Casualty recording in Lebanon
Recent conflicts
Casualties of recent conflicts in Lebanon’s territory, such as the 2006 and 2024 conflicts between Israel and Hezbollah have been well-documented. This is due to a variety of factors, including the limited duration and geographical scope of the events, together with the fact that journalists and independent investigators – including a United Nations commission of inquiry – were able to gain access to the area promptly. The well-functioning public health and civil registration system also facilitated accurate identification and documentation of the dead.
Information about casualties was published by the Ministry of Public Health on a weekly basis during the conflict, providing a contemporary record of deaths. Both civil society organisations and an international commission of inquiry conducted investigations into casualties promptly after the end of hostilities, and were able to gather and publish substantial detailed records.
The 1975 – 1990 civil war
There is no central record of those killed during the civil war, and estimates of the total number of deaths vary substantially. The Taef Agreement which ended the war prioritised ‘national reconciliation’ over accountability, and in 1991 the Lebanese parliament passed a General Amnesty Law, granting immunity for virtually all crimes committed during the war. This law became one of the main obstacles to truth and justice for victims and their families. Subsequently, Law 434 of May 25, 1995, streamlined the process for declaring missing persons legally dead. Although this had practical benefits in some cases, it also further reduced the opportunity to obtain truth and accountability.
Following ongoing pressure from civil society organisations, including the Committee of the Families of the Kidnapped and Disappeared, in 2000 the government established a Commission on the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared, followed by a second commission in 2001 to investigate cases of those believed still to be alive. In 2005, a joint Lebanese-Syrian commission was created to investigate cases of Lebanese citizens believed to have been disappeared in Syrian prisons. None of these commissions was considered to produce meaningful results. Their work was widely criticized for lack of transparency, limited authority, and a failure to locate or identify victims or mass graves.
In the absence of political will to conduct effective investigations into the deaths and disappearances of the civil war, documentation efforts have been driven primarily by Lebanese civil society organisations. Various civil society memorialisation initiatives have developed in the past twenty years.
Continued pressure from civil society also led to the adoption in 2018 of Law 105 on the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared. This was the first legislation in Lebanon to acknowledge that disappearances had taken place during the civil war. It established the National Commission for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared, mandated to investigate individual cases, locate and exhume graves, and enable identification processes.
Despite some progress, the Commission lacks the financial and logistical support required to carry out its mandate effectively. The government has allocated inadequate funding for exhumations, DNA analysis, data management and other vital tasks. In the meantime, increasing numbers of known mass-grave sites are at risk of being built over and evidence destroyed.
Information on individual casualties
Sources of information about people killed in armed conflict in Lebanon:
Casualties of conflicts since 2006:
During the course of the conflict the Ministry of Public Health published regular updates on the number of fatalities and injuries resulting from the conflict. As of the start of December 2024, after the ceasefire came into effect, it had recorded 4,047 fatalities. The published figures are disaggregated by age (adult/child) and sex, but without names.
Airwars is a UK-based non-profit organisation which conducts remote open-source investigations on civilian deaths in several armed conflicts worldwide. It was established in 2014 and has documented thousands of deaths across multiple conflicts. In September 2024, Airwars began documenting and investigating civilian deaths in the context of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict.
CLDH is a Lebanon-based organisation, established in 1997. It monitors and documents human rights violations in Lebanon, advocates for accountability and provides legal assistance to victims. Since 2019, this has included recording casualties of armed violence, enforced disappearances and extrajudicial killings in Lebanon.
Human Rights Watch identified 1,109 of the people killed in Lebanon during the 2006 conflict. Appendix II of the Human Rights Watch report, Why They Died, contains a full list of the names of the deceased. The list includes Lebanese army personnel, Hezbollah combatants, and civilians.
In August 2006 the UN Human Rights Council mandated an independent commission of inquiry to investigate the killing of civilians during the July-August conflict. Although not a comprehensive record of casualties, the Commission’s final report includes detailed information about a large number of fatal incidents and the victims.
Casualties of civil war 1975 – 1990:
There is no known comprehensive list of fatalities of the civil war, but there are multiple initiatives searching for and documenting the Missing and Disappeared. As of 2025, more than 17,000 people remain unaccounted for.
Act for the Disappeared is a Lebanese human rights organisation established in 2010, with the aim of identifying the fate of those who disappeared during the war and ensuring recognition of victims.
Amongst its activities, Act for the Disappeared has created an online memorial project, Fushat Amal, that provides a personal record of individual missing persons. As of 2025, Fushat Amal contains the stories of 1,002 missing people.
Act for the Disappeared has also created Waynoun, a digital space providing a repository of information about missing persons, and a searchable database and map of significant events of the civil war.
UMAM D&R was established in Lebanon in 2005 as a citizen resource centre, to document and inform debate on the country’s conflict-laden past. One of UMAM D&R’s areas of focus is ondocumenting and memorialising those who went missing during the civil war. As part of this work, UMAM D&R created a database documenting more than 1,250 missing individuals, based on interviews with families across the country. This database, together with a photography exhibition and other materials, is now available at www.memoryatwork.org. Information from the ICRC’s forensic database of missing persons is also incorporated into the project.
