Today’s battle spaces are more intertwined with civilian lives than ever before, with high levels of civilian harm accepted and tolerated in the face of often vague justifications of military necessity. Understanding where and how civilians are harmed can provide the ultimate check on this escalating violence: it exposes patterns, revealing blind spots or biases in targeting decisions, and provides an evidence base to check if the legal frameworks and practices intended to protect civilians are fit for purpose. And yet even states ostensibly adhering to the laws of war rarely admit to the civilians they have killed, and almost no active military state has robust mechanisms to account for and respond to harm caused. This failure on the part of states to invest in understanding where and how civilians are being harmed is one of the greatest threats to civilian protection. And yet it is an entirely solvable problem. 

Almost every major kinetic action in conflict zones around the world now comes with a digital footprint: from individuals posting on social media as a cry for help as their family members are trapped under rubble, to relatives in diaspora communities posting about loved ones killed in a single strike, to images posted online by journalists capturing the vast destruction of urban warfare. 

The organisation I work for, Airwars, specialises in collecting all the information available online as it pertains to civilian harm from a given strike across a number of modern battlefields over the last decade. We’ve broken apart the so-called fog of war, and revealed where and how thousands of civilians have been killed across major urban battles like Mosul, Raqqa and Aleppo. From the brutal battlegrounds of border towns in Ukraine, to the unprecedented harm we have documented across Gaza since 2023, we use a systematic methodology to push back at the notion that civilian harm is simply an unhappy and inevitable reality of today’s modern wars, mostly obscured from view in the chaos of modern warfare.

Systematically documenting where and how civilians are being killed in today’s wars offers a particular vantage point: it allows us to spot trends, and risks, to see patterns of action, and also identify areas of change – informing our work advocating for policies and approaches that prioritise the mitigation of civilian harm, rather than treating civilian harm as a tragic byproduct of military necessity. 

Yet while there is a wealth of information about civilian harm events now emanating from almost every battlefield, states have proven themselves either unable or unwilling to engage proactively with this information landscape. Despite killing thousands of fighters in the war against the so-called Islamic State, and supporting the Americans in levelling densely populated cities like Mosul and Raqqa, the United Kingdom, for example, still takes the position that it only has evidence of having killed one civilian in the decade-long campaign.

This failure has repeated itself with deadly consequences over the last two years as Israel’s allies have applied the same inadequate reckoning with the information environment in upholding their own obligations. In comments to Parliament and the public on why the UK has been unable to carry out its own assessments of civilian harm in Gaza, as it should do as part of its own legal obligations under its security partnership with Israel, Secretary of State David Lammy blamed an “opaque and contested information environment”, echoing assertions made by his predecessor.

Since October 7th, a powerful ecosystem of civil society organisations, journalists and researchers have worked tirelessly to make sense of this ‘opaque’ environment. At Airwars, we have identified more than 15,000 incidents of civilian harm, publishing over a thousand cases on our website, with our work feeding into legal cases, UN Commission of Inquiry reports, and award-winning journalism. The evidence pack prepared by the South African legal team for their case at the International Court of Justice was so huge, pictures of the stack of boxes representing the submission were circulated widely online.

There is a through line here: an inability or unwillingness to engage with the truth of the battlefield on the part of states, and invest in mechanisms to understand the human toll of every single kinetic action, has meant that the guardrails in conflict that are intended to protect civilians have been all but pushed aside. 

So where do we go from here? As usual, it is a powerful ecosystem of civil actors who have been leading the march for change, with notable early successes over the last couple of years across advocacy, law and policy that are worth paying attention to. 

One of these efforts includes the November 2022 Political Declaration on Strengthening the Protection of Civilians from the Humanitarian Consequences Arising from the Use of Explosive Weapons in Populated Areas. More than 80 states, including Canada, signed onto this new commitment to better protect civilians following years of sustained pressure from a broad network of documentation groups, diplomats, researchers and advocates. A declaration pushed over the finish line as Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine took hold and forced states to reflect on the norms of war, that failed to curb the widespread use of explosive weapons in conflicts since, it has nevertheless articulated a new set of obligations, should states choose to recognise them. This includes an acknowledgement that “improved data on civilian harm would help to inform policies designed to avoid, and in any event minimise, civilian harm”. This has provided civil society with a tangible roadmap for engaging with states to ensure these commitments are recognised.

Soon after the Declaration was released, and following pressure from a distinct but complementary set of actors, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights produced a groundbreaking report on casualty recording. The UN called on states to “ensure that casualty recording systems and policies are in place and report publicly on all casualties believed to have resulted from hostilities or violence and their circumstances”, noting that casualty recording data “can be used to foster compliance with international law, including by changing practices and behaviour and enhancing training to this end”. 

Both these efforts push the importance of understanding the information environment in conflict to the fore, with a central emphasis on tracking and making sense of where and how civilians are being harmed as a key preventative tool in the face of further violence.

At a time of escalating threats to civilians, and continued unchecked military might, meeting these obligations might be one of the most meaningful ways to push against the steady normalisation of civilian casualties in conflict.

This blog is related to a presentation given by Emily Tripp on October 23, 2025.