For a Third Year, One Military Caused the Majority of the World's Civilian War Deaths

For the third year in a row, a single military was responsible for the majority of all civilian deaths caused by explosive weapons anywhere in the world. According to the Explosive Weapons Monitor 2025, released in June by the civil-society network INEW using data from the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), Israeli armed forces accounted for more than 55 percent of global civilian fatalities from explosive weapons in 2025 — more than 12,500 people, the overwhelming majority of them in Gaza.

The monitor is emphatic that its counts are floors, not ceilings: the true civilian toll, it writes, is “almost certainly an underrepresentation,” with deaths uncounted in places the data never reached.

That figure is a decline — Israeli forces were linked to 76 percent of such deaths in 2023 and 71 percent in 2024 — but the monitor is explicit about why the share fell. It was not a change in conduct so much as a change in tempo: the ceasefires in Gaza and Lebanon slowed the rate at which civilians were being killed, without ending it.

A fifth fewer deaths — because the guns went quieter

Globally, the report records more than 22,600 civilian deaths from explosive weapons in 2025, a 21 percent drop from the more than 28,600 recorded in 2024. The monitor attributes that decrease overwhelmingly to the truces in Gaza and Lebanon. In Palestine alone, recorded civilian fatalities fell from 19,561 in 2024 to 12,136 in 2025 — still, by a wide margin, the highest national toll on the planet.

The corollary is sobering: strip out the effect of those ceasefires and the picture worsens. Civilian deaths attributed to every other actor combined rose by about 7 percent, driven by renewed or intensifying conflict in Myanmar, Russia's war in Ukraine, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

The war moved off the front page, not out of the data

Even with fewer deaths, the destruction of the systems civilians depend on intensified. Attacks in which explosive weapons disrupted humanitarian aid rose 52 percent to 2,541 incidents — and roughly 90 percent of them were in Palestine. At least 108 aid workers were killed by explosive weapons over the year, with Gaza the deadliest place in the world to deliver relief. Attacks affecting education rose 64 percent. About two-thirds of all incidents harming civilians involved air-launched weapons — airstrikes and drones.

The Gulf dimension

For the Gulf, the report is a data-backed vindication of an argument Doha has made throughout the war: that a negotiated halt to the fighting is not a concession but the single most effective civilian-protection measure available. The clearest line in the 2025 numbers is that the largest fall in civilian deaths anywhere came from the Gaza ceasefire — the agreement Qatar spent months helping to mediate alongside Egypt and the United States. Diplomacy, not better-targeted bombs, is what moved the figure.

The monitor's authors frame their work around a simple, unfinished goal: bringing into force the international Political Declaration restricting the use of explosive weapons in populated areas. Qatar is among its endorsers. The 2025 data is, in effect, the case for it — written in the arithmetic of who is dying, where, and why the toll only falls when the weapons fall silent.