Double Tap and Triple Tap: Successive Airstrikes

The term "double tap" — and "triple tap" when it happens a third time — describes an attack pattern in which a second strike hits the same target shortly after the first, once rescue workers, medics or neighbours are already helping the victims on the ground. The term comes from shooting slang (two rounds fired in quick succession at the same target) and became widely used from 2011 onward in reports on the US drone campaign in Pakistan, though the pattern has since been documented in other theatres and involving other actors.

This article describes the phenomenon from a historical and legal angle: what has been documented, who documented it, and how international humanitarian law assesses it.

What sets a successive strike apart

A two-stage attack is not the same as a prolonged bombardment or a corrected aiming error. What defines the pattern reported by investigators is the time window: minutes between the first impact and the second, precisely the interval in which people rush in to help the wounded. Militarily, it has been justified as a way to hit combatants who return to retrieve bodies or equipment; human rights organizations counter that this calculation makes casualties among rescuers and civilians foreseeable.

It is worth separating two situations that are often conflated. One is a deliberate re-strike against those arriving at the scene. Another, quite different, is unexploded ordnance or the later collapse of a damaged building, which also kills rescuers but does not stem from a decision to strike again. Serious investigations try to distinguish between the two through testimony, munition remnants and timestamps, and do not always manage to do so with certainty.

The case that named the pattern: Pakistan, 2009-2012

The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, based in London, published a 2012 investigation into the CIA's drone campaign in Pakistan's Tribal Areas documenting dozens of secondary strikes against rescue groups and, in several episodes, against funerals. The report "Living Under Drones," produced that same year by the legal clinics of Stanford University and New York University, gathered testimony from residents of North Waziristan describing their neighbours' reluctance to help the wounded for fear of a second strike.

The US administration denied at the time that rescuers were deliberately targeted. The public debate that followed — including reports by UN special rapporteurs Christof Heyns, on extrajudicial executions, and Ben Emmerson, on counter-terrorism, presented in 2013 — centred on the lack of transparency around targeting criteria rather than on specific figures, which remain disputed.

Other documented cases

The pattern is not exclusive to one campaign or country. In Syria, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry documented, between 2016 and 2018, Syrian and Russian air strikes in which a second blow hit Syrian Civil Defence teams deployed after the first; the repeated use of strikes against medical facilities was the subject of specific reports by Physicians for Human Rights.

In Yemen, the UN Group of Eminent Experts and organizations such as Mwatana documented strikes by the Saudi-led coalition in which a second impact hit those arriving at the scene; the most cited case is the attack on a funeral in Sanaa in October 2016, with a second strike minutes after the first and more than a hundred deaths according to the UN.

In Gaza, both during the 2014 offensive and the one launched after the October 7, 2023 attacks, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have documented episodes in which medics, firefighters or neighbours were hit while responding to a freshly bombed site. Israel has maintained in these cases that the targets were combatants or military infrastructure and has denied any policy of targeting rescuers. Independent verification on the ground has been limited, and the figures and responsibilities remain under investigation.

What international humanitarian law says

The law of armed conflict does not prohibit striking the same location twice. What it prohibits is attacking protected persons and carrying out indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks. Three rules apply:

• Medical and rescue personnel: Articles 12 and 15 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I protect medical personnel and units, including civilian rescue services, which may not be attacked unless they commit hostile acts.
• Distinction: Article 48 requires distinguishing at all times between combatants and civilians; civilians helping the wounded do not lose their protected status by doing so.
• Proportionality and precaution: Articles 51 and 57 prohibit attacks whose foreseeable civilian harm is excessive and require precautions to be taken. When it is foreseeable that rescuers will arrive, that harm ceases to be an unforeseeable variable.

The International Committee of the Red Cross has noted, in its study of customary international humanitarian law, that the protection of medical personnel is a customary rule applicable to both international and internal conflicts. The practical consequence of a pattern of successive strikes — regardless of intent — is that rescue is delayed, and with it, mortality among the wounded rises.

The second-order effect: deterring rescue

Beyond the direct casualties, studies on Waziristan and Syria agree on a secondary effect: people stop coming to help. When rescue is perceived as dangerous, the wounded go hours without care and professional teams adopt wait-and-see protocols before entering the area. That delay, hard to quantify, is part of the humanitarian cost that reports attribute to the pattern.

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