Updated Google Maps Imagery Shows Gaza Towns Still in Ruins a Year Into Ceasefire

An update to Google Maps, drawing on satellite images captured in June, shows the scale of destruction across Gaza nearly a year after a ceasefire took effect, and shows that destruction has continued since.

The imagery shows tented camps stretching along much of the shoreline, many just a few meters from the water. Gaza's main port sits damaged and empty of fishing boats, ringed by makeshift shelters. In Gaza City, open ground is packed with shacks, tents and huts.

Further north, the towns of Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun show heavy damage. The Istiqlal mosque in Khan Younis appears destroyed. Jabaliya and Shuja'iya, two Gaza City neighborhoods hit by repeated Israeli offensives during the war, appear uninhabitable in the images.

In the south, the imagery shows a wide strip cleared along the Egyptian border, in an area under Israeli forces' control. Rafah appears almost entirely reduced to rubble. Tel al-Sultan appears razed to the ground.

What the UN data shows

The satellite record lines up with figures from the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa, which estimates more than 2.1 million displaced people are now living in tents and temporary shelters in Gaza. Unrwa puts the share of damaged structures at about 82 percent, roughly 200,000 buildings, with about two-thirds of those destroyed outright.

A UN assessment found the number of destroyed structures across Gaza rose by 9 percent in the period after the October 2025 ceasefire declaration, indicating the physical toll on the territory did not stop once the fighting formally paused.

Jaco Cilliers, the UN Development Programme's special representative in Palestine, told the Guardian last month that the rubble itself has become its own crisis.

"The estimate of the total amount of rubble in Gaza is 61m tonnes. It is approximately 20 times the amount of rubble generated in all wars across the world over the last 18 years."

Human remains are still believed to be buried beneath that rubble, which the UN describes as one of the most urgent humanitarian problems left by the war.

The broader toll

More than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the war began in October 2023, most of them civilians, according to figures widely reported since the conflict started. The war was triggered by a Hamas attack into Israel that killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and saw 251 people taken hostage.

The Google Maps update offers something the casualty counts and UN percentages cannot: a navigable, publicly viewable record of specific streets, mosques and neighborhoods that no longer exist as they did before 2023, searchable by anyone with an internet connection, nearly a year into a ceasefire that was supposed to mark the start of rebuilding rather than further loss.