An updated study of satellite imagery of Gaza by the Hebrew University’s Geographic Information System Center finds that the recent demolitions of buildings in Rafah—an average of 2,000/month since April—have raised the%age of uninhabitable buildings there to 89%. Northern Gaza comes in at 84%, with Gaza City itself at 78%. Coverage of the study provides some revealing overviews of the areas.
The Center’s director Adi Ben-Nun summarized: “The residents of Gaza have nowhere to return to. The world they knew and their daily lives are simply gone. The devastation is on every level, from homes that have been demolished to public institutions, workplaces, schools and agricultural lands—everything has been destroyed.”
In recent months, Ben-Nun has analyzed satellite images of Gaza using an algorithm to assess the scale of destruction. He estimates that around 160,000 buildings—about 70% of all structures in the Strip—have sustained severe damage (at least 25% are entirely destroyed), rendering them uninhabitable. His work is coherent with the UN’s previous estimation that there is about 50 million tons of construction debris in Gaza, which is over 700 million pounds per square mile (or about 300 pounds per square meter). Last year, the UN’s research institute estimated that the volume of construction waste in Gaza is equivalent to 14 times the waste generated by all armed conflicts worldwide since 2008.
Further, the destruction has shifted from bombings by Israel’s Air Force to the more recent Israeli Defense Ministry practice of hiring private contractors to demolish buildings systematically. Protected by IDF combat units, they are paid up to $1,500 per building. Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, who operates a D9 bulldozer, bragged last week: “Rafah is being cleared today; there’s no Rafah. Northern Gaza is almost entirely leveled. Khan Yunis is next—it’ll be wiped out as well…. In my humble opinion, God wants our job to be simply clearing the land. All this great wickedness, the likes of which we haven’t seen in recent generations, must be wiped out.”
No longer is the excuse proffered that areas near the border with Israel had to be cleared. In May, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as reported by Maariv, told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Committee: “We are destroying more and more homes. They have nowhere to return to. The only expected outcome will be the desire of Gazans to emigrate out of the Strip.”
