‘Not seen since Vietnam’

Israel dropped hundreds of 2,000-pound bombs on Gaza, analysis shows
CNN ONLINE
In the first month of its war in Gaza, Israel dropped hundreds of massive bombs, many of them capable of killing or wounding people more than 1,000 feet away, analysis by CNN and artificial intelligence company Synthetaic suggests.
Satellite imagery from those early days of the war reveals more than 500 impact craters over 12 meters (40 feet) in diameter, consistent with those left behind by 2,000-pound bombs. Those are four times heavier than the largest bombs the United States dropped on ISIS in Mosul, Iraq, during the war against the extremist group there.
Weapons and warfare experts blame the extensive use of heavy munitions such as the 2,000-pound bomb for the soaring death toll. The population of Gaza is packed together much more tightly than almost anywhere else on earth, so the use of such heavy munitions has a profound effect.
“The use of 2,000-pound bombs in an area as densely populated as Gaza means it will take decades for communities to recover,” said John Chappell, advocacy and legal fellow at CIVIC, a DC-based group focused on minimizing civilian harm in conflict.
Israel has come under pressure internationally over the scale of the devastation in Gaza, with even staunch ally US President Joe Biden accusing Israel of “indiscriminate bombing” of the coastal strip.
Israeli officials have argued that its heavy munitions are necessary to eliminating Hamas.
Hamas reportedly relies on a sprawling tunnel network that is believed to crisscross the Gaza Strip. Proponents of Israel’s campaign in Gaza argue that the heavy munitions act as bunker busters, helping to destroy Hamas’ underground infrastructure.
But 2,000-pound bombs are normally used sparingly by Western militaries, experts say, because of their potential impact on densely populated areas like Gaza. International humanitarian law prohibits indiscriminate bombing.
Marc Garlasco a former US defense intelligence analyst and former UN war crimes investigator, said the density of Israel’s first month of bombardment in Gaza had “not been seen since Vietnam.”
Garlasco, now a military adviser at PAX, a Dutch non-governmental organisation that advocates for peace, reviewed all the incidents analysed in this report for CNN.
“You’d have to go back to the Vietnam war to make a comparison,” said Garlasco. “Even in both Iraq wars it was never that dense.”
The heavy munitions, mostly manufactured by the US, can cause high casualty events and can have a lethal fragmentation radius – an area of exposure to injury or death around the target – of up to 365 metres (about 1,198 feet), or the equivalent of 58 soccer fields in area.
Weapons and warfare experts blame the extensive use of heavy weaponry, such as the 2,000-pound bomb for the soaring death toll.
CNN partnered with US AI company Synthetaic which used Rapid Automatic Image Categorization (RAIC) to detect craters, smoke plumes and damaged buildings in tasked satellite imagery over the Gaza Strip. The findings were manually reviewed by a member of Synthetaic, as well as by CNN journalists.
CNN and Synthetaic’s findings “reveal and emphasize the sheer intensity of the bombardment over a very short period of time,” according to Annie Shiel, US advocacy director at CIVIC.
“In two months, we’ve had about the level of strikes in this tiny little area in Gaza as what we saw in Mosul and Raqqa combined,” said Larry Lewis, research director at the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) and formerly the US State Department’s senior adviser on civilian harm, referring to US-led coalition operations against two ISIS strongholds. “It is an incredible amount of strikes, period-wise.”