U.S. and Israel hitting more targets than any previous campaign, numbers suggest
The first days of bombing in Iran saw far more sites targeted than any recent U.S. or Israeli military campaign, an Airwars analysis has found.
By comparing publicly released targeting figures from both the U.S. and Israeli militaries with historic data, the analysis found the initial days of the campaign hit significantly more targets per day than any campaign in recent decades.
Even in the opening days of Israel’s unprecedented bombardment on Gaza after October 7th, it appears that around half the number of targets were hit compared to the first days in Iran.
The closest paced campaign was the escalated wave of strikes on Lebanon in September 2024, where more than 1,600 Hezbollah targets were declared hit by Israel on the first day – but the rate dropped significantly after that.
While comparisons between conflicts are often imperfect as militaries release varying amounts and types of information, this Iran campaign appears to be vastly outpacing any other recent U.S. air war.
In 100 hours the U.S. and Israel declared hitting more targets in Iran than in the first six months of the U.S.-led Coalition’s bombing campaign against the so-called Islamic State, the analysis found.
While the rate of civilian harm cannot be solely predicted by the number of targets hit, initial indications suggest it has been high – particularly with U.S. targets correlating with heavily populated areas. Within the first round of targets, a girls’ school was hit adjacent to an Iranian military base, with Iranian health and state media reporting a death toll of at least 175 people, including dozens of children.
Strikes may increase further in the coming days, with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declaring on Thursday that the U.S. campaign was “accelerating, not decelerating.”
The rate of strikes may also raise questions about the role of AI in targeting, with reports that the controversial Claude AI has been integrated throughout the U.S. military to speed up target selection.
Number of targets struck so far
There are at least three types of information about targeting that militaries have released in previous conflicts: the number of targets hit, the number of strikes, and the number of munitions/bombs dropped.
While these metrics sound similar, they are totally distinct. A single strike would often include multiple munitions released, and a single target could be hit by multiple strikes. There is no universal standard of what information militaries should release and there are no agreed upon ‘typical’ ratios – for example, that one strike typically means a certain number of munitions dropped.
So far in this war, the U.S. and Israel are releasing different amounts and kinds of information, making it a challenge to get a unified metric for comparison.
The United States has largely highlighted the number of targets hit. On Wednesday the U.S. military declared it had hit more than 2,000 targets in four days.
In its own ‘100 hour’ statement, the Israeli military said it had hit at least 300 defense systems across the country, 750 targets in Tehran alone, and “hundreds” of command and control targets. And after the first day of the campaign, the IDF announced it had hit 500 targets in a single day. As rates of fire have held roughly constant, a conservative estimate would suggest this has continued as a daily rate – so also around 2,000 targets in the first four days.
In terms of strike intensity, on Wednesday the Israeli military said it had dropped more than 5,000 bombs and on Thursday declared it had carried out 2,500 strikes. On average it appears the IDF has been dropping about 1,000 munitions per day.
As such, the two militaries combined were striking a conservative estimate of 1,000 targets per day in the first days of the conflict – around 4,000 over the first 100 hours of the campaign.
How does this compare with other bombing campaigns?
Airwars monitors civilian harm in conflicts across the globe, as well as munitions use on our sister site the Open Source Munitions Portal. As part of that process, we monitor and archive official statements by militaries – including in relation to munitions use. We have used some of these previous figures to provide comparative analysis.
Gaza
After the October 7th attacks in Israel, the country launched one of the largest bombing campaigns of the 21st century in Gaza. The Israeli military did not provide daily target numbers, but on November 1, after 23 days, announced it had struck 11,000 targets.
Assuming those targets were roughly static per day, that averages around 478 targets per day – or around 1900 over four days. This is less than half the combined number of targets hit by the U.S. and Israel in the first four days of the Iran campaign.
In the first month of the war in Gaza Airwars has documented more than 6,000 civilians likely killed.
