Israel’s intensive bombing raids in recent months have been carried out against a densely populated area whose area is less than a third of Öland.
Thousands of people have been killed, but the death toll is believed to be high. Satellite images and compilations of open source data shows how cities and communities have been bombed to pieces.
At least two-thirds of the settlements in northern Gaza have been destroyed, as well as a quarter of the buildings in the southern city of Khan Yunis, according to US researchers mapping the war’s devastation through images and data which is collected from above.
– The Gaza Strip now has a different color seen from space. A different texture, says researcher Corey Scher at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, to the AP.
More destroyed than Aleppo
Israel has dropped tens of thousands of bombs and destroyed hundreds of thousands of homes. At least 1.9 million people have been displaced within the Gaza Strip, but almost no one is able to leave it.
By December, the Israeli military had destroyed more buildings than the Syrian regime and Russia destroyed in Aleppo between 2013 and 2016, assessed The Washington Post in a review during the Christmas holiday. It was also estimated to be more buildings than the US-led coalition forces destroyed in Raqqa and Iraqi Mosul during the fighting against IS in 2017.
The devastation is also reported to be greater than that of Mariupol in Ukraine, which is occupied by Russia after a siege and bombing.
War and suffering are difficult to boil down to exact numbers and comparisons as the circumstances are never the same. Moreover, far from all horrors and deaths are witnessed and recorded.
Intense like Hanoi
However, the killing in Gaza is occurring at an exceptionally high rate compared to recent years’ conflicts in the area, according to Professor Michael Spagat, who researches death tolls in conflicts worldwide.
– In the series of Gaza wars since 2008, the ongoing war stands out both in terms of the number of people who are killed and how indiscriminately the killing takes place, says Spagat to British BBC.
Marc Garlasco, a former US military intelligence analyst who investigates war crimes on behalf of the UN, told the BBC that you have to go back to the US Christmas bombing of Hanoi in the Vietnam War in 1972 to see so many bombs being dropped on such a small area.
The most vulnerable are Gaza’s youngest residents, says Adele Khodr, Middle East director for the UN children’s fund Unicef, who calls the area “the most dangerous place in the world to be a child”.
– Entire residential areas, where children used to play and go to school, have turned into piles of gravel where no life is going on, she tells the BBC.