The UN Counted the Dead in Myanmar’s “Election” — 702 Civilians in Six Months, Most of Them by Air.

On June 22, 2026, the United Nations Human Rights Office released a report covering the six months from August 2025 to the end of January 2026 — the window in which Myanmar’s ruling military staged a long-promised election. In that period, the OHCHR found, credible sources verified a minimum of 702 civilian deaths attributable to the military, among them 224 women and 153 children.

The single largest cause was the sky. Of the verified deaths, 476 were caused by airstrikes — jet fighters, drones, para-motors, and gyrocopters bombing residential areas, displacement camps, schools, and markets across the central regions and Rakhine State. The killing did not pause for the vote. It coincided with it.

This is a foreign-atrocity story with a primary-source spine: an official UN body, named figures, counted bodies. We lay out what the report says, who runs the military that did it, and why the world — in the High Commissioner’s own words — has “seemingly forgotten” the people on the receiving end.

• 702 civilians — verified killed and attributed to the Myanmar military, August 2025–January 2026 · Source: OHCHR report; UN News
• 476 by airstrike — the single largest cause — jets, drones, para-motors and gyrocopters over villages and camps · Source: OHCHR; UPI
• 224 women · 153 children — among the verified civilian dead in the six-month reporting window · Source: OHCHR; UN News
• Dec 28 – Jan 25 — the three-phase junta election the report brackets — held with main opposition parties excluded · Source: Britannica; Al Jazeera
• 5 years — since the February 2021 coup by Senior General Min Aung Hlaing that began the war · Source: HRW; Amnesty International

The report, published by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, brackets a specific six-month period: from August 2025, when the military announced it would hold elections, through the end of January 2026, when the three-phase voting concluded. Within that window, OHCHR said credible sources verified at least 702 civilian deaths — a floor, not a ceiling, since verification in a war zone undercounts. A UN spokeswoman stated plainly that “those 702 are attributable to the Myanmar military.” Most of the deaths were concentrated in the central regions and in Rakhine State.

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“As if the people of Myanmar have not suffered enough at the hands of the military, they have now seemingly been forgotten by those outside the country.”

Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, June 22, 2026

The casualty breakdown is precise. Of the 702, 224 were women and 153 were children. Of the deaths, 476 came from airstrikes — described as “the single largest cause of destruction and suffering.” And 111 of those airstrike deaths, including 43 women and 10 children, occurred before voting even began in December. The bombs were not incidental to the election; they were part of the environment in which it was held.

The defining feature of this phase of the war is air power used against people who cannot shoot back. The military holds a near-total monopoly on the sky, and the OHCHR report describes airstrikes from jet fighters, drones, para-motors, and gyrocopters hitting residential neighborhoods, markets, displacement camps, schools, and religious sites. Human rights monitors have called this pattern of deliberate and indiscriminate attack on civilians a likely violation of international humanitarian law — the language that, in other contexts, precedes the words “war crime.”

The pattern predates this report and corroborates it. UN and rights-group documentation through 2025 recorded airstrikes on schools and shelters across the Sagaing region — the area with the highest concentration of strikes and child casualties — and a December 10 strike on a hospital in Mrauk-U, Rakhine State, on International Human Rights Day. Fortify Rights and Human Rights Watch had been warning for months, ahead of the vote, that the junta was escalating its air campaign rather than easing it.

The six months the report covers are not arbitrary. They span the military’s long-promised return to the ballot box — a three-phase general election held between December 28, 2025 and January 25, 2026. International observers, rights groups, and the UN itself widely derided the vote as a sham: it was held during an active civil war, with the main pro-democracy opposition excluded, in conditions UN officials described as an atmosphere of fear and repression.

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The exclusion was structural. The National League for Democracy — the party of detained Nobel laureate Aung San Suu Kyi, which had won the 2020 election in a landslide — was dissolved in 2023 after refusing to register under party laws it considered illegitimate. Hundreds of people were arrested under a new law criminalizing criticism or obstruction of the poll, and whole regions of the country, controlled by ethnic armed groups and resistance forces, did not vote at all. The result was a contest dominated by parties aligned with the military — an exercise in manufacturing continuity, not consent.

The chain of command is not a mystery. On February 1, 2021, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing led a coup that overthrew the elected civilian government, detained Aung San Suu Kyi, and installed himself atop a junta called the State Administration Council. That body has since rebranded as the State Security and Peace Commission, styling itself an “interim government,” and Min Aung Hlaing has moved into the presidency around the election it oversaw. The institution that the UN says killed 702 civilians in six months is the same institution that ran the vote and crowned its own leader.

The human cost since the coup dwarfs even this six-month tally. Monitoring groups and the UN estimate the broader civil war has killed tens of thousands and displaced more than 3.5 million people. The war is multi-sided — the military regime against a patchwork of long-established ethnic armed organizations and newer post-coup resistance forces aligned with the shadow National Unity Government — but the OHCHR report is narrow and specific about responsibility for these 702 deaths: the military.

The report’s subtitle is its sharpest point: foreign indifference is compounding the suffering. OHCHR found that a sharp decline in international assistance has gutted the local protection systems that were, in many areas, civilians’ only buffer against the violence — early-warning networks, emergency healthcare, safe houses for survivors of sexual violence, support for ethnic media and women’s organizations. As funding dried up, those programs closed or shrank, and people’s exposure to harm rose.

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At the same time, the report notes, foreign actors have kept supplying the military with the means to keep bombing — weapons, ammunition, jet fuel, and dual-use items. Rights groups including Fortify Rights have spent the past year pressing UN member states for a jet-fuel and arms embargo, on the logic that an air force grounded for lack of fuel cannot strike a market. Türk’s framing tied the two together: the people of Myanmar are being attacked from the air while the aid that once cushioned them disappears and the fuel that powers the jets does not.

A few honest caveats. The 702 figure is a verified minimum, not a total — OHCHR can only count deaths it can corroborate from a country where the military controls access and information, so the real toll is almost certainly higher, not lower. Myanmar’s war is also genuinely multi-sided: Al Jazeera’s own investigations have documented alleged atrocities by some resistance and ethnic forces too, and an accurate picture of the conflict does not pretend only one side ever kills.

But the report is precise about attribution: it assigns these 702 deaths to the military, and the mechanism — airstrikes on civilian targets by the side that holds the sky — is documented, not inferred. Min Aung Hlaing’s coup, the dissolution of the opposition, the timing of the election, the strikes on schools and hospitals: each piece is on the record from primary UN reporting and corroborating monitors. The argument over what the world should do about it is live. The facts underneath it are not.

Five years after the coup, the Myanmar military held an election to launder its rule into something that looks like legitimacy — and the UN counted 702 civilians it killed in the six months it took to do so, most of them from the air, hundreds of them women and children. The man who led the coup now holds the presidency. The bombs are still falling, the aid that once softened them is drying up, and the fuel that powers the jets keeps arriving. Volker Türk asked whether the world is going to fail the people of Myanmar yet again. The honest answer, in the report’s data, is that it already is. We’ll keep tracking the toll, the litigation toward accountability, and whether any of Türk’s asks — a ceasefire, access, an embargo — move from a press release to a policy.

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