Since October, Israel has killed more than 25,000 Palestinians, an estimated 70 percent of them women and children, in what a leading scholar of aerial bombing has called “one of the most intense civilian punishment campaigns in history.” Israel has been killing more than five times as many Gazans per day as the Nazis did, per capita, in the London Blitzkrieg. It killed roughly fifteen times as many children in the war’s first two months alone as Russia did in Ukraine in the invasion’s first eighteen months.

The Associated Press, citing analysts who specialize in mapping wartime bombing damage, reported that “the offensive has wreaked more destruction than the razing of Syria’s Aleppo between 2012 and 2016, Ukraine’s Mariupol or, proportionally, the Allied bombing of Germany in World War II.” Israel’s campaign has destroyed the homes of a third of Gaza’s residents, damaged almost two-thirds of all dwellings, and displaced 85 percent of its population, or 1.9 million people, through forced evacuations. More than ten Gazan children per day, on average, are estimated to have lost one or both of their legs.

The carnage is entirely deliberate. As a leaked analysis by the Dutch defense attaché in Tel Aviv put it, Israel “intends to deliberately cause enormous destruction to the infrastructure and civilian centers”; this is what explains the “high number of deaths” among civilians.