Mapping the destruction in Gaza

For most Gazans the dull boom of an air strike is a familiar sound. The current barrage—which began after Hamas, a Palestinian militant group, murdered more than 1,400 Israelis on 7th October—is the beginning of the fifth war since Israeli troops withdrew from the area in 2005.

But nothing could have prepared the people of Gaza for the scale of destruction this time around. The Israeli Air Force claims to have dropped nearly 6,000 bombs on the narrow strip of land in the first week of the war—more than the yearly rate of American forces in their operation against Islamic State in 2014-17. Our analysis of satellite images suggests that in this short space of time at least 4.3% of the enclaves’ buildings have been destroyed.

To assess the damage caused by the strikes we analysed freely available data from Sentinel-1, a European satellite. It flies over Gaza at least three times every 12 days, and creates an image by bouncing microwaves off the Earth’s surface and measuring the “echo” when they return.

By comparing images taken before the war began with the latest image from October 12th, we identified areas with dramatic changes in signal, a hallmark of damage. We verified the method’s accuracy by applying it to data from the Ukrainian city of Mariupol in the spring of 2022, and comparing it with human-coded assessments. Our method is not perfect. Not all damage can be detected from above. As a result, our numbers, if anything, may be too low.

Our analysis of Gaza revealed that significant areas of its north may have been damaged or destroyed. The city of Beit Hanoun appears to be the worst hit. Sources on the ground confirm that the Al-Sousi and Ahmed Yassin mosques—which our analysis highlighted as damaged—have been levelled. Overall, our estimates suggest that 11,000 buildings in Gaza are already damaged or destroyed.

Gaza’s population is particularly vulnerable to air strikes. Around 2.2m people live in the sliver of land—40km (25 miles) long and 10km wide—that makes up the strip. All border crossings are closed. In some refugee camps as many as 400 people live in each 100-metre square. Hundreds of thousands have already been displaced. By merging our damage map with fine-grained population data, our analysis suggests at least 92,000 will have no home to return to when the fighting stops. This is about three times our number for roughly the same point of the 2021 war.

Israel says the strikes have killed hundreds of terrorists and destroyed Hamas command centres. The Ministry of Health in Gaza reports around 3,500 Palestinian lives lost, more than in any other Israel-Gaza conflagration. With bombs still falling, and Israel expected to launch a ground attack, this number is sure to rise.■

Chart sources: European Commission; European Space Agency; OpenStreetMap; UN; The Economist