Updated Google Maps imagery has laid bare the full scale of destruction wrought during the three-year Gaza war and the severity of the ongoing humanitarian crisis faced by the territory's 2.3 million residents. The satellite images, captured in June this year, show further damage to homes, businesses, places of worship and infrastructure since a fragile ceasefire took hold nearly 12 months ago.
Shoreline camps and damaged port
The images reveal vast tented camps stretching along much of the coastline, often within a few metres of the sea. Gaza's once-bustling main port, now badly damaged and devoid of fishing boats, is encircled by makeshift shelters. In Gaza City, every available open space is crowded with shacks, tents and huts.
Northern towns such as Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun have suffered massive damage, while places of worship including the Istiqlal mosque in Khan Younis have been destroyed. Major neighbourhoods in Gaza City, including Jabaliya and Shuja'iya, which were targeted in repeated Israeli offensives, are now clearly uninhabitable.
Southern rubble and Rafah's destruction
Swaths of rubble are visible in the south of Gaza, where a wide strip appears to have been cleared by Israeli forces along the border with Egypt. The town of Rafah appears to have been almost entirely reduced to rubble, and Tel al-Sultan has been razed to the ground.
More than 2.1 million displaced people are living in tents and temporary shelters in Gaza, where about 82% of structures – roughly 200,000 buildings – have been damaged, with about two-thirds of those destroyed, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa. A recent UN assessment estimated that the number of destroyed structures across Gaza had increased by 9% since the declaration of a ceasefire in October 2025.
Rubble and human toll
“The estimate of the total amount of rubble in Gaza is 61m tonnes. It is approximately 20 times the amount of rubble generated in all wars across the world over the last 18 years,” Jaco Cilliers, the UN Development Programme's special representative in Palestine, told the Guardian last month. The presence of human remains still buried under the rubble remains one of the most urgent humanitarian problems.
More than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, mostly civilians. The conflict was triggered by a surprise attack by Hamas into Israel in October 2023, in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 others hostage.
