Sources on security incidents and civilian casualties

Sources on security incidents and civilian casualties

Data of the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project (ACLED)3 has been used for information on security events and fatalities.

ACLED is a project that collects, analyses and maps information on ‘dates, actors, locations, fatalities, and types of all reported political violence and protest events around the world’.4 The EUAA downloaded the ACLED curated data files on Middle East, including Lebanon, on 26 September 2025, which are used in this report.

ACLED records six event types: battles, explosions/remote violence, violence against civilians, protests, riots and strategic developments.5

For the analysis of the security situation in Lebanon in this report, only battles, explosions/remote violence and violence against civilians were included as incidents. ACLED uses the following definitions of these event types:

• Battle: ‘a violent interaction between two politically organized armed groups’ which occur ‘at a particular time and location’, ‘between armed and organised state, non-state, and external groups, and in any combination therein’. There is no fatality threshold for an incident to be included. Sub-events associated with ‘battles’ are designated according to the events outcome and consist of ‘armed clash’, ‘government regains territory’, and ‘non-state actor overtakes territory’.6

• Violence against civilians: ‘violent events where an organized armed group deliberately inflicts violence upon unarmed non-combatants’ and includes attempts at inflicting harm (e.g. beating, shooting, torture, rape, mutilation) or forcibly disappearing civilian actors. Sub-events associated with ‘violence against civilians’ are: ‘sexual violence’, ‘attack’, and ‘abduction/forced disappearance’. It should be noted that all violence against civilians do not fall under this category, as civilians can also be harmed as ‘collateral damage’ in ‘explosions’ and ‘battles’ – in such cases a separate civilian-specific event is not recorded, although the number of fatalities is aggravated.7

• Explosions/remote violence: ‘incidents in which one side uses weapon types that, by their nature, are at range and widely destructive’. The sub-event types associated with ‘explosions/remote violence’ are ‘chemical weapon’, ‘air/drone strike’, ‘suicide bomb’, ‘shelling/artillery/missile attack’, ‘remote explosive/landmine/IED’, and ‘grenade’. 8