Lebanon
The only air campaign where the Israeli or American militaries have claimed a similar number of targets hit was the first few days of a war with the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah in September 2024.
The Israeli military announced it hit 1,600 Hezbollah targets in the first 24 hours, dropping to 280 later that week. By the time a ceasefire was called two months later, the total number of targets announced was 12,500.
Lebanon also borders Israel so the logistics of conducting airstrikes there is significantly more straightforward than those on Iran.
On the first day of the Lebanon escalation alone, Airwars documented at least 53 incidents of civilian harm – with at least 271 civilians likely killed.
U.S. Coalition in Iraq and Syria
In the war against the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria from 2014, the U.S. military led a coalition of states conducting daily airstrikes against the terrorist group.
Six months into the anti-ISIS campaign, the U.S. declared having hit just over 3,000 targets. At the height of the war – in deadly battles like Mosul and Raqqa, the Coalition reported having dropped 500 munitions in a single day.
Iran, Yemen 2025
On June 13, Israel commenced a surprise attack on Iran, kicking off a conflict between Israel and Iran that would last for 12 days. The official Israeli military record of that campaign declared 900 targets struck. This would on average indicate around 75 targets per day. Over the course of the 12 days, Airwars documented more than 200 civilians killed.
Another significant campaign the U.S. launched in 2025 was against the Houthi militant group in Yemen. Dubbed Operation Rough Rider, the U.S. ultimately declared it struck more than 1,000 Houthi targets in the 52-day campaign – an average a little under 20 per day. In that campaign Airwars tracked a minimum of 258 civilians killed.
Older conflicts
The U.S.-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are not directly comparable as they both involved primarily ground troops – rather than airpower alone. The U.S. military said on Wednesday the first 24 hours were roughly “double the scale” of fire power used in the first 24 hours of the 2003 Iraq war. Going further back, in 1991 the U.S. began Operation Desert Storm with strikes on 150 discreet targets.
Airwars collated all official U.S. strike data for the period 2001-2021 in a report on the so-called Forever Wars.
What does this say about rates of civilian harm?
It is very hard to extrapolate estimates of civilian harm directly from the number of munitions dropped.
The types of targets struck, population density in the area, the military’s rules of engagement and the quality of military intelligence are among the many factors that may have an impact on how likely civilians are killed or injured.
But it is clear civilians are being killed. On Wednesday, the pro-democracy Iranian documentation group HRANA reported that more than 1,100 civilians killed across the country.
One factor that has been repeatedly linked to high rates of harm in conflicts globally is population density – the more people that live in an area that has been targeted the more likely it is that civilians will be harmed. On Wednesday, the U.S. released a rough map of targets has hit so far. Airwars mapped those strikes onto a map of population density in Iran (see chart below). The targets map heavily onto the highest populated areas.
AI speeding up targeting
Before October 2023, it was rare for air forces to declare hitting more than 250 targets in a single day. However, the Israeli military has often more than doubled that in Gaza – and hit more than 1,600 targets in a single day in Lebanon.
This has, according to reports in the Israeli media, been facilitated by extensive use of AI in targeting. Prior to October 2023, an attack rate of 100 to 200 targets per day “led to a situation in which the Israeli Air Force had no targets of military value left,” the Israeli magazine +972 found. But the use of an AI-powered target system dubbed “Habsora” (“The Gospel”) has allowed the military to identify targets far faster over a long period of time. The magazine reported there was limited human oversight, with the AI-selected targeting only being very quickly reviewed by an operator before the strike was conducted.
The U.S. military has also been using AI in targeting in the conflict in Iran. The Washington Post reported that Claude AI, built by Anthropic, is widely embedded in the targeting process in this conflict, despite an ongoing dispute between Anthropic and the Department of Defense.
The exact ways in which AI is feeding into U.S. targeting remain unclear, but the rates at which the U.S. has been able to declare targets in Iran suggest that artificial systems are likely feeding into U.S. target banks.