Ideas - Why is bombing civilians still a military tactic?

Episode Date: March 26, 2026

The bombing of civilians has been called one of the "great scandals" of modern warfare. So why, despite nearly a century of drafting laws and signing conventions protecting the sanctity of human life, does bombing civilians remain a widespread military tactic? IDEAS producer Naheed Mustafa looks at a century of bombing civilians to try and answer that very question.Guests in this episode:Yuki Tanaka is a historian and emeritus research professor of history at the Hiroshima Peace Institute.Mark Selden is senior research associate in the East Asia program at Cornell University, and the founder of Asia-Pacific Journal.Azmat Khan is a professor of journalism at Columbia University and an investigative journalist with the New York Times.

If you experienced harm while admitted to a federal Indian hospital between 1936 and 1981, you might be eligible for compensation. The claims period is now open and free supports are available to help you submit your claim. Learn more at www.IH.settlement.ca. Or call 1-888-592-9101. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. The bombing always comes as a shock.

The convoy that turns out to be just a bunch of cars. The headquarters that's actually an apartment building full of families. A compound that's really just someone's home. Then there are the weddings, aid distributions. the breadlines. Over the last 100 years, bombing technology has evolved from grenades getting tossed out of hot air balloons to drone strikes that can obliterate a specific vehicle in a crowded line of cars. But there is one unchanging constant in the history of bombing. Civilians die. And often there's another constant, a spokesperson will call the civilian deaths a tragic.

collateral damage. It was unintended. We don't kill civilians. So why do they keep getting killed? Ideas producer Nahid Mustafa looks at a century of aerial bombing to try and answer that very question. And she begins at the beginning.

The Chinese invented gunpowder in the ninth century. The first bomb followed soon after. Someone took that gunpowder and stuffed it in a bed. bamboo pipe. Close one end and it's a rocket. Close both ends and it explodes. Swedish author Sven Lindquist wrote a seminal book called A History of Bombing. He says that by the 1400s, fragmentation bombs, cast iron shells filled with gunpowder and shards of porcelain, were used against so-called soft targets. A dispatch from the year 1207 describes the impact on the enemy's morale,

the so-called terror effect. The enemy wretches were terrified and quite lost their senses, men and horses running away as fast as they could. Western notions of what could constitute a just war go back to St. Augustine. And ever since then, just war theory holds that civilians should never be direct targets, only a state and its military. But as Sven Lindquist put it,

for those thinkers, there were exceptions. rebels, infidels, and savages. For the English colonizers of Ireland, he says, the Irish belonged to all three categories. This film made in 1903 recalls the first flight of this primitive biplane making aviation history. As the two brothers prepare to attempt the first catapulted takeoff,

man's age-old dream of flight becomes a reality. On December 17, 1903, near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the possibility of bombing from the air came alive. For 12 seconds, humans could fly. Eight years later, an Italian lieutenant named Giulio Gavadi flew his plane over a group of Turkish soldiers near Tripoli in Libya and lobbed four hand grenades over the side. The historian Gerard J. de Groot described the bombing this way.

When he reached the Turkish camp, Gavadi took a detonator from his pocket, methodically screwed it into a grenade. and tossed the grenade over the side, repeating this process four times. No Turks were injured in this first instance of aerial bombardment, but they were mighty angry. Gavadi officiated at the wedding of air transport and bombs. The marriage has been enormously successful. At the time, however, this first bombing raid was widely condemned as a gross defilement of the gentlemanly art of war.

Then came the First World War, where 19th century codes of conduct ran headlong into 20th century technology. The doctrine of the so-called strategic bombing, which involved the indiscrimin of civilians, was formulated during World War I. And, regulatively, as we know, this doctrine has persisted for over a century and is still used to justify military attacks on enemy civilians. And so an understanding of the development of this doctrine during World War I helps to explain why civilian bombardment continues to go today. My name is Yuki Tanaka. I'm a freelance historian. I used to be a research professor at Hiroshima Peace Institute of Hiroshima City University. German forces initially deployed airships during the war, but they failed to achieve the expected result due to their slow speed and inability to fly.

