Israeli military operations in Gaza have killed nearly 42,000 people since October 7, 2023, according to the Health Ministry of the Hamas-led Palestinian territory, the majority of them women and children.
In addition to the lives lost, the United Nations estimates that the war has displaced 90% of Gaza’s approximately 2.3 million residents. Many of them – unable to leave the besieged enclave – have been repeatedly displaced inside Gaza as they tried to escape Israeli airstrikes that have decimated its towns.
As of January, the war had caused an estimated $18.5 billion in damage to Gaza’s infrastructure, according to the UN and World Bank. This figure is almost equivalent to the entire combined GDP of the Palestinian territories (Gaza and the much larger Israeli-occupied West Bank) in the year before Hamas launched the war with its October 7 terrorist attack.
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Most of the damage and destruction concerns housing (72% in January), but other critical infrastructure has also been affected. The UN and World Bank said 84% of health facilities and 92% of main roads were damaged or totally destroyed in January, and bombing has continued since then.
How to assess the destruction in Gaza
It has not been possible to comprehensively map the destruction in Gaza from the ground. Since the start of the war, international journalists have not been allowed to enter Gaza, except during very restricted visits offered by the Israeli army.
Palestinian journalists covering the conflict have minimal security and are subject to evacuation orders and restrictions on their movements, like everyone else in the enclave. At least 116 journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Given the difficulties of on-the-ground assessment, a team of U.S.-based researchers used data and other resources from the European Space Agency and NASA to map damage indicators in conflict zones , particularly in Gaza.
“Satellite data, in particular, is not a picture like what you would imagine with a normal camera,” Corey Scher of the City University of New York told CBS News. “It’s a radar, so it sends a burst of radar into the Earth that sends back to the sensor, and we can get a sense of that three-dimensional structure and layout of an area in a way that you don’t “you won’t get with an optical device.” picture.”
The technique allows the team to track indicators of destruction more quickly than analyzing traditional satellite images would allow, which can take several weeks, Scher said.
Mapping the situation on the ground
CBS News used data provided by Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek, an associate professor of geography at Oregon State University who also worked on the project, to map indicators of destruction in Gaza during the war with the aim of revealing the global extent of damage to infrastructure.
Scroll through the map below to see how the damage has intensified over the past 12 months.
“Over time, it becomes inevitable that people will be displaced to areas where there is only – there is no security, there is no shelter that can sustain the needs of the population. “Food insecurity, lack of access to water, constant uprooting add to this. The history of damage is also very unique in this conflict,” Van Den Hoek said.
“The pace and scale of the bombing that caused this damage was extremely unique,” Van Den Hoek said, adding that it was the greatest destruction he had seen in any conflict he has ever seen. examined in the course of its work. Oregon State Conflict Ecology Lab.
“Over time, it becomes inevitable that people will be displaced to areas where there is only – there is no security, there is no shelter that can sustain the needs of the population. “Food insecurity, lack of access to water, constant uprooting add to this. The history of damage is also very unique in this conflict,” Van Den Hoek said.
“It’s beyond brick and stone”
“The damage was colossal and also unprecedented and unprecedented in the history of the United Nations,” Juliette Touma, communications director for UNWRA, the United Nations agency that supports Palestinian refugees, told CBS News.
Touma said that of the 190 buildings UNRWA owned in Gaza before the war, two-thirds were either damaged or totally destroyed, and several of them were hit repeatedly.
“It’s beyond brick and stone,” Touma said. “It’s about what these buildings and structures represented – and the vast majority of these buildings were children’s schools.”
Before October 7, 2023, UNWRA provided educational services to approximately 300,000 children across Gaza. As of September 2024, Touma said all school buildings still standing were being used as shelters for displaced people.
In January 2024, Israel accused 12 UNWRA employees of participation in the attacks of October 7. After an internal UN investigation, the world body laid off nine of its employeesaccepting that they could have participated in the attacks. The agency employs some 13,000 people in Gaza, and as of September 2024, the UN said at least 222 of its staff had been killed during the war.
“What is the fate of these children who frequented these buildings which are now either destroyed, badly damaged, or which continue to house people and provide shelter to displaced families?” Touma said. “Even if there is a miracle and we get a ceasefire tomorrow, what will that mean for education? And how will children be able to go back to school? Because… 70% of our schools in Gaza are not used.”
Destruction and successive Israeli evacuation orders have forced many people to flee to places increasingly difficult to survive, including hundreds of thousands of people crowded into the coastal area of al-Mawasi in the west from Khan Younis. The Israeli military designated al-Mawasi as a humanitarian zone, but before the war it had “no facilities for human beings,” Touma said.
“People just started moving there, meaning putting up these plastic tarps with, you know, wooden planks and living anywhere and everywhere,” she told CBS News. “At one point, Mawasi had a population of one million.”
But even al-Mawasi was bombed. The deadliest attack took place in July, when 90 people were killed and 300 injured. Israel said he targeted and killed Mohammed Deifthe head of the military wing of Hamas, with this strike.
“A damaged building is an indicator of a displaced family, a displaced group, you know, a school or a bakery,” Scher said. “It’s also an indicator of potential danger for an unexploded ordnance…It’s an indicator of everything that’s happening on the ground.”
