Collateral damage

With this choice, it was criticized that the term had been used by NATO forces to describe civilian casualties during the Kosovo War, which the jury considered to be an inhuman euphemism.

[17] Military necessity, along with distinction and proportionality, are three important principles of international humanitarian law, governing the legal use of force in an armed conflict.

Luis Moreno-Ocampo, Chief Prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, investigated allegations of war crimes during the 2003 invasion of Iraq and published an open letter containing his findings.

International humanitarian law and the Rome Statute permit belligerents to carry out proportionate attacks against military objectives,[18] even when it is known that some civilian deaths or injuries will occur.

An example is the Great Barrington Declaration, purportedly signed by 3500 medical and other professionals (and mentioned in UK parliament[27] and media[28]) has a FAQ page titled 'Lockdowns and collateral damage',[29] and refers to this phrase several times.

The term has also been borrowed by the computing community to refer to the refusal of service to legitimate users when administrators take blanket preventative measures against some individuals who are abusing systems.

Fisheries are an example of this, where bycatch such as dolphins are called collateral mortality; they are species that die in the pursuit of the legal death of fishing targets, such as tuna.

Ruins from the Allied accidental bombing of the Bezuidenhout in 1945, which killed over 500 Dutch civilians
Tokyo after the massive firebombing attack on the night of 9–10 March 1945, the single most destructive raid in military aviation history. The Tokyo firebombing killed around 100,000 civilians, but the city's industrial productivity—the primary target of the bombing—was cut in half.