my son, and I said to myself, ‘It’s over. Now is the time when we go under the rubble, it’s going to fall now,’” she continued. “Then there were no more sounds. The class was full of smoke and dust."
Yaghoub Yazdanpanah, a literature teacher at another school about eight miles from Minab, described the moment he learned that the school his 6-year-old daughter, Fatemeh, attended had been bombed.
“I left my classroom, ran home, took my car, and sped to Minab. When I arrived, I said, ‘Oh no!’ The unimaginable had happened," he said. “There was no school left. Two-thirds of the school, maybe more, had been destroyed. Smoke was rising from all over the school. It had turned into rubble. For a moment, I thought I was asleep and having a nightmare."
Yazdanpanah said he already knew the worst had happened well before he received his daughter’s body at an overwhelmed hospital that night.
“We knew our children had been martyred; we knew our children were no longer with us," he said. “When they brought Fatemeh, she was in one piece because she had been in her teacher’s arms [when she died].”
“There was no school left."
The US has still not accepted responsibility for the Minab attack, even though an internal Pentagon investigation has concluded that US forces struck the school using two Tomahawk missiles. In the initial days after the attack, President Donald Trump claimed that Iran had been responsible before backing off the claim, stating, “I just don’t know enough about it.”
Drop Site obtained images of the missile fragments from the site, which an independent weapons inspector said “all appear to be remnants of Tomahawk missiles." Iran is not known to possess Tomahawks. A UN fact-finding mission report released earlier this month determined that the school had been “the intended point of impact" rather than collateral damage.
People are seen scouring the wreckage at the site of the February 28, 2026 bombing of the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab, Iran. (Photo by Mehr News Agency/Wikimedia Commons)
Adm. Brad Cooper, the commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM) told Congress in May that the school was "located on an active [Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps] cruise missile base."
Wes Bryant, a former senior targeting adviser at the Pentagon, told Drop Site he'd never seen any indication that the school was on an active missile site and explained that even if it was, "it doesn’t matter."
“Those children, all those civilians, are still non-combatants and protected, so it’s really disgusting to hear that," he said. "This wasn’t even fragmentation that hit a school next to another target. This was deliberately targeted very, very clearly and obviously. So at the very least, [it was a] complete mischaracterization of the target.”
There was abundant evidence of the school's civilian use that would have been available to those who conducted the strike. The school was part of a compound that included barracks for the elite IRGC but was redeveloped for civilian use beginning in 2014. It had publicly and officially operated as a school since 2015.
The school had a very active online presence with a website that prominently displayed classroom activities and school events. Meanwhile, satellite imagery captured just two months before the attack showed children standing in the schoolyard outside the building.
An investigation from Bloomberg found that the school had been placed on a list of targets for the war's opening salvo that was assembled in part using the Maven artificial intelligence system developed by Palantir, which reportedly did not classify it as a school.
The UN report emphasized that even if the attack can be boiled down to an intelligence failure, it still likely amounted to a war crime because the US attacked despite readily available evidence that the building was a school, a failure investigators said went “beyond mere negligence” and amounted to recklessness toward the risk of striking civilians.
US President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth attend a dignified transfer event for US service members killed during operations in the Middle East, at Dover Air Force Base in Dover, Delaware, on July 22, 2026. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)
Hala Rharrit, a career former US Foreign Service officer who spent 17 years at the State Department before resigning in 2024, remains unsatisfied by the government's efforts to downplay the attack as a "mistake."
“There’s no way to say that this was some type of error,” Rharrit told Drop Site. “You’re either saying that our US Military is completely incompetent, that despite the multiple layers of review, everybody messed up—or there was something very, very sinister about this strike.”
According to data from the Human Rights Activists News Agency, the vast majority of US-Israeli strikes during the first 40 days of the war did harm to civilians or civilian infrastructure, contradicting repeated claims that the US “never targets civilians.” At minimum, the data shows at least 1,701 civilians have been killed, but HRANA has stressed that the true death toll is likely substantially higher.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has spent his tenure dissolving guardrails meant to prevent civilian casualties, denouncing "stupid rules of engagement," and saying the military should pursue “lethality” over “legality.” Trump, meanwhile, has repeatedly threatened mass destruction upon Iran, including that the "entire civilization" would "die."
“The administration and Hegseth have made it quite clear that they don’t really care about civilian casualties. That may also have been true of previous bombing campaigns that predate the Trump administration, but it is even more the case than in the past, and they have made it clear that troops do not need to be concerned about consequences,” said Harrison Mann, a former US Army major and intelligence analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA).
“There is no mystery about what coordinates those missiles hit, and that question would have been answerable on the day of the strikes," he told Drop Site. "The only way that CENTCOM would not know is that they are choosing to be willfully ignorant.”
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NAZA Filmmakers to Make Film Available for Free Online Amid Israel's Smear Campaign
"It is the duty of every citizen whose government commits crimes to know, and of every soldier who witnessed them to tell."
Sep 24, 2026
Israeli journalists and filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor are determined to ensure that their documentary, NAZA, has the farthest reach possible even as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government accuses them of "blood libel" for interviewing soldiers who described the Israeli military's mass killing of civilians, and threatens to revoke their citizenship for making the film.
Abraham said Thursday morning on social media that he, Szor, and The Guardian, which produced the film, had decided to make NAZA accessible "online for free, without any time limit, so that every person can watch it and the soldiers' testimonies," starting in November.
