Active InSAR monitoring of building damage in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas War

TL;DR

This study demonstrates a Sentinel-1 SAR-based method for actively monitoring building damage in Gaza during the 2023 Israel-Hamas War, providing timely, accurate damage assessments over a year of conflict.

Contribution

It introduces a long temporal-arc coherent change detection approach for continuous damage monitoring in active conflict zones using SAR data.

Findings

Detected 92.5% of damage with 1.2% false positives

Tracked damage trends over one year, revealing conflict dynamics

Identified that 60% of buildings were damaged or destroyed

Abstract

Aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip beginning October 7, 2023 is one of the most intense bombing campaigns of the twenty-first century, driving widespread urban damage. Characterizing damage over a geographically dynamic and protracted armed conflict requires active monitoring. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has precedence for mapping disaster-induced damage with bi-temporal methods but applications to active monitoring during sustained crises are limited. Using interferometric SAR data from Sentinel-1, we apply a long temporal-arc coherent change detection (LT-CCD) approach to track weekly damage trends over the first year of the 2023- Israel-Hamas War. We detect 92.5% of damage labels in reference data from the United Nations with a negligible (1.2%) false positive rate. The temporal fidelity of our approach reveals rapidly increasing damage during the first three months of the war focused in northern Gaza, a notable pause in damage during a temporary ceasefire, and surges of new damage as conflict hot-spots shift from north to south. Three-fifths (191,263) of all buildings are damaged or destroyed by the end of the study. With massive need for timely data on damage in armed conflict zones, our low-cost and low-latency approach enables rapid uptake of damage information at humanitarian and journalistic organizations.