Mapping Israel’s war in Gaza

What started as a horrific attack on October 7th—when Hamas militants crossed from Gaza into Israel and murdered an estimated 1,200 people, most of them civilians—has become a war. Israel has put Gaza under siege, and battered the enclave with air strikes. Already the fighting has caused more bloodshed than any previous clash between the two groups. On November 22nd Israel’s cabinet agreed to a hostage deal that would see Hamas free women and children from the roughly 240 hostages being held in Gaza. As part of the agreement, a temporary truce came into effect on November 24th. That came to an abrupt end on December 1st, after Israel claimed that Hamas had reneged on the terms of the truce by failing to release some of the agreed-upon hostages. After seven days of calm, during which Hamas released more than 100 hostages in exchange for 240 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, fighting has resumed. But Israel is running out of targets, and America, its main ally and supplier of arms, is pushing Israel to scale back its offensive.

We are tracking the conflict using satellite imagery and data on casualties and building damage. This page will be updated regularly as information becomes available.

Israel’s ground operations in Gaza began alongside an intense bombardment on October 27th. Israel Defence Force (IDF) troops crossed the border and cut off Gaza city from the north and south, aiming to destroy Hamas’s command centres. The IDF’s job is complicated by the tunnel network Hamas has dug under Gaza city. Faced with a foe that largely operates underground, Israel has continued to rely on aerial bombardment, dropping bunker-busting bombs whose explosions are audible from 80km away in Tel Aviv.

After the truce ended on December 1st, Israel turned the focus of its strikes to the south, targeting cities such as Khan Younis, to where hundreds of thousands of people from the north of Gaza have fled. Palestinians in Gaza are paying a high price for Israel’s approach. Food, water and fuel in the territory are already scarce. Its hospitals, already badly overcrowded, lack supplies.

Israel dropped 6,000 bombs in the six days following Hamas’s attack. The Israeli Air Force has targeted weapons-production sites, rocket systems and Hamas command centres. It claims to have killed hundreds of terrorists. It has also caused massive collateral damage.

Our analysis of open-source satellite images shows the scale of the destruction. We used data from Sentinel-1, a satellite that flies over Gaza three times every 12 days. By comparing images taken in the six months before the war with the image from December 12th we have identified damaged areas.

The city of Beit Hanoun and the south-east and north-west areas of Gaza city appear to be the worst hit. Our method detected damage to several parts of the al-Shifa hospital complex, including the maternity department, a building that the IDF claimed was being used by Hamas. Areas of the al-Shati and Jabalia refugee camps have also been damaged. These are among the most crowded neighbourhoods in the densely populated region (see map below). Dozens of people are reported to have been killed in the strikes there.

By analysing the image from December 12th we estimate that almost 40,000 buildings have been damaged, roughly 16% of the building stock of the Gaza Strip. This is four times the number that we identified as damaged on October 13th. By merging our damage map with fine-grained population data, we calculated that at least 450,000 people will have no home to return to when the fighting ends.

Our method is not perfect. Not all damage can be detected from above. As a result, our numbers, if anything, may be too low. The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry said on October 21st that at least 42% of all housing units in the Gaza Strip had been damaged or destroyed. The true figure probably lies somewhere in between.

Since Hamas’s attack Israel has intensified its blockade of the strip. Gaza’s communications infrastructure has also been largely destroyed by the fighting. The chart above shows the latest internet-connectivity level, and updates twice a day. Connectivity has fallen significantly since the start of the current fighting. Fibre-optic cables to the strip pass through Israel, and mobile-internet providers in Gaza are limited to the outdated 2G standard. The hit to connectivity since October 7th in some districts has been so severe as to be equivalent to a shutdown; in other parts of Gaza the internet has remained usable but slow. That hampers efforts to share early warnings of attacks (as the IDF has done on social media) and tell the world what is happening in the strip.

The conflict has already exacted a grim cost. Israeli sources estimate Hamas’s attacks have killed at least 1,300 civilians and soldiers in Israel, and injured more than 5,000, according to authorities there. The Gaza health ministry ceased reporting the death toll in the territory on November 10th, as the deteriorating situation there has made it difficult to tally, but since November 21st the Gaza Media Office has provided updates. At last count they reported that Israel’s response had killed over 21,000 people in Gaza and injured more than 35,000. These figures are hard to verify, and Hamas has been accused of inflating the number of casualties in some cases (such as following an explosion at a hospital on October 17th). The death toll reported by the government has risen more quickly than in any previous clash between the two sides. Between 2008 and 2023 extended conflicts and other bursts of violence between Israel and Hamas killed 5,360 Palestinians in Gaza, according to the territory’s government.

On October 13th the Israeli army warned Palestinians living in the north of the Gaza Strip to flee south. These include residents of Gaza city, the territory’s largest. Their journey is difficult and dangerous. The strip is small—41km long and 10km wide. But just two roads connect the north and south, and air strikes have made progress difficult. On December 1st it was reported that Israeli forces had dropped leaflets warning people in Khan Younis, southern Gaza’s largest city, to move further south, close to the border with Egypt.

Some three-quarters of the civilian population is thought to have moved south since the start of the war. If all 1.1m residents of northern Gaza get there, the UN warns, their arrival could cause a humanitarian disaster. Gaza is already a crowded place. If its entire population were to move to the smaller built-up areas in the south, the density in those areas would reach an estimated 19,500 people per square kilometre. That would make the urban parts of southern Gaza more densely populated than Delhi in India, Alexandria in Egypt or Karachi in Pakistan, some of the most packed places on the planet. Most of the hospitals are in the north, too. ■