Until then, the filmmakers are approaching movie theaters in Israel and offering the film "at no cost, in the hope that it will be screened in the country" as it is distributed worldwide.
Commentators in Israel have criticized Abraham and Szor for not making the film free, said journalist Ryan Grim, and theaters are now "being dared to follow through on their bluff and screen it."
The film builds on reporting Abraham has done since the beginning of Israel's current assault on Gaza, which started in 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas-led attack. In NAZA, as well as in investigative reports for the Israeli news outlets +972 Magazine and Local Call, Abraham has extensively covered the Israel Defense Forces' rules of engagement in Gaza, including its use of artificial intelligence for targeting and the IDF policy of allowing the killing of more than 100 Palestinian civilians for every Hamas commander killed.
The film's title refers to the IDF's term for the number of civilians commanders expected to be killed in a particular strike.
" Journalism is not betrayal. Criticism is not betrayal."
NAZA received a record-breaking standing ovation and the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival this month, and the film will premiere in North America at the New York Film Festival this Saturday, with a theatrical release beginning four days later. A wider release in the US is scheduled for October 9, and 50 other countries and territories are also expected to release the film.
While the film has been widely acclaimed, Abraham noted that at home in Israel, "many incorrect things were said about us and about the film in the past week."
Officials have accused the filmmakers, who interviewed 24 military and intelligence officers for the film, of lying about the IDF's practices in Gaza.
Netanyahu, who is facing legislative elections next month, said after the film's release at the Venice Film Festival that he would introduce a bill to revoke the citizenship of Israelis who defame the IDF. Eyal Zamir, chief of staff at the IDF, said military lawyers were considering legal action against Abraham and Szor.
Protesters outside Szor's family home could be heard chanting, "Death sentence for traitors" one evening, and the Committee to Protect Journalists noted that the call for violence "followed days of increasingly hostile public rhetoric targeting the filmmakers, which underscores the risks created when government officials publicly target journalists."
The offices of +972 Magazine and Local Call were also reportedly broken into.
"We made the film to spark a public discussion about the government's actions in Gaza, the killing of more than 73,000 people, most of them civilians, the normalization of a war of extermination, of the notion that 'there are no uninvolved,'" said Abraham.
"Journalism is not betrayal. Criticism is not betrayal," he continued. "It is the duty of every citizen whose government commits crimes to know, and of every soldier who witnessed them to tell. There are thousands of such soldiers walking around here, who will watch the film and recognize what is described in it personally: the killing of unarmed people crossing an imaginary line, the [NAZA] approvals in the hundreds, the systematic attacks on family homes, the burning and physical destruction of Gaza, murder and shooting at hungry people in food distribution centers, and other crimes that have no justification."
Ali Abunimah, director of Electronic Intifada, said the filmmakers should have made the film free for viewers "from the start."
He also called for Abraham and Szor to "turn over any and all evidence they have that could lead to the arrest and punishment of perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide to the International Criminal Court," which has a warrant out for the arrest of Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant.
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85,000+ Yemeni Civilians Displaced by Renewed Fighting Kicked Off by Trump's Iran War
"Behind every number is a family who's lost everything," said a top UN official. "Many have been displaced multiple times."
Sep 13, 2026
The United Nations agency for migration issues said Sunday that 85,818 Yemeni people have been forcibly displaced in recent days by renewed fighting between Houthi forces and the Saudi-backed government as the Houthis seized control of the Bab al-Mandeb Strait, a key waterway for global oil shipping.
More than 2,000 people fled to Djibouti in recent days, and more are expected to arrive as fighting continues to escalate along the western coast of Yemen and Taiz province, near the port city of Mocha, which the Iran-allied Houthis seized from government forces on Thursday.
Nearly 56,000 people have been forced to leave their homes in Taiz, where heavy ground fighting and counterattacks have been taking place.
Abdusattor Esoev, chief of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in Yemen, told Al Jazeera that the capture of Mocha, where the UN has maintained a strong infrastructure in recent years, has caused difficulty for aid agencies trying to reach people in need of food, water, medicines, and other humanitarian aid.
"Behind every number is a family who's lost everything," saidd Amy Pope, director general of IOM. "Many have been displaced multiple times. People are crossing the sea with nothing because they have no other choice left. Yemen is a country torn by poverty and conflict, and it cannot carry this crisis alone."
Pope called on donor countries to rapidly scale up support for Yemenis arriving in Djibouti and for 5.2 million people who have been internally displaced in Yemen over 12 years of conflict since the Houthis seized the country's capital, Sanaa, in 2014.
More than 900 people have been killed in this month's escalation, Al Jazeera reported.
A UN-brokered truce in 2022 temporarily halted major battles.
In July, the Houthis declared a blockade on Saudi ships in the Red Sea, which Saudi Arabia had been using to ship oil due to Iran's effective blockade in the Strait of Hormuz—a retaliatory measure Iran took in response to the war that the Trump administration and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu began in February.
As Common Dreams reported last week, the Houthis see the war being perpetrated by President Donald Trump as a "golden opportunity" to advance against the Saudi-backed Yemeni government.
The Houthis also launched missile and drone strikes on southern Saudi Arabia in recent days.
