Israel’s Strikes on Lebanon Are Some of the Deadliest in Decades

Israel’s strikes on Lebanon on Monday amounted to one of the most intense air raids in contemporary warfare, outstripping even the bombing of Gaza during the opening days of the Israeli-Hamas war in October, war experts said.

The death count is also one of the highest daily tolls in recent global wars, and could rise because people are still believed to be trapped under the rubble in Lebanon.

War death tolls are estimates, and exact comparisons between conflicts are difficult. But the toll on Monday in Lebanon exceeded most daily tolls in Gaza over the past year and more than doubled the average daily death rate during the deadliest year of the Syrian civil war.

Here’s what else to know.

The number of targets struck by Israel

The Israeli military said it hit more than 1,600 targets in Lebanon on Monday, a number that has few, if any, precedents in 21st-century warfare, according to Emily Tripp, the director of Airwars, a British conflict monitor.

It is roughly 300 more than the number of targets Israel struck during the opening three days of its Gaza offensive after the Hamas-led attack on Oct. 7 — a number that itself was considered unusually high.

During the U.S.-led air campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria between 2014 and 2017, Western fighter jets struck an average of 650 targets a month across a much wider area, according to data published by the Department of Defense.

“Prior to the Gaza war, munitions deployed with this intensity and with this frequency would have been almost unheard-of,” Ms. Tripp said. “There is no comparison in terms of death toll or munitions use with previous 21st-century air campaigns of this nature, as far as we know.”

The Israeli military said Hezbollah fired 250 rockets toward Israel on Monday, most of which were intercepted by Israeli air-defense missiles or missed their targets. At least one man was reported to have been wounded by shrapnel. Since October, Hezbollah has fired more than 8,000 missiles toward Israeli positions, according to the Israeli military.

How the Lebanese death toll compares

The Lebanese health minister, Dr. Firass Abiad, said 558 people were killed on Monday in Israeli strikes — an unusually high number by the standards of contemporary war, experts said.

In Gaza last October, it took 18 days for the reported daily death toll to exceed 500. The Monday toll is about half the entire casualty count during the monthlong Israel-Hezbollah war of 2006. And it is far higher than the average daily toll during the Syrian war in 2014, the deadliest year of that decade-long conflict.

How the Lebanese government collates the death toll

Lebanon’s health ministry runs an emergency operations center that collects casualty numbers from private and state-run hospitals, collating them to create a national toll from the war, according to health officials.

These figures have historically been viewed as reliable and are cited regularly by the United Nations, which helped the ministry develop the operations center.

Hezbollah, the powerful Shiite militia backed by Iran, does not run the ministry. It is overseen by the government of Lebanon, whose members are split along sectarian and political lines.

Dr. Abiad, a former board chairman at Lebanon’s largest hospital, is generally considered apolitical and won praise and prominence for his data-driven assessments during the coronavirus pandemic. He was first proposed for the role of health minister by Saad Hariri, a Sunni former prime minister who is not allied with Hezbollah, and was formally appointed by Mr. Hariri’s successor.

The ratio of slain combatants to civilians

The Lebanese health ministry does not provide detailed breakdowns of the numbers of civilians and combatants killed. But Dr. Abiad said in a brief phone interview on Tuesday that the “overwhelming majority, if not all,” of those killed and injured on Monday were civilians.

For his statement to be true, the number of civilian men killed in Lebanon on Monday would need to overwhelmingly exceed the combined number of slain women and children. The Lebanese health ministry said that 94 women and 50 children were killed on Monday, or just over 25 percent of the total death toll, but it did not specify the number of slain male civilians.

The Israeli military has said it was targeting military operatives, weapons caches and rocket launchers, many of them hidden in civilian neighborhoods and homes.

Ms. Tripp said the number of slain women and children was “consistent with what we’ve seen in conflicts such as Iraq, but lower compared to the recent Gaza war.”

In Gaza, more than 54 percent of the roughly 34,000 people recently named as victims by the Gaza health authorities were said to be either women or boys and girls under 18. Roughly 7,000 other victims are still to be identified by the health authorities, according to the ministry’s chief statistician.

Lauren Leatherby contributed reporting.