JERUSALEM – Rarely has the world had such a front-row seat for a concerted attack by a major air force on an urban area as it did during last summer’s Gaza war. But Israel is far from the only country to have killed civilians during war. The list is long, from Dresden to Japan, from Grozny to Algeria.
The United States has killed civilians in its recent conflicts – in Iraq and Afghanistan in the last decade and earlier in Vietnam and Korea as well. Syria’s ongoing civil war has killed an estimated 220,000 people in about four years, nearly half civilians and many of those bombed by their own government. And Israel itself has killed civilians before, including in previous Palestinian campaigns and during wars in Lebanon.
Recent years’ establishment of war crimes tribunals and the International Criminal Court aims to give leaders pause, but prosecution is a politically complicated process and the carnage goes on.
Last summer, Israel and the Hamas rulers of Gaza fought for most of July and August. Israel demanded an end to rocketing of its cities, a policy that Israel says was itself a war crime. By the end, 2,205 Palestinians were dead, including at least 1,483 civilians, according to preliminary U.N. figures. Israel says about 890 militants were among those killed in Gaza. On the Israeli side, 67 soldiers and five civilians were killed. The Associated Press reviewed the 247 strikes in which residential compounds were targeted, according to witnesses and site visits. The review found that these strikes killed at least 844 Palestinians, including 508 children, women and older men – demographics generally accepted as probably civilian. Israel says it tried to warn civilians and avoid causing their deaths.
Some examples from recent history of conflicts in which civilians were targeted:
Allied attacks on Tokyo and Dresden
The nuclear bombs dropped by the United States on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 killed about 130,000 people, secured Japan’s surrender and ended World War II. Less well-known, perhaps, is Operation Meetinghouse – the firebombing of Tokyo five months earlier. It is believed to have killed about 100,000 people, which would make it the single deadliest event in that war. A month before that, about 25,000 people were killed in concerted Allied bombing of the German city of Dresden, which destroyed much of a what was a key industrial center contributing to the Nazi war effort. (The Germans killed more than 28,000 in the Blitz, the bombing of London – as well as millions of others throughout World War II.)
NATO’S Bombing of Serbia
For three months in 1999, NATO waged a bombing campaign against Serbia without U.N. approval, aimed at forcing a withdrawal of Serbian security forces from the province of Kosovo, which had historical importance to Serbs but housed an ethnic Albanian majority seeking to secede. The NATO bombing campaign was in response to a brutal crackdown on Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians by Serbia’s leader Slobodan Milosevic who was later charged with crimes against humanity. Milosevic died while on trial.
A report issued for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia said it appeared about 500 civilians were killed and noted that targets included “some loosely defined categories such as military-industrial infrastructure and government ministries and some potential problem categories such as media and refineries.”
France in Algeria
France’s empire stretching across the globe was coming undone in the 1950s, but the country fought its most brutal battle for one precious piece of turf: Algeria, colonized beginning in 1830. The war to hold onto Paris’ crown jewel lasted seven years, until 1962. The number of Algerians killed remains under debate, but the leading French historian on the war says 350,000 to 400,000 Algerian civilians died. In a brutal precursor to the war, the 1945 uprising in the town of Setif, Algerians say some 45,000 people may have died at the hands of the French troops putting down the revolt; French figures put the number of Algerian dead there at 15,000 to 20,000.
Russia in Chechnya
During Russia’s wars against separatists in Chechnya, the armed forces first attacked Grozny, the capital, in late 1994 and early 1995 in what at the time was considered to be the heaviest bombing campaign in Europe since the end of World War II. Russian forces also attacked Grozny in 1999, leveling the city before driving out the rebels. Rights activists and aid workers say many thousands of civilians died in the Russian attacks but precise numbers remain unknown.
Guatemalan civil war
Recent Latin American history is littered with conflicts in which governments stand accused of having targeted civilians, such as in Chile after the 1973 coup against Salvador Allende or Argentina under the 1976-83 dictatorship. An egregious case was the Guatemalan civil war of 1960-1996, which killed up to 200,000 people, mostly indigenous Mayan civilians who were targeted specifically because of their perceived alliance with leftist guerrillas.
Nigerian army avenging Boko Haram attacks
The Nigerian military has been accused of deliberately targeting civilians in revenge attacks after it was hit by the radical militia Boko Haram. In one of the worst cases, hundreds were killed and hundreds of homes set ablaze and destroyed in the town of Bama last year, after a suspected Boko Haram fighter killed one soldier.
Dresden bombing remembered
DRESDEN, Germany – Soviet troops were pressing into Germany from the east and the other Allies from the west, but for 12-year-old schoolboy Eberhard Renner the war seemed far away.
Dresden had been spared the destruction suffered by other cities like Berlin and Hamburg, and Renner clung to the hope that the Saxon capital would stay off the target list with the war so clearly near its end.
Even as air-raid sirens started screaming 70 years ago Friday, Renner’s father dismissed the attack as another reconnaissance mission.
Then the bomb fell into Renner’s backyard. It blew the thick oak door off the shelter where the family had taken refuge, slamming him and his mother to the ground. Somebody yelled that the roof was on fire, and they ventured out into the streets as the bombs rained down.
The Allied decision to firebomb Dresden – immortalized in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Slaughterhouse Five” – has long been a source of controversy.
At the time, the Allies hoped the attack on a city deep in the German heartland would hit hard at civilian morale and help force the Nazis to capitulate. Some historians, however, said the destruction was a tragic waste of human life and cultural patrimony – with little to no effect on the outcome of the war.
The raids that began on Feb. 13, 1945, left the city littered with corpses, and tens of thousands of Dresden’s buildings had been turned to rubble, including its famous opera house and museums in the historic old city. The baroque Church of Our Lady, appeared initially to have survived, but, weakened by the intense heat, it collapsed two days after the bombing under its own weight.
As Renner wandered the streets of Dresden, he saw a dead body for the first time in his life. In the days to come, he would see many more. Renner remembers the streets still being littered with bodies a week after the attack and coming across the corpse of a woman in a square.
“She was burned to a cinder, had become very small, but her hand was held up and on it was her gold wedding band, shining, not blackened at all,” said the 82-year-old retired architecture professor. “I will never forget this scene.”
It was not just the bombs dropped by the waves of British and U.S. bombers that wreaked devastation. The fire made superheated air rise rapidly, creating a vacuum at ground level that produced winds strong enough to uproot trees and suck people into the flames. Many Dresden residents died of collapsed lungs.
Renner’s family made it safely to the home of one of his dentist father’s patients. They were able to stay the night and regroup. After that they moved in with an uncle.
Nazi propaganda from 1945 put the death toll at 200,000 and after the war some scholars estimated as many as 135,000 were killed – more than the combined total of those immediately killed by the nuclear blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
After neo-Nazis began inflating the figure further, talking of 500,000 to 1 million victims of a “bombing Holocaust,” the city established an expert commission to investigate. It concluded in 2008 that closer to 25,000 people were killed in the attack.
Whatever the number, Renner mourns the victims as friends, schoolmates and neighbors. Even if the Allies thought it would shorten the war, he said he thinks the bombing was unjustifiable.
“To sacrifice 25,000 woman and children, innocent people for that? That’s a war crime,” he said. “We started the war, but it is a war crime.”