Mohammed al-Basha, founder and lead analyst of the Basha Report Risk Advisory, told Al Jazeera that Saudi Arabia is likely providing air support to the Yemeni government forces and is under pressure to launch a wider military campaign.
Trump reportedly refused a request from Saudi Arabia to launch airstrikes against the Houthis last week, and said Saturday that the Houthis had reached out to Washington, asking the Trump administration not to intervene in the conflict.
The renewed conflict in Yemen has sparked intensified calls for the White House to end its war on Iran, which has also led to casualties across the Middle East, including in Lebanon.
A woman named Aman Murshed told Al Jazeera on Saturday that her family, including five children, has been displaced in a refugee camp for five years in Taiz, and they were forced to flee again this past week.
“The last four years were calm, and our hopes of returning home grew stronger," she said at the al-Malika camp in al-Maafer district in Taiz. "But suddenly, fighting erupted near our camp three days ago, and we found ourselves fleeing again toward an unknown destination. The only priority was to carry the children and flee as quickly as possible, because any delay could mean death. It was around 5:00 am, and there were no cars in the camp or the surrounding area since it is on the front line. So, we walked for more than two kilometers until we found a pick-up truck that brought us to this camp for free.”
Mohammed Ali, a journalist in Taiz, told Al Jazeera that "the broader US-Iran conflict effectively brought an end to the 2022 truce, as the Houthis have been attempting to advance to take control of the Bab al-Mandeb strait to serve Iran’s agenda."
“The warring sides are escalating, but it is civilians who pay the price," he said. "A single visit to one of the camps for displaced families is enough to see the severe toll this escalation has taken on the Yemeni people.”
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'Burning Entire Families to Death as They Slept' in Gaza, Israel Kill Count Nears 1,000 Since Ceasefire
As Israel ratchets up its attacks and conquers more territory in Gaza despite a ceasefire, May was the deadliest month for Palestinians there in 2026.
Jun 04, 2026
Five members of the same Palestinian family were killed in a burning building after Israel bombed four residential apartment buildings in Gaza City on Thursday morning. Eight months after the October “ceasefire” began, the death toll from continued Israeli attacks is rapidly approaching 1,000.
A single nine-year-old girl, identified as Hala Hassan Rabah Labad by local reports, survived the strike on an apartment on Intelligence Street in northwestern Gaza and was taken to the hospital. Five members of her family—her father, mother, and three siblings—were all killed.
Nine people were killed in total and dozens more wounded in other strikes on residential buildings throughout the night, according to medical sources who told the Anadolu Agency that bodies arrived at Al-Shifa Hospital—some dismembered and others severely burned.
Other attacks were reported on Al-Salam Tower in Tel al-Hawa, the Mahna family home near Al-Qouqa Roundabout in Al-Shati refugee camp, and a residential apartment in the Abu al-Amin and Abu Iskandar area of Sheikh Radwan.
Local journalists reported that many of the targeted buildings were sheltering displaced families.
One resident recorded video of a burning building near her home and posted it to social media.
"Israel bombed the house next to me at 2 am," she said. "People are burning alive and screaming."
Rescue workers are still reportedly picking through the rubble and have been deployed across multiple locations, according to journalists on the ground, who described the series of attacks as a “major massacre.”
"We were woken up by the strike at 2:30 am. We found pieces of flesh, and people were sleeping. They say the war is over, but the war is not over," Khalil Batran, a neighbor of the deceased family, told Reuters. "There is no safety in Gaza... Every day, they fire at us from there and strike us with missiles. It's futile."
The Israeli military has not commented on the strikes as of Thursday morning.
According to the Gaza Health Ministry, Thursday’s strikes bring the number of Palestinians killed in Israeli attacks up to 947 since a so-called ceasefire between Israel and Hamas was reached in October. Nearly 3,000 other Palestinians have been wounded.
The Gaza Government Media Office has accused Israel of violating the ceasefire more than 3,000 times through the targeting of civilians, the destruction of entire residential blocks, repeated gunfire, and incursions into residential areas, as well as restrictions on humanitarian aid entering the strip.
Since Israel’s genocidal military campaign in Gaza began in October 2023, nearly 73,000 people have been killed, according to official figures from the Gaza Health Ministry, though independent analyses suggest the true death toll could be much higher.
As Israel fortifies and expands its military control of the strip, with leaders including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledging to push forward and conquer more territory, May was the deadliest month for Gaza thus far in 2026, with 119 Palestinians killed.
In recent weeks, Israeli strikes on tent encampments have killed multiple other children, including a 6-year-old girl and an 8-year-old boy.
Thursday’s attacks come a day after Israel continued to bomb several sites in Lebanon despite the announcement of a US-brokered ceasefire, which has not yet gone into effect. During a previous truce, Israel launched numerous attacks, demolished villages, and ordered the forced evacuation of civilians in Lebanon, in clear violation of the agreement. Israeli attacks during that ceasefire period killed more than 600 people, according to the World Health Organization.
In Gaza, Israel has justified continued attacks and deeper encroachment into Gaza by saying that Hamas has failed to "fully disarm." But while that is part of a framework laid out by US President Donald Trump's Board of Peace, Drop Site News journalist Jeremy Scahill points out that it was not part of the deal agreed to in October.
“Netanyahu has a PhD in violating ceasefires,” said Scahill on SkyNews Wednesday. “The term ‘ceasefire’ has been used as a surrender cudgel against the Palestinians in Gaza.”
