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Assessment of physical damage caused to buildings by the war on Gaza: October 2023 - April 2024

ESCWA

7 May 2024

The speed and extent of the catastrophic damage caused by the war on Gaza have been unparalleled and incomparable in recent times. Since 7 October 2023, more than 50 per cent of all the structures in the Gaza Strip have been destroyed; 360,000 housing units damaged, 5 per cent of the population killed or injured and two million people displaced. Combined methods of remote sensing, using satellite imagery, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and very high resolution aerial imagery, in addition to field work, are essential to test and validate the assessment of damage caused by disasters and wars. They are also essential to detect, with precision, damage that is difficult to see, and to quickly assess the amount of damage, as it was done during the damage assessment undertaken by the World Bank of the Haiti Earthquake disaster in 2010.

A methodological note on the assessment of the physical damage to buildings caused by the war on Gaza (October 2023-March 2024) was prepared by UNESCWA-Statistics, in collaboration with the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics (PCBS), the United Nations UNITAR/UNOSAT unit (UNOSAT) and the Decentralized Damage Mapping Group-University of Oregon (DDMG). The assessment integrates high resolution satellite imagery with official statistics on geolocated data from surveys and censuses in the State of Palestine. The collaboration helped provide a better understanding of the different methodologies, integrate the data from different sources, and obtain more consistent, reliable and detailed information on the physical damage incurred by the different structures, to differentiate between buildings, housing units and structures. The collaboration improved the accuracy of the estimations related to the extent of the damage incurred by buildings and the types of buildings damaged in the administrative districts of Gaza, to provide reliable and timely data on the social and economic repercussions of the war, post-war recovery and needs assessment for the State of Palestine.