Briefing | The war in maps

Mapping Israel’s war in Gaza

Our satellite tracking of the conflict with Hamas

Released Palestinian prisoners are greeted in the West Bank

Video: Getty Images

Oct 17th 2023 (Updated on March 5th 2024)

Editor's note: This page is no longer being updated. Read all our coverage of the war between Israel and Hamas

What started as a horrific attack on October 7th 2023—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.

Incursions

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.

Destruction

Detected structural damage

Oct 7th 2023 – Feb 14th 2024

Before the ceasefire, Nov 29th

After the ceasefire

Israel dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza in the six days following Hamas’s attack on October 7th, and since then the barrage has continued. 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.

To track damage to buildings in Gaza we are now using assessments produced by academics based at the City University of New York and Oregon State University. These maps and resulting estimates of damage are created by analysing data from Sentinel-1, a satellite that flies over Gaza three times every 12 days. The method is able to detect small changes in the structure of buildings. The outputs are also checked manually. “False positive” signals created by large changes on the ground that are not related to building damage, such as a queue of trucks at the border, are removed.

In the early days of the war, the city of Beit Hanoun and the south-east and north-west areas of Gaza city were heavily targeted by Israeli forces and suffered the most destruction. Areas of the al-Shati and Jabalia refugee camps were also severely damaged. These are among the most crowded neighbourhoods in the densely populated strip. By November 29th—towards the end of the temporary ceasefire—the academics estimated that around half of the buildings in North Gaza and Gaza city were damaged in some way.

Since then the bombardment in the north has continued and destruction has spread further south, too. In their most recent analysis, based on images from February 14th, the academics estimated that roughly 70% of buildings in North Gaza and Gaza city were damaged. In Khan Younis, a city in the southern area of the strip which was relatively unscathed after the first month of war, more than half the buildings show signs of damage. This includes the Nasser Medical Complex that Israeli troops raided while searching for hostages on February 15th.

Even Rafah, a region in the far south once considered a “safe zone”, has come under fire in recent weeks. Around half of Gaza’s population—roughly 1m people—are thought to be sheltering in Rafah, many in make-shift encampments. On February 9th Benjamin Netenyahu, Israel's president, ordered the military to begin planning the evacuation of civilians from Rafah, in preparation for an Israeli ground invasion. Hours later air strikes on the region killed dozens of people. The estimated number of damaged buildings in Rafah has tripled since the temporary ceasefire ended.

Overall, the researchers estimate that, as of February 14th, between 54% and 66% of all buildings in Gaza have been damaged in some way. The true figure will only be known when the fighting stops and on-the-ground assessments, and rebuilding, can begin.

Connectivity

Internet connectivity in the Gaza Strip

100=pre-conflict average

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.

Casualties

Cumulative deaths reported by each side*

To NaNth

Palestinian**, reported by Gaza authorities
Israeli†, reported by Israel

* By day that deaths were reported, which may differ from day of death
** The Gaza Ministry of Health (GMH) stopped providing updated casualty figures on November 10th following a collapse in health services in the north of the enclave. Starting November 21st the Gaza Media Office has provided updated figures. From December 3rd, the GMH resumed providing daily casualty figures. Between December 14th and December 18th and between December 23rd and December 26th the GMH has not updated its casualty figures. Includes West Bank figures from UNOCHA
† Estimated dead shown until October 29th, when figures for identified civilian or Israeli soldiers' deaths became available

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 24,000 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.

Displacement

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.

Displaced people have moved into tents in Rafah
Image: Planet

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. ■

Sources: European Commission; European Space Agency; KASPR Datahaus; Monash IP Observatory; Open Street Map; UNRWA; UNOCHA; IDF; Institute for the Study of War and AEI’s Critical Threats Project; Corey Scher of CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University