steadily in strong winds. So as aircraft performance improved during the war, a large plane such as the twin-engined Gotha and even larger four-engined Leeson were utilized from May 17 and early 1918 respectively to bomb London from an altitude of a very high altitude of 14,000 feet. However, as night bombing at high altitude increased to avoid attacks by British fighter planes, efforts to limit bombing target to military installations, and ammunition factories became meaningless due to indiscriminated result. So eventually, air crews were instructed that the purpose of the bombing was to discourage the British people from supporting the war against Germany. Under disguise, indiscriminated bombing was condoned. In what's sometimes called the

First Blitz, more than 1,400 British civilians were killed in the German bombing campaign. During those early stages of the war, the British military didn't reciprocate by bombing Germany. It just didn't believe aerial attacks were effective. But the British public was outraged by the bombardment. The British Army's response to public outrage was the creation of the Royal Air Force, RAF, in April 1918. The RAF set up a bomber wing called the Independent Force with the specific task of carrying out large-scale bombing rays on Germany. An a aeron was established in Nancy, a city in northeast France, near a German border. The RAF2 initially limited its target to ironworks, chemical plants, aircraft factories and railways and the like.

Yet from October 1917, the air raids were gradually extended. And in June 1918, the strategy was broadened to allow indiscriminate bombing. Indiscriminate bombing was justified by the idea that bombing the harms of enemy workers would frighten many workers, create a state of panic, and ultimately, indeluctively reduce the productive capacity of the enemy country. After the war, Britain sent an RAF mission to survey the effectiveness of the bombing. They found the direct material damage to military targets was very low, but the report claimed that the indirect impact on the morale of the enemy's citizens was high.

The same report even suggested that if the war had continued for a few more months, some factory would have experienced a complete collapse of the labor force. So while it is difficult to distort the fact that when it comes to the material damage inflicted on the enemy, the highly subjective issue of morale setback can be reported in any way one wishes depending on one's perception. So since then, however, this theory of contributing greatly to the demoralization of the enemy civilian population, which would inevitably lead to a quick end to the war and thus keep casualty-levely law, has been persistently and successfully promoted by the military leaders of the every modern nation. in the world. The same doctrine was adopted by both axes and allies during the World War II,

and as a result, millions of people became victims of this unfounded theory, including the victims of the atomic bombing of Hirschman Nagasaki. The First World War saw revolutionary developments in weaponry, communications, and tactics, But the developments went beyond the technical and practical and entered the realm of the ideological and theoretical. Interestingly, the theory of aerial bombing as an effective strategy to demoralize the enemy forces and enemy citizens, which had been developed during World War I, as we have seen, was applied to Middle East by the British RAF

to engage in a new type of operation. that is the bombing of what an RAF document refers to as quote and unquote rebels of unsubilized tribes who refused to submit to British rules. Over several years from 1920 onwards, the RAF attacked rebel groups in Iraq, for which Britain was the trustee nation at the time, by dropping bombs, including incendiary bombs on remote villages and tent encampment. Actually, the large number of the bombers were produced during World War I, and many of them were actually transferred, transported to the British colonies. Iraq was one of the place, and the same technique of the indiscriminate

bombing was also used enough. territory of the British Empire, such as India and South Africa. Yet, British administration recommended this use of air power as, quote, and unquote, outstandingly effective, extremely economical, and undoubtedly humane in the long run, unquote. The reason for calling it humane in the long run is that the airstrikes can quickly and effectively surrender insurgencies, preventing them from escalating and causing greater damages.

So this approach was considered more humane by British colonial administrators as it minimized the overall impact of the conflict, including the deaths of the people. A similar bombing strategy based on similar doctrine was adopted by other European nations such as France and Germany to suppress rebellions in their colonies too. As a result of this success in the colonies,

the doctrine of bombing non-combatants civilians was reconfirmed by media leaders for future wars against other modern nations. Future wars means World War II. But let's back up a little. There was already a theoretical precedent for employing aerial bombardments to police colonial territories before the First World War. In 1910, the British writer R. P. Hearn published a book entitled Airships in Peace and War. Hearn's idea was beyond the scope of the day's technology. But given that deploying the military costs time and money, bombing the enemy from the air could yield cheap and

immediate results. In savage lands, the moral effect of such an instrument of war is impossible to conceive. The appearance of the airship would strike terror into the tribes. And in addition, one could avoid the awful waste of life occasioned to white troops by expeditionary work. Two years later, the French and then the Spanish put this idea into action. Sven Lindquist described the bombing this way. When the French sent six planes to perform police actions in Morocco in 1912, the pilots chose large targets, villages, markets, grazing herds, otherwise their bombs would miss.

