Mass Casualty Potential of Qassam Rockets

In spite of the bombardment of southern Israel by thousands of Qassam rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, comparatively few people have been injured or killed. This has led some observers to dismiss Qassams as more of a symbolic than lethal threat. However, southern Israeli towns feature robust civil defense systems that include safe rooms, bomb shelters, early detection alarms, and missile defense. How many casualties would occur were such systems not in place? This article applies shrapnel-casualty and spatial allocation models to the population of the southern Israeli town of Sderot to estimate casualties per randomly aimed rocket fired into the unprepared town; that is, in the absence of civil defense (technical details appear in the Appendix). Assuming an injury radius of only 5 meters from impact, the modeled expected casualties per rocket are between three (best-case) and nine (worst-case) times higher than Sderot's observed casualties-to-rocket ratio, suggesting that Qassam-like terror attacks on unprotected urban locations could prove much more serious than what one would expect based solely on the observed number of casualties in Sderot.