Hezbollah attacks northern Israel with drones

Paris: The seven-month war between Israel and Hamas has not only killed more than 34,000 people and caused catastrophic starvation and injuries, but also caused massive material destruction in Gaza.
“The recorded damage rate is unlike anything we have examined before. It’s much faster and more comprehensive than anything we’ve mapped,” said Corey Scher, a doctoral student at the City University of New York who has researched satellite images of Gaza.
As Israel launches an offensive on Rafah, the last population center in Gaza not yet entered by its ground forces, AFP looks at the territory’s shattered landscape, seven months after the start of the war sparked by Hamas’s unprecedented October 7 attack was triggered.
Gaza is one of the most densely populated places on earth, where before the war 2.3 million people lived in a 365 square kilometer strip of land.
As of April 21, 56.9 percent of Gaza’s buildings were damaged or destroyed, a total of 160,000, according to satellite analysis by Scher and Jamon Van Den Hoek, an associate professor of geography at Oregon State University.
“The highest destruction rates occurred in the first two to three months of the bombing,” Scher told AFP.
In Gaza City, where around 600,000 people lived before the war, the situation is dramatic: almost three quarters (74.3 percent) of the buildings were damaged or destroyed.
During the war, Gaza’s hospitals have been repeatedly attacked by Israel, which accuses Hamas of using them for military purposes, something the militant group denies.
In the first six weeks of the war sparked by the Hamas attack that killed more than 1,170 people, according to an AFP tally of official Israeli figures, “60 percent of health facilities … were considered damaged or destroyed,” Scher said .
The territory’s largest hospital, Al-Shifa in Gaza City, was attacked by the Israeli army in two offensives, the first in November and the second in March.
The World Health Organization said the second operation turned the hospital into an “empty shell” littered with human remains.
Five hospitals were completely destroyed, according to figures compiled by AFP from the OpenStreetMap project, the Hamas Ministry of Health and the United Nations Satellite Center (UNOSAT). According to the UN, fewer than one in three hospitals – 28 percent – ​​are partially functional.
The territory’s largely UN-run schools, where many civilians sought refuge from the fighting, also paid a heavy price.
As of April 25, UNICEF counted 408 damaged schools, accounting for at least 72.5 percent of the total 563 facilities.
Of these, 53 school buildings were completely destroyed and 274 others were damaged by direct fire.
The UN estimates that two-thirds of schools will need to be completely or extensively rebuilt in order to be functional again.
Regarding places of worship, combined data from UNOSAT and OpenStreetMap show that 61.5 percent of mosques were damaged or destroyed.
The scale of destruction in northern Gaza has exceeded that of the German city of Dresden, which was firebombed by Allied forces in 1945 in one of the most controversial Allied acts of World War II.
According to a 1954 U.S. military study cited by the Financial Times, bombing at the end of World War II damaged 59 percent of Dresden’s buildings.
In late April, the head of the UN demining program in the Palestinian territories, Mungo Birch, said there was more rubble to clear in Gaza than in Ukraine, which was invaded by Russia more than two years ago.
The United Nations estimated in early May that rebuilding Gaza after the war would cost between $30 billion and $40 billion.