Hengaw, a Kurdish human rights monitoring organisation based in Norway, reported 2,400 people killed in Iran: approximately 310 confirmed civilians and 2,090 military or security personnel. This breakdown is the most granular published by any source tracking the conflict and the only one attempting systematic distinction between civilian and combatant dead.
The implied ratio — 6.7 military or security personnel killed for every confirmed civilian — would, if accurate, place this campaign well below the civilian casualty rates of comparable modern air operations. NATO's 78-day bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 killed an estimated 489–528 civilians (per Human Rights Watch) against roughly 1,000 Yugoslav military personnel — a ratio below 2:1. The US-led Coalition campaign against the Islamic State from 2014 to 2019 produced civilian-to-combatant ratios that varied by theatre but rarely approached 6:1 in the Coalition's favour, according to Airwars monitoring data. A sustained ratio of 6.7:1 across five days and more than 2,000 targets would indicate discrimination between military and civilian targets at a rate with few modern precedents.
Two factors erode that reading. First, Hengaw's 310 confirmed civilians stands against HRANA's 1,097 — a gap of 787 people. The difference is methodological: Hengaw applies a higher evidentiary bar, counting only deaths it can independently categorise with enough information to distinguish civilian from combatant. HRANA counts all civilian deaths reported through its network, a lower threshold that captures more cases with less granularity per case. The true civilian figure falls somewhere in that range, and the range is wide enough to transform the analysis. At 310 civilians against 2,090 military, the ratio is 6.7:1. At 1,097 civilians, it drops to roughly 1.2:1 — a figure consistent with the most destructive air campaigns of the past three decades and far less favourable to Coalition claims of precision.
Second, Hengaw's monitoring infrastructure is strongest in Iran's western Kurdish-majority provinces — Kurdistan, Kermanshah, Ilam — where its networks have documented state violence against Kurdish populations for years. Its reach into Baluchistan, Khuzestan, or the central Iranian plateau, where different communities and communication networks operate, is less established. The strike that killed schoolchildren in Minab — where NPR satellite imagery revealed blast damage extending into adjacent residential blocks beyond the school — sits in Hormozgan province on Iran's southern coast, well outside Hengaw's core coverage area. With Iran's internet at 1% capacity for six days, the deaths that no network can reach are the ones that determine whether the true ratio is closer to 6.7 or to 1.2. That determination cannot be made while the bombs are still falling.
