Newly updated Google Maps satellite imagery shows the scale of destruction across the besieged Gaza Strip nearly three years into Israel’s genocidal war. With neighbourhood after neighbourhood reduced to rubble and little left but the faint outlines of main roads, it is now almost impossible to tell one part of Gaza from another. Farmland has been charred, and centuries-old places of worship have been damaged or wiped from the landscape.
A recent assessment by the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT) found that the number of destroyed structures across Gaza has increased by 9 percent since a “ceasefire” took effect nearly a year ago. Overall, about 82 percent of structures in Gaza, roughly 200,000 buildings, have been damaged, and about two-thirds of those have been destroyed, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA. Using satellite images recently released on Google Maps, Al Jazeera compared Gaza before the war with today, from Rafah in the south to North Gaza.
The images of Rafah were captured this year while those of northern Gaza date from 2025 and 2024. Drag the slider to the left to see what remains of some of Gaza’s neighbourhoods. Rafah, Gaza’s southernmost city, became a major refuge for Palestinians displaced from across Gaza, but about one million people were forced to flee the area after Israeli military operations began there in May 2024.
Most had already been displaced multiple times and were forced to move towards Khan Younis, a city just north of Rafah, and Deir el-Balah in central Gaza as UNRWA shelters in Rafah were emptied. In western Rafah, the once densely populated Tal as-Sultan neighbourhood has been almost entirely wiped out. Satellite images showed little more than sand where homes once stood.
Al-Mawasi, once a sparsely populated coastal strip of sand and farmland stretching along the coast of the Rafah and Khan Younis governorates, was declared a “humanitarian zone” by Israel early in the war. It told displaced Palestinians to seek safety there. In May 2024 as Israel prepared to invade the city of Rafah, then-US President Joe Biden warned: “If they go into Rafah, … I’m not supplying the weapons.” Israel went ahead with the operation, pushing hundreds of thousands more people into al-Mawasi, which it has since bombed repeatedly.
The latest satellite images show the once largely empty area now covered in tents and packed with families who have nowhere else to go. Khan Younis recorded the highest number of damaged structures of any governorate in UNOSAT’s October 2025 assessment with 51,885 structures. The governorate was also one of Gaza’s main agricultural hubs, and Khan Younis has recorded the largest total area of damaged cropland in the Gaza Strip.
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