Over half Of Gaza structures destroyed or damaged during war: UN

The analysis showed more than 137,000 buildings affected, UNOSAT, the United Nations satellite analysis agency, said on X, formerly Twitter.

The estimate is based on a satellite image taken on May 3, and compared with images taken in May a year earlier, last September, and on October 15 — just over a week after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel that sparked the war in the besieged enclave.

The fresh satellite image was also compared to images taken during several dates in November, then again during the first months of this year, UNOSAT added.

“According to satellite imagery analysis, UNOSAT identified 36,591 destroyed structures,” the agency announced in a statement.

In addition, it said it had seen “16,513 severely damaged structures, 47,368 moderately damaged structures, and 36,825 possibly damaged structures for a total of 137,297 structures”.

“These correspond to around 55 percent of the total structures in the Gaza Strip and a total of 135,142 estimated damaged housing units,” it added.

UNOSAT noted the image comparisons showed the governorates of Deir Al-Balah, in the centre, and Gaza, in the north, had suffered the worst damage between April 1 and May 3.

Comparing satellite images on those dates indicated that an additional 2,613 structures had been damaged in Deir Al-Balah, while another 2,368 had been damaged in Gaza governorate in just over a month.

Within Deir Al-Balah, the Nuseirat municipality suffered the greatest number of newly damaged structures during that period, at 1,216, UNOSAT said.

The agency stressed that the findings were still part of a preliminary analysis, which had yet to be validated in the field.

Israel’s bombardments and ground offensive in the blockaded territory have killed at least 36,400 people in Gaza, mostly civilians, according to the territory’s health ministry.