And when the Spaniards began bombing their part of Morocco the next year, they used German cartouche bombs filled with explosives and steel balls, bombs that were especially made not to focus their effect, but to spread it to as many living targets as possible. strategies developed in bombing the colonies which show up again in the Second World War. You press a button and death flies down. One second, the bomb hanging harmlessly in your racks,

completely under your control. The next, it is hurtling down through the air and nothing in your power can revoke what you have done. How can there be writhing mangled bodies? How can this air around you be filled with unseen projection? It is like listening to a radio account of a battle on the other side of the earth. It is too far away, too separated to hold reality. Charles Lindberg, pilot, first solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic in 1927.

Combat pilot, Second World War After the First World War, Winston Churchill was tasked with reducing the British military to peacetime levels. Various services were told, prove your indispensability or get axed. To demonstrate the vital need for the RAF, its commander-in-chief Hugh Trenchard set his sights on Mohamed A. Hassan, the so-called Mad Mullah in Somaliland. The British had tried to get rid of Hussein over multiple expeditions but failed, so the new plan was to deploy two divisions for a year to oust him. It would cost millions of pounds to build the roads, railroads, and military base necessary to occupy the country. But Commander Trenchard proposed something that could save both time and

money. The 12 airplanes and 250 men that were being sent to bomb the Russian city of Zaditzen, later Stalingrad, could go first to Somaliland. Sven Lindquist recounts the story this way in his book, a history of bombing. The first bomb almost put an end to the war. It killed Muhammad's counselors, and he himself had his clothes singed by the explosion. The next bombardment killed his sister and several of his immediate family members.

Then for two days, the British bombers attacked Muhammad and his family while they fled through the desert like hunted animals. Finally, they were forced to give up. Total time required. a week instead of a year. Total cost, 77,000 pounds. Chicken shit, compared to what the army had asked for. Churchill was delighted. He persuaded the government to maintain the Air Force out of purely economic considerations. By 1920, the British, like other colonial powers, had already been bombing what they often referred to as restless natives for years. Batons on India's northwestern border in 19,

1915, revolutionaries in Egypt and the Sultan of Darfur in 1916, Massoud tribesmen on the Indo-Afghan border in 1917, Dhaka, Jalalabad, and Kabul were bombed in 1919 by British squadron chief Arthur Harris. Chief Harris dropped a 10-kilo bomb on the Afghan King's palace, claiming it was what won the war. That same year, the RAF bombed Egyptians who were agitating for independence. as well as rebels in the Transjordan. Arthur Harris went on to become head of bomber command in the Second World War. With Iraq, it was different, though. There, the British were trying to control a population that had been living for years under Ottoman rule,

and once free, definitely did not want to live under the British. The assignment for the RAF was to, quote, control without occupation. The first report from Baghdad describes the sea, of chaos and confusion among the civilians after an air raid. The dispatch said many of them jumped into a lake, making a good target for the machine guns. A 1922 RAF memorandum lists a series of available means of inflicting terror on populations it wanted to control. Timed bombs, phosphorus bombs, crow's feet intended to maim humans and livestock, whistling arrows, crude oil used to pollute drinking water and liquid fire, a forerunner to napalm.

