Israel-Hamas war: One map to visualize Gaza's hardest-hit areas since start of offensive
Satellite images recovered by Le Monde show the areas targeted by the Israel Defense Forces. Strikes have hit across the enclave, day and night.
The declared aims of the bombing campaign launched by Israel on Gaza on October 7 were to cause destruction and kill Hamas leaders after the attack carried out by the Islamist movement which killed 1,400 people in Israel. Israeli raids, limited on the first day, have since become incessant. Since October 8, bombs have fallen continuously all over the enclave. They have mainly killed civilians.
Sources: Destruction analysis by Masae Analytics, based on Sentinel-1 data acquired between September 18 and October 17; Copernicus; Global Human Settlement Layer; European Commission; Insecurity Insight; OCHA; Le Monde
Infographic: Le Monde
This is a first. During the 2014 war, destruction had been concentrated in areas close to the barrier that separates Gaza from Israel. The neighborhoods of Shuja'iyya in the east, Beit Hanoun in the north and the eastern Khan Yunis had been virtually wiped off the map during this ground invasion. In 2021, in downtown Gaza, the Ar Rimal neighborhood, with its banks, ministries and residential apartments, where NGOs and headquarters of international organizations are also concentrated, was hit massively for the first time by the Israeli Air Force. Israel's latest bombing campaign largely destroyed it on October 10, the day it was concentrated on Gaza City.
Six days after the start of the offensive, the Israeli army announced that it had already dropped 6,000 bombs, or 4,000 tonnes of explosives, on the 41-kilometer-long strip of land, 6 to 12 kilometers wide to the south, wedged between the Mediterranean Sea, Israel and Egypt, and one of the most densely populated areas in the world with some 2.3 million residents). It's been under blockade since 2007. According to provisional figures from the Gaza authorities, more than 3,400 people living in the Gaza Strip, including over a thousand children, have been killed since the start of the war, and 12,000 have been wounded.
One million displaced Gazans
The enclave's residents, who have already lived through four wars since 2008, say they have never experienced such deadly strikes. Within hours of the Hamas attack on October 7, families started to leave the Shuja'iyya neighborhood in the northeast – it's an agricultural border zone that could be one of the first to be crossed by Israeli troops. In Beit Hanoun, a hilltop village in the north, whose farmland is surrounded by the fence, raids were particularly intensive in the early days, as Israel sought to stem incursions into its territory. A family of 20 was killed on October 8.
On the outskirts of Gaza, bombs rained down on the narrow streets of camps built to accommodate refugees from the 1948 war, at the birth of Israel, on the Al-Shati refugee camp and on the city of Jablia. In Jabalia, which is home to the most densely populated camp in the enclave, a particularly deadly raid killed 35 people at around midday on October 9.
On October 13, the Israeli army ordered the residents of northern Gaza to evacuate to the south of Wadi Gaza Nature, which divides the enclave. The IDF says it is seeking to clear space to strike against Hamas underground installations, but since the announcement it has stepped up its raids on the south and bombed a convoy of displaced persons, killing 70 people.
Since the start of the offensive, UNRWA, the UN refugee agency, has counted a million displaced Gazans. Around 500,000 are being sheltered in schools, many of which have been bombed. Dozens of Gaza's wealthiest families are now crammed into their second homes in Nuseirat. Other Palestinians have joined relatives on the southern outskirts, in Khan Yunis and Rafah, densely urbanized areas with little infrastructure, which came under heavy shelling on the weekend of October 14 and 15. Rafah is the only crossing point into Egypt that could allow humanitarian aid into the Strip.