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.