Fragments: Explosive Weapons Monitor Quarterly (Vol. 2, Issue 4, December 2024)
A NOTE FROM THE EXPLOSIVE WEAPONS MONITOR
For almost 500 days, Gaza has been subject to one of the most intense bombing campaigns in history. The extensive and widespread harm, largely caused by the use of explosive weapons in densely populated areas, has displaced 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.1 million inhabitants and damaged more than 66 percent of Gaza’s structures. This includes 90 percent of its housing units, according to UN agencies. Gaza’s Ministry of Health has reported that more than 46,000 people, among them almost 18,000 children, have been killed. More than 100,000 people have been injured, nearly a quarter of which have life-altering injuries, according to the World Health Organization.
Despite the significant coverage of quantitative data on the conflict in Gaza, there has been limited focus on the experiences of affected people and survivors living with the direct and indirect effects of explosive weapons. These personal accounts underscore the reality of this data and highlight the very human impact of bombing and shelling densely populated areas, which has caused life-changing injuries, devastating losses, and cut civilians off from food and clean water. Testimonies contribute towards the collective understanding of lived experiences.
Likewise, civilians self-published accounts of life in Gaza over the past 15 months provides insight into life under bombardment. Some Gazans have taken to social media, where they have published videos, images and text that capture what they are experiencing. The second article of this issue spotlights drawings by one artist, depicting themes experienced by Gazans, including displacement, death, fear, resilience and love. For this artist, drawing and posting on social media has become a process of self-perseverance – providing a link to life before 7th October 2023 and activities that used to be enjoyable – as well as a means of documenting harm and communicating with the world beyond Gaza.
Collecting and sharing information on the harm caused by use of explosive weapons in populated areas is a prerequisite for understanding the impacts of such use on civilians and for informing changes in policy and practice to better protect civilians. Over the past 15 months, investigators and researchers have drawn on open-source material to document harm, damage and destruction in Gaza. Methodologies developed to make these assessments have been instrumental to our understanding of harm in Gaza. Sharing good practice and making publicly available these methodologies can aid efforts to document harm in other hard-to-access contexts.
The use of explosive weapons in Gaza underscores, yet again, the extensive and far-reaching humanitarian consequences of such weapons, and highlights the importance of restricting and refraining from such use, and to provide rapid, safe and unhindered humanitarian assistance to civilians, as set out in the Political Declaration.
Camilla Molyneux Researcher,
Explosive Weapons Monitor