“The Palestinians signed a deal with Israel. Israel has violated it every day, killed 1,000 Palestinians, has moved deeper into Gaza. They say, ‘Hamas agreed to disarm.’ Hamas never signed a disarmament agreement,” he continued. “Now the so-called 'Board of Peace' is demanding that the Palestinians surrender their liberation cause as a condition for Netanyahu to abide by the terms that he signed.”
"They signed a ceasefire with Hamas," he said. "Not with the children in tents that they continue to burn alive."
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How Many People Have the US and Israel Killed in Iran?
The massacre at a school in the city of Minab is not an isolated case, but rather an example of broader brutality and also a window into how the US systematically downplays civilian death and suffering.
Apr 13, 2026
After the breakdown of talks in Pakistan, the ceasefire between the US and Iran is more fragile than ever, and now seems likely to give way to a new phase of the war. The ceasefire and talks have failed to end Israel’s devastating attacks on Lebanon or to negotiate international access to the Strait of Hormuz, now under Iran’s control.
The world must use this pause in the war to push for a permanent ceasefire and peace agreement, but we must also start to assess the true human cost of the war–something the US is always reluctant to do in its wars, from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan. While we always know the exact number of Americans killed in these wars, we never have an accurate tally of how many people we have killed–not only because it is often hard to get the data, but also because the US systematically downplays civilian casualties and treats their lives as less valuable.
We saw this from the very first day of this war. The US carried out a double-tap strike on a girls’ elementary school in Minab, killing 175, mostly young girls. Trump’s response was to blame Iran: “In my opinion, based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran,” he said, and later suggested that Iran might have gotten hold of a Tomahawk missile and used it to kill its own people.
Minab is not an isolated case—it is a window into a much broader failure by the US government and media, as well as the Iranian government and international media, to honestly reveal the human toll of this 40-day war.
The Iran Health Ministry’s casualty figures have not been updated in any detail since March 29, when it put Iranian casualties at 2,076 killed and 26,500 wounded, and there is an obvious mismatch between these two numbers. The ratio between them is much higher than in other wars, or even when compared with the Israeli assault on Lebanon in this war, where Lebanon’s Health Ministry reported 1,830 people killed and 4.927 wounded by April 10, a ratio of 2.7 to 1 between the wounded and the dead.
For further comparison, UN figures for civilian casualties in the war in Ukraine are 15,172 and 41,378 wounded, which is also a ratio of 2.7 to 1. These are certainly under-estimates, like civilian casualty counts in every war, but the ratio between deaths and injuries is realistic, unlike that in Tehran’s casualty figures.
If the Iran Health Ministry’s casualty figures were accurate, it would mean that only one person is being killed for every 13 people wounded. But if the figure of 26,500 people wounded was accurate, and the ratio between dead and wounded was similar to what is found in other wars, we would expect that around 10,000 people have probably been killed.
Looking at other sources, the UK-based Iran International website, on March 31, reported Iranian military, militia and police casualties of 4,770 killed and 20,880 wounded, but did not divulge its sources.
Two human rights groups, HRANA and Hengaw, have also published mortality estimates. HRANA, based in Fairfax, Virginia, in the US, is partly funded by the US government, the aggressor in this war. So its data on war casualties are as suspect as its data for casualties during protests in Iran in December and January that the US used as a pretext for the war.
The other human rights group, Hengaw, is based in Norway and Iranian Kurdistan. It reports a total of at least 7,650 people killed by the time of the ceasefire on April 8, of whom 6,620 were military personnel and 1,030 were civilians.
If the Iranian government’s figure of 26,500 people wounded is correct, Hengaw’s count of 7,650 war deaths would amount to a ratio of 3.5 people wounded for each person killed, which would be closer to what one would expect by comparison with other wars.
But the Health Ministry’s figure of 26,500 wounded is also suspect. The Pentagon claims that US and Israeli airstrikes have hit more than 13,000 “targets,” so 26,500 injuries would amount to only two people wounded for each target attacked. This suggests that the count of 26,500 people wounded is itself an undercount, and that the true numbers of casualties in Iran, killed and wounded, military and civilian, are therefore likely to be much higher than any of the numbers reported so far.
While it is easy to understand why the US government doesn’t want to talk about casualties, it seems that the Iranian government doesn’t want to either. If, as we suspect, the true casualty figures are much higher than the health ministry has reported, it may be hiding and downplaying them to prevent panic among the population and keep up the country’s morale, especially in light of the recent large protests in the country. That could also explain why it has not updated its casualty report since March 29.
The fact that our government and institutional media downplay the importance of accurate casualty figures and make no effort to discover them only makes it more urgent to find them, as we and others have tried to do during previous US wars.
We would encourage all sides, and independent groups, to cooperate in efforts to accurately count the dead and wounded. Why does this matter? In an illegal war, every death is a crime, while every person killed or maimed is somebody’s husband, wife, father, mother, son or daughter. They should all still be alive and whole. The US armed forces should not be killing or wounding any of them. So some might ask what difference it makes whether they’ve killed 2,000 people, 7,000 or even 70,000.
We would say that it is precisely because each life is precious, and because the pain and horror each person suffers in these violent deaths and injuries is so unacceptable, that each one deserves to be counted and considered. Americans, and our neighbors around the world, need to fully grasp the scale of the mass murder that the US government is committing, so that we can all respond appropriately.
