📊HOW MUCH OF GAZA WAS DESTROYED DURING THE WAR AND HOW MANY DEATHS/INJURIES OCCURRED AT THE SAME PERIOD OF TIME?
After two years of fighting, when the war ended on 10 October 2025, 123,464 structures out of Gazas 245,000 pre-war structures had been destroyed according to UN damage assessment. That is 50.4% of the structures that Gaza had before the war started.
As seen on the satellite images from Gaza, shared in my thread below, most of the destroyed areas are close to the Israeli border. And when it comes to the major cities in Gaza, except for Rafah, most of the city centers are still intact. 50.4% of structures destroyed, but that covers more of the smaller structures in Gaza than the larger inner city ones, according to satellite images from Gaza, and that is missed when looking at the overall destruction numbers.
But how did the destruction actually match the death toll and the injures?
I have matched the available UN damage assessments from 2023 (Oct and Nov), 2024 (Jan, Feb, Apr, May, July, Sep and Dec) and 2025 (Apr, July and Oct), with the number of deaths and injures at the same curve. This is seen in the two graphs below.
Note:
1. First, the damage assessments are most often from the end of the month. However, it not always 100% direct comparable at all times to the casualties.
2. Second, the boxes without a number in the upper graph are averages, based on the closest UN damage assessment before and after.
3. Third, the black number in the top are total numbers for all destroyed and damaged structures together, and the same for injuries and deaths, while the red numbers is the confirmed destroyed buildings and deaths.
4. The death toll includes is what Gaza MoH counts as violent deaths. However, they also includes accidents in that number. Of these violent deaths at least 3-4,000 are accidents.
What can be seen here?
The amount of destruction of course follows the casualties mostly pretty closely. The two first months had lower destruction in comparison to deaths, 21.4% vs 26.52%. In the end of January 2024, when 45.33% of the deaths had occurred, the destruction where at 39.6%. Then they followed closer the rest of the war.
Around 0.7 structures, that most often includes several or many housing units per structure, were damaged or destroyed per casualty (including both deaths and injures). 174,437 structures in comparison to 242,856 cautalites in total. At the same time, 122,464 structures were destroyed in comparison to 72,166 deaths in total, which is a rate of around 0.41 deaths per destroyed structure.
That is a very low ratio of deaths in comparison to how the rate of destruction was.
Several things are clear from this:
1. If Israel wanted to kill or injure as many Gazans as possible, the rate of casualties, and especially the rate of deaths, would have been much higher than the amount of destroyed structures. That is clear.
2. If Israel wanted to kill as many as possible, and also didn't have any related military objectives, they would have destroyed the inner cities of the larger cities in the Gaza Strip. Not just primarily the structures at the border to Egypt, that was used for smuggling, and the smaller structures that were closer to Israel and the structures in the outskirts of the largest cities, that indicates typical urban warfare patterns.
3. Israel has the capability to kill people if the wanted. The statistics show they didn't want to. The demographics of the death toll heavily indicates around 30,000 fighters dead.
4. Gaza already had huge problem with limited groundwater, over-usage and saltwater intrusion. Destroyed structures, and especially terror tunnels, will always make water supply harder. It is often portrayed as limited water supply is Israel's fault but it mostly comes from the fact that Gaza is a very small area, that is a desert, heavily over populated, where Hamas has used a large part of the civilian infrastructure for terror purposes.
🧵1/5 Short thread about the Satellite Images of Gaza
There is much focus on the "new" Google Earth images from Gaza that people have just found about, even though the new ones came out already in may 2026.
However, when taking photos from a satellite of a desert area, with white buildings, in the middle of the summer, makes it so that all contrast goes away in the image and nothing is green. This sells the effect of most of it being rubble, even though it is not true.
Here are images from Sentinel-2 taken on 17 March 2026, showing the four areas of Gaza that is not Rafah. Images from December to March is when Gaza is mostly green. From April to November it looks like a desert (because it is).
sentinelbird.com/palestine/g…