I'm Mark Selden. What do I do? Well, I've taught at a number of universities in the states, most recently at the State University of New York at Binghamton. I was the founder of the Asia-Pacific Journal that works on contemporary affairs and historical affairs in the Asia-Pacific. strategic bombing, which was the primary American strategy in the early years of World War II and before that as well, basically attempts to destroy an enemy's military capacity. How do you do that? You destroy military bases. You attempt to destroy industries supportive of the war effort, such as factories that build airplanes. and you focus on the military capacity of the enemy. Area bombing refers to the attempt to destroy cities and other large territorial areas that have the effect of destroying the enemy population, and specifically the civilian population,

as well as any military personnel that happened to be in the area. So this means you attempt to take out entire cities, or it could mean that you'd attempt to take out entire areas. For example, in the Vietnam War, area bombing frequently was the countryside, and it would use napalm to destroy the capacity of the enemy to survive. Far away across the world in southwest China, there are Japanese planes over Kunming. The first area bombing was conducted by the Japanese. in China in the years 1937 to 45. This is the period of Japan's invasion of China. And that story can begin with Japanese area bombing in China, particularly in Shanghai and later in Chongqing. The United States, interestingly, as we look as World War II proceeds, the United States staunchly

stuck with strategic bombing until 1943 to 1945. And it first broke with this in the European theater. Britain and Germany were both bombing the hell out of their respective cities earlier. And the United States held back from participating this, even as it was allied with Britain and other powers. But at the Battle of Hamburg in 1943, the United States joined Britain. And this had a quaint name for it. It was called Gomorrah.

And the Brits went in and destroyed the city with tens of thousands killed. But this was the first major battle that the United States Air Force joined in. Previously, the Air Force leadership insisted that the best bang for the buck, so to speak, hinged on using your aircraft to target major military targets. But with Gomorrah, and then two years later, in I guess February, 1945, at Dresden, this was the second major city that the U.S. and the Brits together demolished, again with large loss of life. Well, what's the point of doing this? The idea is that you inflict so much damage on the enemy that they will surrender. Over the course of the war, the United States, which had at first refused to participate in this kind of attack, called area bombing, shifted its position closer to that of the British.

When the U.S. started bombing in Japan, it was from the very beginning they conducted the indiscriminate bombing. The U.S. Army Air Force began the bombing campaign of Japan from late 1944, and according to Curtis LeMay, commanding General of the 21st Bomber Command in the Pacific bombing civilian was essentially in order to break Japanese morale, and this was the quickest way to force them to surrender. And at the same time, it was the most efficient method to minimize, casualties their own man, that's what the Curtis LeMay thought about. In this sense, LeMay and other US media leaders inherited the idea of strategic bombing that was originally advocated by the RAF leaders in World War I.

So you can see the direct link between the RAF in World War I and the US bombing of Japan. According to this concept, the killing of enemy civilians is justifiable, no matter how cruel the method. Indeed, it is indispensable to hastening surrender. So U.S. leaders, however, in their public pronouncement, would continue to insist that their bombs were directed towards a strategic target. During the war, many private homes in major Japanese cities housed small factories, which produced various parts for the nation's arsenal. For the U.S. military, this fact transformed entire cities into legitimate targets, regardless of the human cost.

They knew that if they bombed these small family factories, then it becomes totally indiscriminate bombings. That's what happened, exactly. So, for example, consider also the President Harry Truman's announcement immediately after the bombing of Hiroshima. He said, the quote, the world will note

that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, immediately base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid in so far as possible the killing of civilians, unquote. Truma made this statement immediately following the instant killing of 70,000 to 80,000,

civilian residents of Hiroshima. By the end of 1945, 140,000 residents of the city would have died from the bomb, mainly the radiation sickness. In the end, almost 400 Japanese cities, towns, and villages were destroyed by firebombing and two by atomic bombing, causing one million casualties, including more than half a million deaths. The majority being, again, the civilians, particularly women and children? I think the main thing is that you never talk about bombing civilians. The Japanese didn't talk about bombing civilians, and the Americans didn't either, and neither the British or the Germans.

They just developed strategies in which the targeting was the city as a whole. And of course, cities often do have military targets, too, like factories, like centers that have oil supplies and other supplies. So I think the main strategy for countries making the shift is a silent strategy. So when assessing cases of indiscriminate bombing, I think it is important to consider the history of the justification for mass killing of civilians. This practice dated back to World War I, as I explained, and the logic behind it has always been that it would demoralize the enemy and hasten their surrender. The fundamental question is why this theory, justifying, mass killing has persisted for so long, even after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So it is important to ask, why this theory, justifying, mass killing has persisted for so long, even after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So it is important to ask why this strategy was used during the Korean and Vietnam wars after World War II and why valuations of it are still being used to some extent to justify now it's so-called the collateral damage of precision bombings in wars such as those in Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iraq, and now Gaza. Here, everything human had been obliterated. For example, the expressions on the faces of the corpses had been replaced by something model-like, automaton-like.