The fact that our government and institutional media downplay the importance of accurate casualty figures and make no effort to discover them only makes it more urgent to find them, as we and others have tried to do during previous US wars.
In 2006, three years into the extraordinarily violent US military occupation of Iraq, public health experts from Johns Hopkins University in the US and Mustansiriya University in Baghdad conducted the second of two epidemiological studies of mortality in Iraq since the US invasion.
The study was published in the Lancet medical journal, and it estimated that, during just the first three years of war and occupation in Iraq, they had caused about 650,000 deaths, including 600,000 violent killings. That was more than ten times higher than previously published figures, which were based on compilations of western news reports and reports from the occupation government’s health ministry.
The study’s results were disputed by those responsible for the war and the mass casualties it caused, including US President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
But leaked emails revealed that the British government’s chief scientific adviser described the study’s methodology as “close to best practice,” and its design as “robust.” Emails from panicking British officials asked, “Are we really sure the report is likely to be right? That is certainly what the brief implies,” and “…the survey methodology used here cannot be rubbished. It is a tried and tested way of measuring mortality in conflict zones.”
In 2015, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning groups Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) and International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) published a report titled Body Count: Casualty Figures After 10 Years of the War on Terror. In discussing the widely varying mortality estimates for the war in Iraq, the report noted, “Despite the furious criticism it attracted, most experts see the second Lancet study of October 2006 as the most solid estimate of the number of casualties, up to the period of its publication.”
No such comprehensive studies were ever conducted in Afghanistan. The UN published annual civilian casualty figures, but these were only compilations of civilian casualties confirmed by the UN Human Rights Office as it followed up on reports of war crimes and human rights violations reported to its office in Kabul, which excluded any deaths not reported to its office, or that it did not have time to fully investigate.
As is happening with the Iran Health Ministry reports today, the UN’s fragmentary reports were uncritically repeated by the world’s media as if they were realistic estimates of total war deaths in Afghanistan.
Finally, in 2019, after 18 years of war and military occupation, Fiona Frazer, the head of the UN Human Rights office in Kabul, admitted to the BBC that the UN’s reports were not providing a full picture of civilian casualties in Afghanistan.
“United Nations data strongly indicates that more civilians are killed or injured in Afghanistan due to armed conflict than anywhere else on Earth,” Frazer said, but then added, “Although the number of recorded civilian casualties are disturbingly high, due to rigorous methods of verification, the published figures almost certainly do not reflect the true scale of harm."
Hundreds of thousands of Afghans were also killed fighting as combatants on both sides in that war. The world’s media were surprised when President Ghani revealed in January 2019 that 45,000 Afghan government troops had been killed since he took office in September 2014. But the US relied on Afghans to fight other Afghans throughout its failed 20-year war in their country.
Whatever the result of the current ceasefire and negotiations, and for however long the US and Israel keep waging war on Iran, the people of the United States and the world must demand a complete and truthful accounting for the human costs of this war, for which Americans and their government bear the prime moral and legal responsibility. At best, that should include the same kind of independent, scientifically-based epidemiological study conducted in Iraq in 2006.
But the demand for accountability starts with a skeptical public and media who can tell the difference between partial, fragmentary casualty reports and serious estimates of total deaths in a violent war zone, and who care enough to want to know how many people their armed forces are really killing and maiming in this illegal war.
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'Nightmare for Civilians': Israel Inflicts 1,400+ Casualties on Lebanon War's Deadliest Day
"Civilians in Lebanon are already paying an unbearable price with children, health workers, and journalists amongst those killed—the latest attacks will only escalate this devastating human toll," said one campaigner.
Apr 09, 2026
Humanitarian campaigners, civil rights defenders, and progressive members of Congress were among those calling on the Trump administration to pressure Israel to stop bombing Lebanon after Israeli airstrikes killed or wounded more than 1,400 people—many of them civilians—on Wednesday.
In what Amnesty International called an "unprecedented escalation," the Israel Defense Forces said it carried out the “largest coordinated wave of strikes” of its renewed war on Hezbollah in Lebanon. Around 100 sites in the country were bombed in one 10-minute period alone in what the IDF dubbedr "Operation Eternal Darkness."
Lebanese officials said that at least 303 people were killed and 1,165 others wounded by Israeli strikes on Wednesday, the deadliest day of attacks since Israel resumed bombardment of Lebanon and likely since it started bombing its northern neighbor after the Hamas-led Palestinian attack of October 7, 2023.
While Lebanese authorities do not break down casualties according to combatant status, officials and residents of the capital city of Beirut said that civilians were the main victims of Wednesday's bombings, which targeted apartment towers and other civilian structures in numerous densely populated urban areas.
One witness, a woman named Fatima, told Amnesty International what she saw in the immediate aftermath of an IDF strike on a building across the street from her home in Beirut's Salim Salam neighborhood.
“It was apocalyptic," she said. "Bodies on the ground. Blood everywhere. I saw countless wounded adults and children. I walked further but it was the same scene in the other neighborhoods too. I did not know where to go. I just walked aimlessly trying to get as far as possible. It was a nightmare.”
