Years in the past, I labored for a nonprofit centered on supporting the spouses and youngsters of members of the U.S. army. The individuals I labored with and the individuals we served would typically stumble onto a subject that’s not imagined to be mentioned, the third rail of American militarism: empathy for the households of civilians overseas who’ve been killed in wars led or supported by U.S. armed forces. These individuals and their misplaced family members are usually not combatants who bravely selected to threat their lives for his or her nation. They don’t have the assist that U.S. army households have. And but they abruptly discover themselves dealing with the sorts of broad challenges our group was designed to deal with for American servicemembers and their family members.
Whereas it’s frequent to gloss over, even rejoice, enemy combatants’ deaths, it’s a lot tougher for many of us to dismiss civilian deaths, to imagine they’re both warranted or in any other case acceptable. However this isn’t a given — and there’s cause to suppose the as soon as verboten matter has come to weigh on extra individuals’s minds.
In 2019, when requested in a YouGov/Washington Post poll, a full 36% of respondents within the U.S. indicated that America ought to use airstrikes even if harmless civilians is perhaps killed. Notably, this ballot was taken earlier than Israel’s onslaught in Palestine on the heels of Hamas’ 2023 incursion. Since then, social media and information protection have given billions of individuals a clearer concept of the character and scale of struggle, whereas additionally invoking once-uncommon language round intentionality.
In a 2025 poll by the Economist/YouGov, 43% of respondents mentioned they believed Israel is “committing genocide in opposition to Palestinian civilians.”
If extra persons are extra prepared to confront the realities of civilian dying tolls, then we also needs to be discussing: What function are governments taking part in within the more and more routine killing of civilians? And what ethical obligations do we have now to the grieving households left behind?
Condolence funds, or ex gratia (Latin for “out of grace”), are an instance — and a really uncommon one — of how governments have traditionally used cash to convey sympathy and train good religion within the aftermath of civilian killings. As such, they’re a probably potent type of smooth energy that might be wielded by army superpowers similar to the USA in a interval of warfare that has been marked by a sharp uptick in civilian deaths in world conflicts. I’ve been learning why superpowers haven’t been making these funds.
The psychological trauma from shedding a civilian beloved one to struggle is often immense, even debilitating, not solely due to the often informal nature of the killing however due to the seeming preventability of struggle’s metastasis into civilian areas. The trauma entails not solely the lack of connection to the deceased, but additionally the lack of important monetary and materials sources, and order.
The strategic, albeit delicate, calculation of a condolence fee is that it’ll cool the aggrieved’s animosity and erode the potential wishes for retaliation, maybe even incomes the aggressor favor — or at the least neutrality — of their combat.
The U.S. authorities has had a proper condolence fee system courting again to at the least the Korean Battle, the place roughly two million North and South Korean civilians are estimated to have been killed. In the course of the Vietnam Battle, roughly 1.4 million civilians were killed, many intentionally. Neither struggle, although, yielded important or broad civilian recompense from America.
Lots of America’s allies — and enemies — have stepped up, however not and not using a trace of irony.
In 2016, Israel paid $20 million to the families of 10 Turkish activists whom the Israeli navy had killed throughout a raid of a Gaza-bound help flotilla six years earlier. However its ongoing assault in Gaza has not elicited wide-scale condolence funds.
In accordance with the Gaza Well being Ministry, greater than 67,000 Palestinians, the overwhelming majority of them civilians, have been killed within the destruction between Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, assault on Israel and the ceasefire settlement that went into place on Oct. 5, 2025. The onslaught has led to unprecedented ranges of world animus towards the Israeli authorities, particularly in America, the place attitudes had lengthy been favorable throughout the political spectrum. An extra 1,160 Palestinians have reportedly been killed by Israeli forces for the reason that ceasefire.
There aren’t any indications that Israel has straight compensated any slain civilians’ households.
In distinction, in 2003, Libya reached a belated but large settlement with families of the victims of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, which killed 270 civilians, most Individuals, awarding every sufferer’s household $10 million. And in 2020, Iran’s cupboard approved a plan to pay $150,000 to the heirs of 176 individuals killed on Ukraine Worldwide Airways Flight 752, which was mistakenly downed over Tehran a yr earlier by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The households of civilians killed by the U.S. army are compensated fairly occasionally and with inconsistent expressions of sincerity. In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union reported that the U.S. army had initiated a sequence of $2,500 funds, a then-common cap, to the relations of Iraqis they killed. In a single occasion, U.S. officers approved a $2,500 fee, equal to about $80,000 in an American family, to an Iraqi family for the army’s function within the dying of the household’s daughter, who was killed by American gunfire whereas taking part in in her entrance yard. In 2015, the Intercept reported on the case of an Afghan boy whose household was paid $1,916 by the U.S. after he drowned in an anti-tank ditch.
The incipient stage of this yr’s U.S.- and Israel-led assault on Iran noticed an airstrike that devastated Shajareh Tayyebeh Major Faculty in Minab, Iran, killing more than 150 individuals, principally schoolgirls, with the U.S. as the likely culprit (although it has largely denied responsibility). Within the continuing weeks, Amnesty International and a glut of different human rights enterprises known as for America’s monetary and ethical atonement. None has been forthcoming. And the incident has little question helped the hardline Iranian regime insulate itself from inner criticism, shifting consideration away from the dynamics that precipitated the coordinated bombing of Iran and towards the beautiful lack of civilian lives brought on by the American army.
Even when used, condolence funds aren’t, fairly intentionally, thought of a direct request for forgiveness or duty, not to mention an acknowledgment of criminality, which is frequently what grieving families want to see.
Some individuals with whom I talk about these funds assist the concept however are involved {that a} morally and financially untenable dynamic would then emerge: the actuarialization of civilian life. If condolence funds have been a norm, army budgets may allocate upfront the estimated monetary protection required for the civilian deaths “needing” to accrue in battle. I agree that acknowledging the fact of civilian casualties shouldn’t cross over into accepting such collateral injury as inevitable or acceptable.
Whereas the gravity of civilian losses in wars can’t be, or at the least shouldn’t be, rigidly measured in {dollars} and cents, the consequences of condolence funds will be substantial. A number of research, together with one examining trends in insurgency violence during the Iraq war, have discovered that in communities the place condolence funds have been supplied, rebel violence was considerably decrease. This means the cash is at the least partly attaining considered one of its supposed functions in stymieing retributive actions.
America can and may go additional financially, as different nations have, in illustrating our understanding of the huge toll of struggle. The ethical case is easy. The sensible case is evident as nicely. And maybe a predictable and steep value on any attainable civilian casualties would current a monetary deterrent to the more and more haphazard and dire methods we conduct trendy struggle.
Jerel Ezell is a sociologist and assistant professor on the College of Chicago Medical Middle.
