Chris Osieck and Nilo Tabrizy write:

At least 1,700 civilians have been killed since the start of the U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on Iran, according to the U.S.-based Human Rights Activist News Agency. An analysis of a series of strikes by the U.S.-Israeli coalition reveals a pattern of civilian harm — specifically, a number of attacks on infrastructure and facilities in densely populated urban areas, often when bystanders were present.

Across multiple verified cases in Karaj and Tehran, New Lines found that initial strikes were followed by additional explosions that occurred in close proximity to civilian activity, or that affected sites were seemingly different from the military descriptions provided by the U.S. and Israel.

The open-source evidence indicates a distinct pattern: airstrikes causing damage beyond their stated targets, disproportionately affecting the surrounding environments and harming civilians in the immediate vicinity.

“Centcom [U.S. Central Command] said they hit 13,000 targets in just over a month. We’ve been documenting U.S. wars for more than a decade now. In the most intense period of fighting in the war against ISIS [the Islamic State group] — that second-phase, really intense heavy fighting period — they were averaging about 800 targets a month, across both Iraq and Syria,” said Emily Tripp, the executive director of Airwars. “There’s a certain inevitability about [civilian] harm given the scale.”

Taken together, the cases we documented reveal that the U.S. and Israel have employed so-called “double-tap strikes” in their campaign in Iran. The attacks, which involve aircraft bombing a site and then conducting further strikes, usually after civilians and medical personnel have gathered to rescue survivors, have been a consistent feature of the Russian war on Ukraine and Israel’s war on Gaza, and the tactic was repeatedly used by Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria. Experts say the strikes show a callous disregard for civilians by the U.S. and Israel, and may show a pattern of seeking to inflict harm on Iranians. [Continue reading…]