The limbs had a sort of bewitching rhythm, as if rigor-mortis had frozen them even as they thrashed about in agony. With the electric wires jumbled and fallen and the countless splinters and fragments, one sensed a spastic design amid the nothingness. But seeing the streetcars overturned and burned, apparently in an instant,

and the horses with enormous swollen bellies lying on their sides, one might have thought one was in the world of surrealistic paintings. Even the tall camphor trees had been torn up, roots and all. The gravestones, too, had been scattered. The Asano Library, of which only the outer shell remained, had become a morgue. The road still gave off smoke here and there, and was filled with the stench of death. Haratamiki Summer Flowers, 1947. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast, heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio,

across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National and around the world at cbc.ca.ca.com. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayyed. If you experienced harm while admitted to a federal Indian hospital between 1936 and 1981, you might be eligible for compensation. The claims period is now open and free supports are available to help you submit your claim. Learn more at www.I.H.settlement.ca. Or call 1-888-592-9101.

Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson, host of the Daily News Podcast Frontburner. I got this really cool note from a listener the other day. They wrote, I find myself torn between the desire to understand the world around me and the anxiety associated with the easily access barrage of terrible news. And yet, amidst the torrent, there lies a sweet spot called Front Burner. This is exactly why we make the show. So you don't get swept away in a tide of overwhelming news. So follow Front Burner wherever you get your podcasts. The historian Marilyn B. Young wrote about American use of air power as a special language. It was both a language to reassure American allies.

and the language that incorporated one very crucial silence. Behind all the bombs dropped was the sound of the one that could drop but did not. Young was interested in the question of why bombing was so attractive to American policymakers. The answer, she wrote, begins with a fallacy. World War II ended in a blaze of bombing. Ergo, bombing ended the war. After World War II, the doctrine of strategic.

strategic bombardment, like the doctrine of the resurrection of the body in Christianity, had to be accepted on faith. In the early morning of Thursday, March 20, 2003, bombs began falling on Baghdad. Shock and awe, as it was called by the U.S. military. The static skyline lit up as explosions occurred every few seconds, sometimes a giant fireball, sometimes distant smoke. In the short, quiet moments in between, alarms were. rang out in the distance. The American journalist Anthony Shadidde described the bombardment this

way in his book Night Draws Near. Perhaps the most terrifying sensation of life in a city under siege are the sounds of the bombers. In a siege, one's hearing becomes exquisitely sensitive. Much of the time, one waits for the faint sound, the whisper that signals the plane's arrival. The entire body listens. Every muscle tightens and one stops breathing. Time slows in the interim.

My name is Asmath Khan and I'm an investigative reporter with the New York Times and a professor of journalism at Columbia University. So I've spent much of the last eight years investigating the U.S.-led air war against ISIS, which began

in late 2014 as the United States put together a coalition of countries, essentially to attack ISIS targets in Iraq and Syria. And they primarily did this through airstrikes in the assistance of partner forces who were on the ground in Iraq and Syria, attempting to expel the Islamic State or the so-called Islamic State from these areas that they controlled, where they had essentially victimized the civilian population, brutalized minority communities, and threatened attacks against other parts of the world. U.S. Air War in this time period was incredibly intense

and had a much higher civilian casualty rate than what our government told us. At the time, they were relying primarily on intelligence from partner forces on the ground and largely from what they were observing from the air, what they could see from a distance. We didn't have many troops on the ground. We didn't have reporters on the ground in these areas that ISIS controlled. It was incredibly dangerous for journalists to try to operate in ISIS health territory. And what's more, ISIS had a monopoly on the Internet.

