“When I was a kid, old Gaza was really a very lovely place. Narrow streets with houses hundreds of years old. Walking there, you could just smell the history.”


“The smell of death is everywhere as bodies are left lying on the roads or under the rubble … In northern Gaza, people are just waiting to die … They live from one hour to the next, fearing death at every second.”


The smell of a place is a strange thing to consider. It can’t be written down, captured in a bottle and saved for later, or wholly articulated to someone who’s never experienced it themselves. Smells, especially those from childhood, have a tendency to burrow themselves deep into the mind, stuck to memories that lie dormant until they’re coaxed out by a particularly nostalgic inhale, even years later.

The Great Mosque of Gaza, perhaps once, smelled of sweet rose attar and incense during the days of the Rashidun caliphate, who captured the land from the Byzantines a little over a thousand years ago. Today, the mosque smells of smoke and ash, of the Israeli missiles that crumbled its minaret and ground parts of its walls down to a fine powder. In the early 5th century, Byzantine traders might have enjoyed the aroma of wine en route to Italy or France, while the Assyrians who inhabited Gaza a thousand years before breathed air tinged by the scent of copper, and by the musk of donkeys and camels pulling caravans west from Iraq to Egypt.

Today, many of the Palestinians living in Gaza will remember their homeland not by the smell of attar and incense, or by the salty air of the Mediterranean sea, but by that of blood, scorched metal, rotting corpses, and singed flesh. These are the realities of the genocide that Israel has perpetrated on the residents of Gaza in response to Hamas’s deadly attack on Oct. 7th, 2023 — which has yielded the most death and destruction that the territory has ever seen in its 5,000-year-long history. In a speech given on Oct. 7th, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stated:

“All of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in, that wicked city, we will turn them into rubble … I say to the residents of Gaza: Leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere.”

As Egypt and Israel had both closed their borders to Gazans, even civilians who wished to evacuate were forced to endure a brutal military campaign. Airstrikes, in particular, have been the most destructive element of Israel’s genocide. Amongst other tactics, the bombs dropped on Gaza have arguably dealt the most damage; they have killed more than 45,000 Palestinians and reduced over half of Gaza’s buildings to rubble.

Israeli officials have argued that the high number of civilian casualties from airstrikes is a consequence of Hamas’s guerilla warfare tactics, such as using human shields, stationing operatives in civilian buildings like hospitals and schools, or constructing hundreds of miles of tunnels underneath the Gaza Strip. While Hamas has indeed taken advantage of Gaza’s dense population to obscure itself amongst civilians and even released videos of its own operatives using some civilian locations for military operations, the level of force used by the IDF is still extremely disproportionate, as argued by members of the Israeli military themselves.

From an investigation by Israeli newspaper +972 Magazine, former IDF intelligence members involved in planning airstrikes stated that one reason for bombing civilian targets was that “a deliberate attack on Palestinian society will exert ‘civil pressure’ on Hamas.” Moreover, an intelligence member stated that “if they [IDF intelligence] would tell the whole world that the [Islamic Jihad] offices on the 10th floor are not important as a target, but that its existence is a justification to bring down the entire high-rise with the aim of pressuring civilian families who live in it in order to put pressure on terrorist organizations, this would itself be seen as terrorism. So they do not say it.”

Beyond intentional targeting, Gazans can also be killed because of carelessness. According to a former intelligence member, after October 7th, the “criteria around harming Palestinian civilians were significantly relaxed”, and that there have been “cases in which we shell based on a wide cellular pinpointing of where the target is, killing civilians … often done to save time, instead of doing a little more work to get a more accurate pinpointing.”

This continues a pattern previously seen in Israeli warfare: disproportionate force — a strategy referred to as the Dahiyeh Doctrine. The term was coined after the 2006 Israeli invasion of Dahiyeh, Lebanon, where IDF General Gadi Eisenkot stated that: “We will apply disproportionate force on it and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are [Hezbollah] military bases.”

Interestingly, even Eisenkot suggested in late 2024 that the use of disproportionate force in Gaza had gone too far, stating that the military offensive “went very seriously wrong” — albeit because the destruction of Gaza would burden Israel economically after the war. Eisenkot is among many former Israeli officers who oppose the continuation of Israel’s offensive. In April 2025, over 450 Mossad veterans and reserve medical officers signed letters arguing for an end to the war. One letter stated that “the continued fighting in Gaza is intended primarily to serve political and personal interests without a security purpose.”

Even in the event of a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the damage to the people of the Gaza Strip has already been done. Millions of Gazans are now without a home, food and clean drinking water, or their children, parents, brothers, and sisters. In this article, we’ll attempt to paint a comprehensive picture of the role that airstrikes have played in Israel’s genocide by visualizing data from the ACLED (Armed Conflict Location and Event Data).

By design, data from the ACLED is conservative — only including incidents that can be independently verified from reputable sources. If the exact number of an airstrike’s casualties cannot be verified, then the ACLED will list zero casualties. This means that the casualties presented in the article are, in fact, low. The ACLED also groups multiple airstrikes into “events”, so for example, if a cluster of bombs is dropped at the one location over the span of several minutes, they will all be grouped into the same “air/drone strike event” as opposed to counting each individual munition.

Airstrikes are crucial to analyze because of the sheer devastation they can inflict. According to a series of reports published by the Action on Armed Violence, which also considered the impact of rocket launchers, grenades, and mortars — airstrikes were by far the most destructive. The IDF commonly drops up to a thousand kilograms of explosive material on its targets, which annihilate them and generate supersonic shock waves capable of killing people and damaging buildings up to 360 meters away.

For reference, an average adult sprinting (~7 m/s) would need almost a minute to cover this distance — meaning that civilians simply in the vicinity of an airstrike without having any prior notice can be at a similar risk to people in the buildings being struck directly. If we combine this radius with the population density figures of a concentrated region like Gaza City, we find that a single airstrike can put more than 6,000 people at risk of injury or death.

Repeating these strikes tens of thousands of times over the entire Gaza Strip — which is one of the most densely populated regions in the world — it becomes clear how much damage Israeli airstrikes have inflicted on Gazans over the past two years alone. In the map below, you can watch a day-by-day visualization of Israeli airstrikes from 2023 to the present day. The map is accompanied by an interactive timeline of major events; clicking on any dot on the timeline will skip to that date on the map.