Since the start of Israeli operations in the Gaza Strip, launched after the astonishment caused by the Hamas massacres, on October 7, 2023, the international press has been unable to enter the enclave – with the exception of rare and short visits strictly supervised by the Israeli army.
The massive bombings and the ground offensive carried out since October 27, 2023 have had devastating effects on the very dense buildings of the Gaza Strip.
Unable to directly measure the extent of the devastation on the ground, the Infographics service of the Monde was able to rely on two types of sources to map them.
On the one hand, the testimonies, videos and photos of journalists and Palestinian civilians trapped there, which document the disappearance of entire neighborhoods under the rubble. On the other, satellite images.
Satellite and private images
Thanks to these images, produced both by public satellite constellations (European Space Agency, NASA, etc.) and by those of private actors (Maxar, Planet Labs, etc.), two researchers based in the United States, Corey Scher, doctoral student in earth sciences, specialist in natural disasters and political conflicts at the Graduate Center of New York University, and Jamon Van Den Hoek, professor of geography at Oregon State University, have followed for a year the evolution of destruction in the Gaza Strip.
The researchers produced these maps using data collected by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 SAR (Synthetic-Aperture Radar) satellites, a joint initiative of the European Commission and the European Space Agency, with a resolution of 10 meters per pixel. SAR radars have the advantage of collecting information day and night, whatever the weather conditions (cloud cover, lack of lighting, etc.).
Unable to verify their data in the field, they then cross-referenced them with assessments published by Unosat, the United Nations satellite center, as well as with very high-resolution commercial satellite images, up to 30 centimeters per pixel.
This makes it possible to draw up a detailed map of the probable damage inflicted on human constructions in the Gaza Strip, their methodology not applying to potential damage in vegetated areas (agricultural regions, natural areas). As they specify in their methodology, “Given the likely presence of very small-scale damage that the Sentinel-1 satellites are not able to detect, these maps likely provide a conservative estimate of the areas affected by the destruction”.
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