The contrast is stark. In images from before October 2023, Gaza looks like any other community, with houses at different levels, clear roads and green spaces. New satellite images on Google Maps, which the company says were taken in June this year, instead show what appear to be scattered piles of rubble.
According to UN estimates, it will take between seven and ten years to clear all the debris and rubble - if the necessary resources are deployed. This would make the cleanup effort in the Gaza Strip one of the largest in modern history.
Difficult conditions
The total amount of rubble in Gaza is estimated at 61 million tonnes. That is about 20 times the amount of rubble generated in all the wars around the world over the past 18 years, Jaco Cilliers, the UN Development Programme’s special representative in the Palestinian territories, told The Guardian.
The clearance work is being carried out under extremely difficult and dangerous conditions, with unexploded bombs buried beneath the rubble.
"It feels like we're holding a spoon and trying to empty an ocean," UN engineer Ahmed Alya, who works to clear rubble in the Gaza Strip, told The Guardian.
“The tip of an iceberg”
Complicating the cleanup effort are the bodies. As recently as last week, 105 bodies were found buried in the rubble, according to the Hamas-controlled Gaza Civil Defense. Palestinian authorities estimate that more than 10,000 people remain buried under the rubble.
The remains found so far may be the tip of an iceberg, said Thameen al-Kheetan, spokesperson for the UN human rights agency OHCHR, in mid-September.
The war between Israel and Hamas broke out after Hamas and other Islamist extremist groups attacked a music festival and kibbutzim in Israel on October 7, 2023. Around 1,200 people are estimated to have been killed in the attack, most of them civilians, and more than 200 people were taken hostage.
According to Hamas-controlled health authorities in Gaza, more than 73,000 people have been killed in Israeli attacks.
More than 73,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip have been killed since the start of the war, which followed Hamas’s terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023. The figures come from health authorities in Hamas-ruled Gaza and are often cited by UN agencies and other international organizations. A large proportion of the dead are women and children.
In 2024, UNICEF estimated that one million children in the area needed psychological and psychosocial support.
Before the war, Gaza had a population of 2.1 million. Around 90 percent of them have been displaced within the territory, according to the UN.
Israel’s intense bombardment has led to the complete or partial destruction of a large proportion of the area’s hospitals and schools. Israel’s blockade this spring has also led to famine in Gaza.
In Hamas’s large-scale attack on October 7, 2023, around 1,200 people were killed in Israel, most of them unarmed civilians. In addition, nearly 250 people were taken hostage, including children.
Sources: OCHA, UNICEF and news agencies