Dr. Firass Abiad, a surgeon and wformer Lebanese health minister, told The Guardian that American University of Beirut Medical College, where he works, received about 70 patients at the same time, a situation he said was intentionally caused by Israel "to flood the health system."
“There was a 90-year-old who I just left a bit ago. He passed away from his wounds," he said. "There was nothing we could do. These are civilians who, without any warning, their whole apartment building was flattened. So you can imagine the severity of injuries that we’re getting.”
Shaden Fakih, a 24-year-old calisthenics trainer, described trying to find his friend who was inside a building when it was bombed. He couldn't locate his friend, but he was seen carrying an elderly woman from the rubble.
"There’s no Hezbollah here, the Israelis are just getting happy when they bomb people, it’s not about Hezbollah," Fakih said in an interview with The Guardian. “Just stop bombing us. If you want to kill Hezbollah, go for it, but don’t kill civilians, because you’re creating anger in us against Israel and we will have to act like Hezbollah just to defend our country. But I don’t want to do that, I just want to live in peace."
“It’s been the worst day since the war started," he added. "And what I’m most sad about is that my pretty Lebanon, our beautiful Lebanon, soon it will all be brought down to the ground.”
As Common Dreams reported, Israeli strikes have wiped out entire families in Lebanon and Iran. In Gaza, more than 2,700 families have been erased from the civil registry.
Responding to Wednesday's attacks, Amnesty International Middle East and North Africa regional director Heba Morayef said that “just hours after the world cautiously welcomed news of a US-Israeli ceasefire with Iran, in Lebanon the nightmare for civilians has become more terrifying."
“Even before today’s attack... more than 1,500 people had been killed and over a million people displaced from their homes across the country," Morayef continued, referring to Israel's bombardment of Lebanon after Hezbollah began launching rockets and drones southward in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. Israel's genocidal assault on Gaza has left more than 250,000 Palestinians dead, injured, or missing.
"Civilians in Lebanon are already paying an unbearable price with children, health workers, and journalists amongst those killed—the latest attacks will only escalate this devastating human toll," Morayef added. "These attacks are a reminder that states must immediately halt the transfer of arms and weapons to Israel given the overriding risk that they will be used to commit serious violations of international humanitarian law."
The Washington, DC-based Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said in a statement late Wednesday, “Once again, Israel’s genocidal government is trying to derail a ceasefire and ensure peace does not succeed by slaughtering innocent civilians."
"The Trump administration must stop them from carrying out this brutal plan," the group added. "Israel has demonstrated time and again that it cannot be trusted to abide by peace agreements. It is time for our government to cut all support for Israel’s atrocities.“
These and other groups, as well as governments in the Mideast and beyond, and US progressives, are demanding that Lebanon be included in the ceasefire. Although Israel agreed to the truce, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza—asserts that the deal does not include Lebanon.
Iran categorically rejects Israel's claim and is using its leverage over the Strait of Hormuz to pressure Israel to reconsider its stance.
Some US progressives called for President Donald Trump to pressure Israel to stop attacking Lebanon, and for a suspension of American arms transfers to the IDF.
"It is unconscionable we continue to provide aid to Israel as they continue to murder civilians and violate international law in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank," Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) said Thursday on Bluesky. "No more money to Israel’s genocidal apartheid regime."
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Children Among Those Killed by US With Mysterious New Weapon Fired on Iran: Reports
The Precision Strike Missile has never before been used in combat by the US military.
Mar 30, 2026
As experts and investigators analyze one of the first strikes carried out in the US-Israeli war on Iran, mounting reports point to a ballistic missile that had never been used before by the US military in combat—but which may have struck a residential area, a sports hall, and a school in the southern city of Lamerd.
Along with being accused of bombing a school in Minab, killing more than 160 children and teachers, the US reportedly attacked several facilities and civilian areas near an Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps facility in Lamerd, killing an additional 21 people, including children.
While analysts have found a US Tomahawk cruise missile was used in the Minab attack, munitions experts interviewed by the BBC and The New York Times in recent days said footage of the attacks and images of the targets after they were struck suggest a short-range ballistic missile called a Precision Strike Missile (PrSM) was used to bomb a sports hall, school, and residential neighborhood in Lamerd.
The missiles are newly developed and are designed to detonate just above a target and propel small tungsten pellets into the surrounding area.
As the Times reported, the PrSM is manufactured by Lockheed Martin and has the capability to hit targets at a 400-mile range, "but additional details about the weapon, including its expected accuracy and the quantity of explosives it carries, remain unknown to the public."
The Times reported that munitions experts had analyzed footage of a weapon in flight over a residential area about 900 feet from the sports hall and school, showing the missile erupting "in a large fireball midair."
Another video showed an explosion in midair just above the sports hall and nearby school, and photos of the aftermath showed the sites with numerous holes, presumably from the tungsten pellets.
The Times also verified a video that showed a plume of smoke rising in an area close to the other strikes at the same time, and local media reports said a cultural center had been hit in that attack. The target couldn't be independently verified.
Late last week, the BBC also reported that the PrSM was likely used on residential buildings in Lamerd on the first day of the war.
Experts at the defense intelligence firm Janes and at McKenzie Intelligence told the BBC that the shape, length, and size of the explosions created in verified footage they analyzed indicated the weapons were likely PrSM missiles.
"US Central Command has admitted to using PrSM in strikes from the desert of an unnamed Gulf country against Iran in the early phases of the conflict," McKenzie Intelligence emphasized.
Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Dan Caine also celebrated the use of the PrSM in a press conference on March 13, reported the BBC, saying the US military had "made history" and carried out attacks with "precision and determination that comes from relentless training and trust in each other and in their weapon systems."
But a spokesperson for US Central Command on Saturday told the Times that Pentagon officials are "aware of the reports and are looking into them," and claimed US forces "do not indiscriminately target civilians."
The US has also not officially taken responsibility for the attack in Minab that happened on the same day as the ones in Lamerd, but fragments of a Tomahawk missile that were found at the site are among the mounting evidence pointing to the Trump administration as the perpetrator.
The sports hall in Lamerd was reportedly being used by a children's volleyball team at the time of the strike; fourth grader Helma Ahmadizadeh and fifth grader Elham Zaeri were among those killed while at volleyball practice, according to an Iran-based journalist, Negin Bagheri.
Zaeri's father "described her as an avid volleyball player, who would always turn up to the sports hall 20 to 25 minutes early," the BBC reported.
The outlet also said the youngest victim of the suspected PrSM strike was two years old.
At Drop Site News, Mahmoud Aslan reported on the attack on the sports hall shortly after it took place, before analysts linked the bombing to the PrSM.
Hossein Gholami told Aslan his 16-year-old daughter, Zahra, had been training in the facility when he "noticed a strange gathering of people at the corner of the street leading to the sports hall."
“The screaming was rising from a distance," said Gholami. "A colleague ran toward me, waving his arm, and said in a shaken voice: ‘Zahra, the hall, there has been an explosion.'"
“The continuous screaming of the injured mixed with the sounds of secondary explosions," said Gholami, whose daughter was killed in the attack. "The ground was covered in debris and shattered glass. It was difficult to move with all the rubble. Ambulances arrived after about twenty minutes, but most of the injured were in critical condition. The smell of blood and burns covered everything."
“Every time I close my eyes," he said, "I see her face, her smile, and I hear the sound of the explosion."
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165 Massacred Schoolgirls in Iran — and the Silence That Exposes the West’s Moral Selectivity
These were not combatants. They were not militants. They were children seated at their desks, pens in their hands, notebooks open before them, studying, whispering to classmates, and imagining futures that stretched decades ahead.
Mar 07, 2026
In an era when images can circle the globe in seconds and newsrooms claim to uphold universal humanitarian principles; one might expect the killing of 165 schoolgirls inside a primary school to dominate international headlines. One would expect emergency debates, moral outrage, and relentless coverage. Yet in the southeastern Iranian city of Minab—where Israeli-American strikes obliterated classrooms filled with children—the world’s most influential media institutions have responded with something far more revealing than condemnation: they have responded with silence.
These were not combatants. They were not militants. They were children seated at their desks, pens in their hands, notebooks open before them, studying, whispering to classmates, and imagining futures that stretched decades ahead. In seconds, that ordinary school day turned into a massacre. Desks became splintered wreckage, classrooms collapsed into dust, and rows of coffins replaced rows of pupils.
Yet the names of these girls—165 lives extinguished before they truly began—barely entered the global conversation.
This omission is not the product of oversight. It reflects something far more structural: the hierarchy of victims that governs much of the contemporary information order. In theory, modern Western media institutions present themselves as defenders of human rights and guardians of moral accountability. In practice, their editorial priorities often mirror geopolitical interests with striking precision.
When the deaths of children generate outrage in one context but indifference in another, the moral language surrounding human rights begins to lose its integrity.
When tragedies reinforce established narratives about adversarial states, they are amplified, dramatized, and transformed into global moral spectacles. But when tragedies expose the human cost of the military actions carried out by Western powers or their closest allies, they are quietly displaced from the front page—if they appear at all.
The massacre in Minab illustrates this logic with devastating clarity.
The deaths of 165 Iranian schoolgirls do not fit comfortably within the dominant geopolitical storyline that portrays Israel and its strategic partners as defenders of stability and order in a turbulent region. Acknowledging such an atrocity would inevitably raise difficult questions: about the legality of strikes on civilian infrastructure, about the ethics of military escalation, and about the widening humanitarian toll of ongoing Israeli-American attacks across the region.
It is therefore far easier to look away.
But Minab is not an isolated tragedy. Across Lebanon, relentless bombardments have repeatedly struck civilian neighborhoods, reducing homes and streets to rubble. Across Palestine, entire communities have endured cycles of destruction that claim the lives of children whose only battlefield was the ground beneath their feet. Hospitals, schools, and residential blocks have all entered the expanding geography of devastation.
These events do not occur in a vacuum. They form part of a broader pattern in which military power operates alongside narrative power. Missiles shape the physical battlefield, while selective reporting shapes the battlefield of perception.
What emerges is not merely a media bias but a form of narrative engineering. Certain victims are elevated as symbols of universal suffering, while others—often far more numerous—are rendered invisible. Compassion itself becomes curated, distributed unevenly according to political convenience.
For Western audiences accustomed to believing in the neutrality of their information systems, this selective visibility should provoke serious reflection. The credibility of humanitarian discourse depends on consistency. When the deaths of children generate outrage in one context but indifference in another, the moral language surrounding human rights begins to lose its integrity.
