Google has refreshed its satellite imagery of the Gaza Strip on Google Earth and Google Maps, and the new views show whole neighbourhoods in Rafah, Khan Younis and Gaza City that Israel’s military campaign has reduced to rubble and bare, cleared ground. The updated images spread quickly across social media on Monday, 28 September, with people placing them side by side with older captures of the same streets.
With Naza set to stream next month for free globally, you won’t have to wait until then to see the Israeli destruction of Palestine.
Google hasn’t confirmed when the new images were captured or when they went live. Either way, they’re the clearest look most people outside Gaza will get at what Israel has done to the strip. Israel has not allowed foreign journalists independent access to Gaza, so a free, publicly available satellite map carries more weight here than it would almost anywhere else.
Among those sharing the images was Dublin MEP Barry Andrews, who posted on X that “the updated Google satellite images of Gaza are quite incredible, for all to see”.
What the new Google Earth images of Gaza show
In short, destruction on a scale that ground-level photos struggle to get across. In the south, large parts of Rafah and Khan Younis appear flattened, with former residential blocks now showing up as grey rubble fields or scraped earth. In Gaza City, the area in and around Al Shifa Hospital, the strip’s largest medical complex, shows extensive damage.
The pictures line up with the work of the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT), which has been tracking damage from orbit throughout the war. Its assessment found that around 201,290 structures, roughly 82 per cent of all buildings in Gaza, had been damaged to some degree by mid-2026.
The difference is access. UNOSAT’s analysis lives in specialist reports. Google Earth puts the same picture in front of anyone with a phone or a browser, and lets them zoom in on a specific street, school or home they know.
Why Google Earth images of Gaza were blurry for years
For a long time, the blurriness was down to US law rather than a lack of satellites. The Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, passed in 1997, barred American companies from distributing satellite imagery of Israel at a higher resolution than was available from non-US sources. In practice, that capped imagery of Israel, and of Gaza and the West Bank alongside it, at two metres per pixel. At that level, anything smaller than a car dissolves into a smudge.
The rule was loosened in July 2020, when the US Department of Commerce accepted that sharper imagery of the region was already on sale from foreign providers and raised the limit to 40 centimetres per pixel. That’s about the width of an adult’s shoulders, sharp enough to make out individual cars, collapsed roofs and piles of debris.
Even after that change, Gaza’s imagery on Google’s platforms was refreshed only occasionally, and researchers who rely on free satellite maps were openly critical of how stale it was. When pressed on it previously, Google said it considers updates as higher-resolution imagery becomes available, without committing to anything specific for Gaza. This refresh changes that, at least for now.
How to compare old and new satellite images of Gaza on Google Earth
I’ve screenshotted one shot from the Rafah region, available in Google Earth. The left is the region in July 2020, the right is June 2024 – still over two years old. The level of visible destruction from Israeli bombardment is horrifying. What stood out to me from a pure chance viewing was the playground that appeared at the centre of the screenshot.
Rafah on Google Earth in 2020
Rafah on Google Earth in 2024
Rafah before and after Israeli bombings
When uploading images like this to the site, it can sometimes be difficult to tell which small thumbnail is which. It was no challenge here, the much more vibrant 2020 image almost shows the hustle and bustle, while 2024 is just destroyed concrete.
You can do this yourself in a couple of minutes, for free, using Google Earth’s historical imagery tool. Open Google Earth in your browser or the Google Earth Pro desktop app, search for a location such as Rafah or Khan Younis, and click the Historical imagery button in the toolbar. In the web version it’s a globe with a circular arrow; in Google Earth Pro it’s a clock icon.
A timeline then appears in the top-right corner. Each larger dot marks a year with imagery available and smaller dots mark extra captures within that year, so you can click back to a pre-war capture and then forward to the latest one. There’s also a Timelapse mode that plays through the captures in sequence. 3D buildings are switched off while historical imagery is on, so what you see is the flat satellite capture for that date.
What the satellite images can and can’t tell you
The images are powerful, but they have limits. Google hasn’t published a capture date for every part of the strip, and Google Earth’s map is stitched together from many images taken at different times, so one neighbourhood can be more up to date than the one beside it. The historical imagery timeline is the most reliable way to check the date on what you’re looking at.
Satellite images also show buildings, not people. They can’t tell you who lived in a flattened block, whether anyone is still beneath it, or what happened on the ground. That’s the gap satellite imagery can never close but with over 72,000 people dead in Gaza at the time of writing, you are seeing the construction of grave yards in this destruction of Gaza. The rubble, their headstones
History isn’t something that just gets written. It’s something that happens and that we all live through and can’t deny. This is further evidence of an active genocide in Palestine.
