Collateral damage

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.

"Collateral damage" is a term for any incidental and undesired death, injury or other damage inflicted, especially on civilians, as the result of an activity. Originally coined to describe military operations, it is now also used in non-military contexts to refer to negative unintended consequences of an action.

Critics of use of the term "collateral damage" see it as a euphemism that dehumanizes non-combatants killed or injured during combat, used to reduce the perceived culpability of military leadership in failing to prevent non-combatant casualties.

Collateral damage does not include civilian casualties caused by military operations that are intended to terrorize or kill enemy civilians (e.g., the Blitz or Bombing of Hamburg in World War II and Russian strikes against Ukrainian infrastructure openly described as "retaliatory" and intended to "make towns uninhabitable").

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