So ordinary people weren't filming and uploading videos to the same extent as we've seen in other wars, such as Ukraine, or the current war in Gaza, for example. So there was limited information coming to light to the public and also just very little effort, I think, to contest the narratives that our government, the U.S. government, and the coalition of countries it was leading, was providing the public about how successful that air war was or how precise. And that was language they used frequently was that this was the most precise air war in the history of warfare, that it would be studied for years to come for its precision, when in reality the true civilian toll was much higher, not just magnitudes higher of a degree of two or three or four.

According to my reporting, the true death rate on the ground was 31 times higher than what the U.S. government told us. The U.S. government's policy was that any time they received an allegation of an airstrike causing a civilian casualty, it was investigated. They would claim that one out of every 157 air strikes resulted in a civilian death. That's less than 1%. It's 0.6%. For the ground sample that I conducted in Iraq, visiting a cluster-based sample of more than 100 air strikes, in three territories formerly held by ISIS, a sociologist, a sociologist. and I found that one in five airstrikes was resulting in a civilian death. That's not

three times higher. That's not ten times higher. That's 31 times higher than what our government was telling us. And we believe that was likely an undercount. We were not sampling the most destroyed territories of West Mosul Iraqa. There's a number of reasons

we undercounted, including the fact that we weren't counting the children of ISIS fighters whose identities we couldn't verify. and even so the rate we found was 31 times higher than what the U.S. government was claiming. Asmah Khan began her investigation by visiting strike sites in Iraq where civilians had been killed. She'd then asked the military about each incident. And they would come back with sort of, well, here's what we believed we were hitting, or here's where our nearest airstrike was and what we thought the target that we went after.

And for one case, I was able to get a record. and it was the story of a man named Bassem Razzo. And Bassem one night in September of 2015 wakes up, and he looks above him and he sees the stars over Mosul. The roof of his house is gone. He can feel like a strange taste in his mouth, maybe metallic. And he calls out for his wife and she doesn't respond. And he learns later in the hospital that his house has been hit,

that his wife, his daughter, his brother, and his nephew. were all killed, and the U.S.-led coalition uploaded a video of that airstrike to YouTube and called their homes a car bombing facility. And he couldn't believe this, and he sets out on this quest for justice. And he happens to have connections. He used to live in the United States. He has a cousin who's a tenured professor at Yale. He arranges a meeting at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, and he puts forward his case, and it goes nowhere.

He tells them what happens, and that goes nowhere. and that was around the time, a little after that was when I met him. And so I began to investigate the airstrike that killed his relatives and went after the records. She put in a freedom of information request and asked for expedited processing. Since the U.S. military had posted a video of targeting Bassem's home claiming it was a facility for making car bombs, Bassem lived in fear that a rogue militia might retaliate against him. It took a few months, but her request. was eventually processed, and she finally got the first record in hand.

And it was so revealing. It showed that they'd done maybe an hour and 45 minutes of surveillance. In that time, they didn't see women or children and considered that evidence of ISIS' presence, even though they were filming during the hottest hours of the day. They said that they didn't see anyone brandishing weapons, but ISIS does not, quote, obviously brandish weapons so as to go undetected. They said that they saw someone opening a gate to the home, and that was an ISIS tactic, technique, and procedure.

And most stunningly of all, this assessment essentially said, they may have confused this home for a target next door, where, in fact, Bassem would tell me ISIS had operated and left, like, I think, weeks earlier. And so when I got that document and I showed it to Bassem, and I realized just how startlingly different their assessment had been with the reality on the ground, I wanted more of these.

Hamid Khan began filing for access to more strike records in 2016. She ultimately applied for 1,300. But by 2018, she hadn't received any of them. So she sued the U.S. Department of Defense and U.S. Central Command. And so I began getting them in batches. Every month or every other month, I would get 300 or so pages for years. And that lawsuit is still ongoing. I'm still getting records for that. It's nearing completion. But by 2020, I had received more than 5,000 pages of records related to these 1,300 or so assessments. And, you know, I would analyze them. You know, I would read them.