The girls of Minab deserved the same recognition afforded to any victims of violence anywhere in the world. They deserved to have their stories told, their lives acknowledged, and their deaths confronted with the seriousness such an atrocity demands.
Instead, they encountered a second form of erasure.
First came the missiles that ended their lives. Then came the silence that followed.
For Western audiences accustomed to believing in the neutrality of their information systems, this selective visibility should provoke serious reflection.
In the contemporary information age, propaganda rarely announces itself openly. It often operates through absence—through the stories that never reach the front page, the victims whose names remain unspoken, and the tragedies that disappear before the world has time to notice.
The massacre in Minab therefore stands as more than a local catastrophe. It exposes a deeper crisis in the global information order—one in which the value of human life appears disturbingly contingent on political context.
And if the deaths of 165 schoolgirls in their classrooms fail to trigger universal outrage, the question is no longer about geopolitics alone.
It becomes a question about the credibility of the moral system that claims to defend humanity itself.
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A Dangerous Step Back: The Renewed Threat of Landmines and Cluster Munitions
Ninety percent of the more than 6,000 killed by landmines last year were civilians, and half of them were children. There can be no justification for weapons such as these.
Dec 01, 2025
One step can be the difference between life and death in many communities around the world. Srey Neang, a young girl living in rural Cambodia, ran outside to play in her uncle’s backyard, and her life was upended in a moment when she stepped on a landmine. She was rushed to the hospital, where her leg was amputated at only four years of age. Her story—like so many others—shows that even decades after conflict ends, the threat of these weapons never does.
Every year, thousands of civilians, particularly children, are injured or killed by landmines and cluster munitions. The use of landmines and cluster munitions had been on the decline since the signing of the Mine Ban Treaty in 1997 and the Convention on Cluster Munitions in 2010.
But despite progress, we are seeing more countries return to the use of landmines and cluster munitions as security concerns rise globally. Some will argue that these weapons make countries safer, but that’s faulty thinking. Security can’t come at the expense of innocent lives. Nor do these weapons actually provide meaningful military advantage; they leave behind contamination that destabilizes communities, limits economic recovery, and threatens peacekeeping forces long after conflicts end. You can’t be safe from a weapon that can’t distinguish between a soldier and a child.
The 2025 Landmine Monitor, out today, reports that more than 6,000 people were killed or injured by landmines and explosive remnants of war in 2024—the highest annual figure since 2020, and a 9% increase from the previous year. Ninety percent of those victims were civilians, and half of them were children. The 2025 Cluster Munition Monitor, published on September 15, also revealed that all reported casualties from this weapon in 2024 were civilians. New uses by countries like Russia, Myanmar, and Syria challenge the treaty. Lithuania’s withdrawal from the Convention, effective March 2025, sends a dangerous message to other countries in the region.
As these findings are released, there is a growing need for clear analysis and public understanding. On December 3, I’ll be joining fellow experts for a virtual briefing hosted by the US Campaign to Ban Landmines—Cluster Munition Coalition to discuss the latest Monitor reports, the human cost of these weapons, and the role US leadership must play at this pivotal moment. Bringing these insights directly to policymakers and advocates is essential to strengthening global norms and advancing effective solutions.
Despite never joining either treaty, the United States has long been one of the world’s largest supporters of mine clearance and victim assistance, helping make former battlefields safe for farming, economic investment, and community life. These investments are among the most cost-effective and high-impact uses of US international assistance, directly saving lives and restoring livelihoods.
The case for action is both moral and pragmatic. Every mine removed or cluster bomb destroyed reopens land for cultivation, enables displaced families to return home, and prevents future casualties. These are tangible, measurable outcomes that support U.S. foreign policy priorities: stability, economic recovery, and the protection of civilians in conflict.
Humanity & Inclusion, which has worked in mine action for more than 40 years, witnesses the human toll daily, as seen in the case of Srey and her family in Cambodia. The organization where I work, Humanity & Inclusion, supported Srey, now 13, in receiving a new prosthetic leg, which allows her to ride her bike to school, help take care of her family, and play soccer, one of her favorite hobbies.
Srey’s story and those of many others are reminders that behind every statistic is a person whose future depends on the choices policymakers make today. US leadership has always mattered. When the United States aligns its policies, funding, and diplomacy toward a humanitarian goal, the world follows. The US has made progress in recent years. In 2022, the Biden administration restricted US landmine use to the Korean Peninsula and reaffirmed the goal of ultimately joining the Mine Ban Treaty. But the transfer of US cluster munitions to Ukraine in 2023 and landmines in 2024, undercut those commitments and send mixed signals to the world.
US leadership in aligning policy with the Mine Ban Treaty and the Convention on Cluster Munitions, and in sustaining robust funding for mine action, comes at a critical time. Washington can once again set the global standard for protecting civilians and strengthening international law.
In a time of never-ending partisan fights, this is a place where both sides can come together and agree on the right steps forward. This is not an abstract debate. It’s about whether children can walk to school safely. Whether farmers can plant crops without fear. Whether communities emerging from war can build futures on land that no longer hides deadly remnants of the past. Eliminating landmines and cluster munitions aligns with American values, advances security, and reflects our nation’s enduring commitment to human dignity.
The world doesn’t need new reasons to fear these weapons. Instead, we must take the kind of step that brings hope rather than harm. If we lead with courage now, our next steps can help ensure that every step, everywhere, is safe.
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