Approximately 55% of buildings, mostly residential, in the Gaza Strip have been damaged or destroyed due to the Israeli war on Gaza, according to the United Nations' announcement today, based on satellite images. The United Nations' satellite center, "UNOSAT," reported on the platform "X" that "a total of 137,297 buildings, nearly 55% of the buildings in Gaza, have been affected." This estimate was based on a comparison of images captured by satellites on May 3 with other images collected from May 2023 to October 15, including a week after the outbreak of the war.
The center explained that "based on our analysis, we identified 36,591 destroyed buildings, 16,513 severely damaged buildings, 47,368 moderately damaged buildings, and 36,825 buildings likely damaged," according to AFP. The analysis published on May 31 noted that almost all of these buildings are residential (135,142).
The damage was concentrated in the Deir al-Balah and Gaza governorates compared to an analysis conducted on April 1. Since then, 2,613 new buildings have been damaged in the Deir al-Balah governorate and 2,368 in the Gaza governorate (north), according to UNOSAT. Overall, the highest number of recently affected buildings (1,216), since the early April analysis, have been recorded in the Nuseirat municipality in the Deir al-Balah governorate.
An analysis conducted by researchers in the United States reached very similar results. An analysis by Corey Scherer and Jamon van den Hoek of satellite images revealed that 56.9% of the buildings in the Gaza Strip, totaling 160,000 buildings, had been damaged or destroyed by April 21. It is noted that the war on Gaza began following a Hamas attack on settlements near Gaza on October 7, with Israel responding with a large-scale war on the region that has so far resulted in the deaths of 36,479 Palestinians, most of whom are civilians, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
