No, Gaza Is Not the Worst or Deadliest War by Any Measure
A recurring claim pushed by anti-Israel activists and critics is that the Gaza war is a and conflict. They cite statistics such as , , the number or of killed, and the , often limiting the comparison to “.” The aim is to depict Israel’s conduct as inherently criminal and to reinforce the false by insisting that nothing in modern warfare compares. War is horrific and Gaza’s losses are tragic, but tragedy does not transform a conventional urban conflict into an unprecedented event. When these claims are examined against actual historical data, every one of them collapses. Gaza is not unprecedented, not the “worst,” and not an outlier in modern warfare, even this century. These claims depend on selective statistics, misrepresentation and a refusal to acknowledge far deadlier conflicts. This article dismantles the main arguments, though no one should expect those invested in this narrative to suddenly start telling the truth.
False Claim: Gaza is the "Most Deadly" War
Claims that Gaza is the most deadly war of this century are demonstrably false. The in Ethiopia, fought from November 2020 to November 2022, killed an estimated in two years. Every metric of displacement, starvation and civilian suffering in Tigray far exceeded anything in Gaza, even using Hamas's .
The Syrian Civil War from 2011 to 2019 saw roughly . It could be even higher after were found this year near Damascus. The Syrian Network for Human Rights documented out of a subset of 234,000 fatalities, far surpassing Gaza’s child fatality numbers. Other deadlier conflicts this century include the Yemeni Civil War with and the South Sudan Civil War with plus 193,000 more from famine.
Nothing compares to the from 1998 to 2003 in terms of total fatalities or rate of death. The war caused an estimated , averaging 75,000 per month. A 2008 report in noted that even after the war ended, 45,000 people were still dying each month from the effects of the war.
There is also a current conflict far deadlier than Gaza: the Sudanese Civil War that began in April 2023, with an estimated , 12 million displaced people and 25 million facing extreme hunger. Despite producing human suffering on a , it receives almost from the same “experts,” NGOs and humanitarians who claim Gaza represents a event.
False Claim: Gaza has the Highest Percentage of a Population Killed
Haaretz journalist Nir Hasson that no war has seen 3% of its population killed within two years based on Hamas’s assertion that Gazans have died out of a 2.1 million pre-war population. Setting aside that roughly of these are combatants, Hasson is simply wrong, both for this century and the last.
The brutal three-month battle for Mariupol in 2022 offers a stark and recent benchmark that immediately disproves claims of Gaza’s unprecedented casualty rates. Ukrainian authorities initially estimated , but an suggested the real figure may be 75,000. With a pre-war population of 430,000, the lower estimate equals 6% of the city killed, while the higher estimate exceeds 17%, both far greater than Gaza. Critics may argue that Mariupol is just one city, not all of Ukraine, but Gaza is also just one territory where Palestinians live, with 3 million in the West Bank. But even setting Mariupol aside, many conflicts have exceeded the 3% threshold.
The Korean War was extraordinarily deadly. South Korea lost an estimated people out of a pre-war population of 20 million, a loss rate of 6.5%. were even more severe, with estimates ranging from 12%-15% of the total population killed. Other modern conflicts produced similarly devastating percentages. The in Nigeria (1967–1970) saw about 4% of the population killed in direct fighting, and 15% when including deaths from the actual famine that occurred. Separately, under the Khmer Rouge and during the (1975–1979), Cambodia lost people, more than 20% of its population. There are many additional examples, but the point is clear: Gaza is not even close to breaking statistical ground.
False Claim: Gaza has Highest Percentage of Women & Children Killed
Claims that Gaza has seen the of women and children killed, about 48% according to , are also false. Recent conflicts show higher rates. The challenge is that in the deadliest wars reliable demographic data is generally unavailable, but where data does exist it contradicts the Gaza narrative.
In the Tigray War, a of airstrikes across 24 districts found that approximately 28% of casualties were children and 30% were women, a combined 58%. A from the Battle of Mosul, fought by US-led coalition and Iraqi forces against ISIS from 2016 to 2017, recorded that more than 54% of those killed were women and children. One does not need to reach back to obscure cases or actual genocides to find higher rates; a recent, well-documented battle involving Western militaries surpasses Gaza’s claims. Similar results appeared in the . Among roughly 1,000 identified deaths, 51% were women and children, including 28% children.
