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| A Palestinian man rushes a wounded girl to al-Awda hospital in the central Gaza Strip on 24 September. Photograph: Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty |
Thu 25 Sep 2025 20.16 EDT
Civilians in Gaza have sustained injuries of a type and on a scale more usually seen among professional soldiers involved in intense combat operations, research has found.
A study published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) found that some types of wounds – such as burns or injuries to legs – were more common among civilians in Gaza than among US soldiers fighting in recent conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Injured civilians in Gaza are experiencing a pattern of wounds that you would expect in intense combat with military professionals. The distribution and nature [of injuries] is almost the same or worse,” said Bilal Irfan, a bioethicist who conducts research at the University of Michigan and is one of the study’s authors.
The peer-reviewed research, the first of its kind, drew on data provided between August 2024 and February 2025 by dozens of international medical professionals who have worked in Gaza during the nearly two-year-old conflict.
Irfan said the data did not include most fatal injuries. “This is data for the patients who made it to hospital and so survived. We don’t even have a full profile of the serious injuries of those who died without any medical attention,” he said... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/25/civilian-injuries-gaza-combat-soldiers-study