I would try to visit the sites of as many of them as I could on the ground. And it was stunning. And not one of those records and not one of these 1,300 plus assessments. Was there a finding of wrongdoing or disciplinary action for anyone involved? Over and over again, there were instances of confirmation bias, where they might see something and see it as a threat, five guys on motorbikes driving in the formation of an ISIS attack. We're just five guys on motorbikes. At one point, there was a record where they said they saw a man dragging a heavy object into a building. And then later on, upon closer review, said it was similar to how a child would look in stature standing next to an adult.

There were instances in which somebody would identify a weapon in someone's arms, and actually there was no weapon. This happened again and again, and oftentimes the video also was not clear. But these records were full of recurring problems that I realized were going unstudied. And unstudied with the information they have from the assessments they've conducted, but even more worryingly, unstudied on the ground. There was no attempt to try to do ground investigation. There was one example where they visited the site of an airstrike and another where they interviewed survivors. But two cases and 1,300 plus allegations, they weren't trying to understand what was going wrong and why. For everyone I sat down with, I would always ask them, if you could tell the U.S. military or if you could tell the people who did this anything, what would you want to say?

And I've had people scream. I've had them shout. I've had them wail. I've had them cry. I've had them say nothing. I would tell them nothing. But for almost all of them, that is the extent of restitution that they've gotten. At the time, none of them had ever been contacted, with the exception of Basim Raza who had initiated that process. None of them had ever been contacted by the U.S. military or by the coalition about their losses. None of them knew that documents or assessments existed about their cases. None of them knew about the potential payment process. But one of the highest offers made was actually to Bassem Razo. And Basim, who lost four of his family members, was made an offer of $15,000. And he's so offended.

And he said, you know, is this what an Iraqi life is worth to you? Are we animals? And so he rejected it. But there are many people for whom, like, even the $2,000 would be very meaningful. And those payments aren't happening. The United States military used to make them quite regularly during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan of the odds, largely because we had troops on the ground. Payments, especially of that amount, are one thing, but most people I spoke to wanted apologies, and they wanted to know why this happened. During the U.S.-led air campaign in Iraq and Syria, it was difficult to get even a peek into the daily lives of ordinary people. In Gaza, it's almost the opposite.

Every day, Gazans share multiple pictures and videos documenting how their lives have been upended. They talk about what they've lost. And remember those who've been killed. She worked as a trainer in the field of soft skills, and she worked in empowering women and youth in the political and social work. She worked with many universities because she was smart as a management and close to the students too.

Oh my God, the bombing school, really close. And she was my trainer in the field of debate. We won a lot of debates together. She was very clever. Heba was besaged for weeks in her home and then she was killed in an Israeli strike with her five years old daughter, jury and some family members. It's a sad intellectual capital loss. She could have built Gaza if we survived after a decision inside like anyone else. And Hibah was such a good, a great friend, and she was killed.

Satellite data shows the war in Gaza is the most destructive in recent history. More than the raising of Aleppo in Syria. more than the destruction of Maripul in Ukraine, or more proportionally than the Allied bombing of Germany in the Second World War. The airstrikes in Gaza have killed more civilians than in the U.S.'s three-year campaign against the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. The Israeli military drops 1,000 and 2,000-pound bunker-buster bombs on densely populated areas. Up to half those bombs are unguided. It may also be the first war where targeting is driven by artificial intelligence. The distance between the bomber and the people below renders them anonymous.

AI makes them even more abstract, rendering those on the ground into a set of tags and features fed into Israel's targeting programs that have names like The Gospel, Lavender, and Where's Daddy? The Israeli-Palestinian magazine 972 recently published two investigations, of Israel's targeting practices, which have, in six months, killed more than 34,000 Palestinians, up to two-thirds of them, women and children. Their investigation revealed that the Israeli military uses the broadest criteria for identifying targets, feeding data collected from its vast surveillance of Palestinians to create what it calls kill lists. There's virtually no human oversight to determine whether a targeted individual is, fact, legitimate, and no post-strike investigation to determine who was killed. The article states,

The Israeli army systematically attacked the targeted individuals while they were in their homes, usually at night while their whole families were present, rather than during the course of military activity. According to the sources, this was because, from what they regarded as an intelligence standpoint, it was easier to locate the individuals in their private houses. Additional automated systems, including one called Where's Daddy, were used specifically to track the targeted individuals and carry out bombings when they had entered their family's residences. They just found its whole one body under the rubles.