The and are particularly because each involved dense urban warfare against a terrorist force embedded within a civilian population. These battles were not labeled genocide or unprecedented crimes, but recognized as the harsh reality of against an enemy that used . ISIS also did not have seventeen years to construct a , making the IDF’s results in Gaza even more consistent with the norms of Western warfare in unusually difficult circumstances.
False Claim: Gaza has Unprecedented Physical Destruction
The destruction in Gaza is as prima facie , with commentators insisting that such damage cannot result from lawful warfare. This claim ignores the extensive record of modern urban battles that produced equal or greater devastation. Gaza is severe but typical of high-intensity urban combat, not evidence of genocidal intent. November 2025 report estimates that 70% of Gaza was damaged or destroyed. Certain areas remain mostly . Importantly, if 3% of Gazans were killed, including combatants, then the massive gap between the percentage of physical destruction and fatalities reflects highly successful s by Israel, not an effort to exterminate a population.
Raqqa and Mosul demonstrate this clearly. Raqqa was assessed as nearly , with one estimate finding uninhabitable. A RAND study described the battle in ways that Gaza, and shows virtually the entire city destroyed or heavily damaged. ISIS had tunneled between buildings, rigged the city with explosives, concealed streets from aerial surveillance and used —the same conditions faced by the IDF.
Mosul suffered comparable devastation, particularly in the western and Old City districts, with estimated at more than 80%. A of Iraqi cities after the war with ISIS found destruction levels of 94% in Bayji and 96% in Al-Ba’aj, with destruction and damage across sixteen governorates, an area far larger than Gaza, averaging 59%.
Outside the Middle East, the five-month in the Philippines in 2017 between government forces and 1,000 Islamic State militants caused massive destruction in a city of 200,000 people. Civilian casualties remained low due to effective evacuations, yet in a large area more than were or damaged. As a noted, “Marawi thus illustrates that even when casualties are low and a population is evacuated, damage to infrastructure can still severely impact both the city’s people and those of surrounding areas.”
l further reinforces the point. The city, spanning 166 square kilometers (nearly half the size of Gaza), saw destruction or damage across almost its entire urban area.
True Statistic: Gaza has a Comparatively Low Civilian-Combatant Ratio
Based on available data, the civilian to combatant ratio in Gaza is roughly 1.8 to 1 (and probably ), using Hamas’ claim of 70,000 total fatalities and an estimated killed. This ratio is far lower than in recent Western-led urban battles. In Mosul, an estimated were killed compared to about 2,000 to 3,000 s, a ratio of 3 to 1 at the low end. Broader operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have produced ratios in the range of . The Gaza ratio therefore contradicts accusations of genocide or indiscriminate targeting.
Critics who cannot accept this reality have attempted to manipulate both sides of the ratio to fabricate a higher figure. On the denominator, they by relying only on the number of fighters the IDF can literally identify by first and last name and match to a pre-war roster. By this absurd standard, any combatant the IDF could not fully identify in the midst of battle, combatants remaining in tunnels or beneath rubble, or any individual recruited by Hamas after the war began, is automatically labeled a civilian. This is how the of “” is manufactured.
On the numerator, these same critics assert, without evidence, that total fatalities are by some 40%. They how this is possible when Gazans could and did thousands of deaths without needing to present bodies, and given the compensation incentives to do so. Two years into the conflict, the notion that thirty thousand or more deaths remain unreported by their families has no evidentiary basis.
Taken together, the credible data leaves Gaza’s civilian combatant ratio well under 2 to 1, low for high-intensity urban warfare. And tellingly, when this metric contradicts their genocide narrative, the same critics who inflated every other statistic suddenly work to discredit it, proving that accurate numbers were never the point; the manipulation exists solely to promote an anti-Israel agenda.
Conclusion
When the facts invalidate the claims, the predictable response is to move the goalposts. After portraying Gaza as an unprecedented, genocidal conflict, critics suddenly dismiss all comparative evidence, insisting that previous catastrophic wars are as data points. The impulse to portray Israel as uniquely criminal, rather than any commitment to truth, drives this constant reframing. It exposes the ideological goal driving the narrative: to cast Israel as uniquely criminal, even when the . In the end, tragedy does not prove genocide, and facts still matter, even to those determined to ignore them.