So I'm here now when there are the bala. The homes behind me and in front of me were bombed two days ago. causing a lot of people to be killed and to be injured. There were innocent people in their homes. No one was like... The children are still under the Ankaid. Omar, Abdullah, and Masa. This translates to the children are still under the rubble.

Omar, Abdullah, and Masa. In the first six days after October 7th, after the Hamas attacks, The Israeli Air Force announced that it had dropped 6,000 bombs into the Gaza Strip. 6,000 bombs in six days into a tiny strip of land. In no month in both Iraq and Syria did the U.S.-led coalition of a number of countries drop that many bombs, not in a single month. I think the highest month was the war in Raqa, and they dropped 5,000 bombs in one month. So to drop 6,000 into a tiny strip of land in six days when you don't have the arsenal of aircraft that that entire coalition of countries did means you cannot be vetting your targets in any depth, conducting lengthy pre-strike surveillance or post-strike battle damage assessments. You simply cannot, if you're working at that pace, it is nearly physically impossible to do so.

So when I read the 972 magazine investigation and saw military officials being quoted, you know, Israeli officials being quoted talking about the intensity of that campaign and the use of technology and AI, I was not surprised because to conduct something at that pace, 6,000 bombs in six days by Israel's own admission, into a tiny strip of land by a single military, that is stunning. That is nearly impossible if you were doing the kinds of pre-strike surveillance or post-strike assessment that modern militaries claim to do. In response to 972 magazine's investigations, the Israel Defense Forces maintained, quote, the targets are legitimate targets for attack in accordance with the conditions set forth in IDF directives and international law. In discriminated bombing across Japan by the U.S. forces for about eight weeks,

months in in 1945 killed some 560,000 people. In addition, about half a medium people survived and 70% of whom were children and women. It was like a Gaza situation now. Many of the children were orphaned and the women were widowed. They endured many years of hardship after the war. Sadly, this tragedy has been repeated numerous times worldwide in the last 100 years or so, and we as humans have miserably failed to prevent it. In 2008, H.G. Weld published the novel called The War in the Air. This novel predicted the destructive power of bombers on both the human body and mind of the enemy. It explores the potential consequences of technological advancement in warfare and offers criticism of weapon development.

The novel contains an astute prediction of the future. The story depict a world where technological progress makes politics and morality irrelevant. This leads to the destruction of modern civilization by bombers, resulting in worldwide starvation and political uprising. They also suggest that the aerial bombardment would strip human beings of their moral and, and ethical character. It was only very slowly that Bert got hold of this idea, that the whole world was at war,

that he formed any image at all of the crowded countries south of these Arctic solitudes stricken with terror and dismay as these newborn aerial navies swept across their skies. He was not used to thinking of the world as a whole, but as a limitless hinterland of happenings beyond the range of his immediate vision.

War, in his imagination, was something, a source of news and emotion that happened in a restricted area called the seat of war. But now, the whole atmosphere was the seat of war, and every land, a cockpit. This is really interesting novel. I mean, the prediction of he erubulated in 1908 was really astonishing.

I think subsequent history has shown that this is clear. This is a fact. So it's important to remember that indiscriminate bombing and mass killing of civilians have never brought an end to any war. In fact, such a strategy typically strengthen the resistance. There is abundant in evidence to support this. So I don't know how, you know, we can stop this indiscrimin, but it's very difficult to question how to stop it. But somehow it's true that the bombing civilians and killing civilians actually destroyed our moral,

especially the moral of politicians and military leaders. This episode was produced by Nahid Mustafa, readings by Matthew Laysen Ryder and Lisa Godfrey. Special thanks to historian Yuki Tanaka, Mark Selden, Senior Research Associate in the East Asia Program at Cornell University, and Asmah Khan, Professor of Journalism at Columbia University. Parts of this episode are based on the History of Bombing by Sven Linkfest, Gaza audio from Bisan Oda, Mota Zazza, and Nur Hadazin.

Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso, technical production, Danielle Duval. The acting senior producer is Lisa Godfrey. The executive producer of ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayad. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.