On Thursday last, Palestinians gathered to bury the remains of 105 people killed in an Israeli attack on Gaza City three years ago. The victims were killed in a series of Israeli air strikes involving dozens of bombs that levelled a seven-storey building and destroyed several other residential buildings in the Yarmouk Square neighbourhood on the afternoon of October 25th, 2023, local authorities say.
Three years after the Gaza war began, and almost a year since a ceasefire came into effect, the extent of devastation and the severity of the continuing humanitarian crisis faced by the territory’s 2.1 million people continues to be revealed.
The presence of human remains still buried under the rubble remains one of the most urgent humanitarian issues in Gaza. According to estimates cited by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), between 8,000 and 10,000 bodies may still be buried in this way.
Newly released satellite images on Google Maps, taken in June this year, show the extent of devastation. Thousands of homes, businesses, places of worship have been wiped away. Any available open space in Gaza City is packed with shacks, tents and huts.
The images also show fresh damage to towns such as Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun, as well as the destruction of places of worship such as the Istiqlal mosque in Khan Younis. Large neighbourhoods in Gaza City such as Jabaliya and Shuja’iya, which were targeted in repeated Israeli offensives, are clearly now uninhabitable.
Swathes of rubble are visible in the south of Gaza, where a wide strip appears to have been cleared by Israeli forces along the border with Egypt. The town of Rafah appears to have been almost entirely reduced to rubble and Tel al-Sultan razed.
More than two million displaced people are living in tents and temporary shelters in Gaza, where an estimated 80 per cent of structures – roughly 200,000 buildings – have been damaged, with about two-thirds of those destroyed, according to the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, Unrwa.
A recent UN assessment estimated that the number of destroyed structures across Gaza had increased by 9 per cent since the declaration of a ceasefire in October 2025.
“The estimate of the total amount of rubble in Gaza is 61 million tonnes. It is approximately 20 times the amount of rubble generated in all wars across the world over the last 18 years,” Jaco Cilliers, the UNDP’s special representative in Palestine, told the Guardian last month.
The destruction is staggering; the human toll even more so. More than 74,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war, mostly civilians. The conflict was triggered by a surprise attack by Hamas into Israel in October 2023, in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 others hostage.
Gaza’s health ministry attributes the deaths in the territory directly to Israeli military action, but does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) disputes the ministry’s figures, saying there is “no basis to assume” that all those listed were killed as a result of IDF activity. It says it operates in “a precise manner to remove threats and protect its troops and Israeli civilians, in accordance with the agreement”, and that it works to mitigate any civilian harm “to the greatest extent possible”.
Meanwhile, the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains perilous, according to United Nations agencies and humanitarian organisations.
Addressing the UN General Assembly last month, secretary general António Guterres said of Gaza that while the resumption of assistance since the ceasefire was announced last October has brought some relief, conditions remain intolerable.
“International law, including international humanitarian law, is brazenly violated. Humanitarian access remains severely restricted, and the level of human suffering is still off the charts,” he said.
Conditions in Gaza remain catastrophic, with widespread destruction and severe shortages nearly a year after the October 2025 ceasefire, according to the British Red Cross and Médecins Sans Frontières.
Human rights groups say the Israeli military maintains direct control of or imposes buffer zones over roughly 60 per cent of the territory; during military operations this expands to 70 per cent of Gaza’s 365sq km. This confines 2.1 million Palestinians to devastated neighbourhoods and tent camps in the 30-40 per cent of the coastal enclave where homes and infrastructure have been reduced to rubble.
The UN secretary general’s spokesman, Stéphane Dujarric, has warned of yet another catastrophe. “Our humanitarian colleagues warn that funding shortfalls, as well as continued Israeli restrictions, are severely limiting preparations for the rainy season,” he said.
While heating points and reinforced tents have been established at displacement sites, they can only host 10 per cent of the population. “Many more tents are needed, along with shelter kits, heaters and sustained fuel imports. Thousands of heating points will be required to meet the needs of people when the temperature drops,” he said.
Israel reports that approximately 600 to 800 trucks enter the Gaza Strip daily, although humanitarian organisations say only 20 per cent carry vital humanitarian aid. In addition to the trucks that get through, UN deputy special coordinator for the Middle East peace process Ramiz Alakbarov has accused Hamas of disrupting aid distribution, increasing the hardship of civilians already facing a humanitarian crisis in the devastated enclave.
He said humanitarian workers halted work after armed men entered a food distribution hub in northern Gaza and assaulted two truck drivers in a World Food Programme warehouse.
“These incidents are not isolated. They are completely unacceptable and reflect an increasingly dangerous pattern of intimidation, violence and obstruction, including smuggling attempts, targeting and abusing humanitarian operations,” he said.
Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Israeli foreign ministry stated that Israel does not have a policy of starvation and facilitates the entry of humanitarian supplies.
Against this backdrop, the charge of genocide in Gaza has been levelled at Israel. During his recent address to the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu claimed that these allegations were “the biggest lie of the century”.
The US refused entry to Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas, who delivered his UN address by video-link. He called Israel’s Gaza offensive a “genocidal war that has created an unprecedented humanitarian catastrophe” and accused the media of failing to tell the truth about Gaza.
For nearly three years Israel has banned foreign journalists from entering Gaza. Satellite images, meanwhile, provide a stark reminder of the conflict’s lasting impact. Gaza remains a landscape of rubble and displacement, where the dead are still being recovered and the living are still waiting for recovery to begin. – Additional reporting: Guardian
Gaza: the human toll
74, 000 – The estimated number of Gazans killed during the war, according to Gaza’s health ministry. The war was triggered by a Hamas attack in which militants killed about 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and took 251 others hostage.
175,000 – The estimated number of injured in Gaza during the war, according to Gaza’s health ministry.
21,000 – The estimated number of children among the fatalities, local health authorities, and international monitoring groups report.
2.1 million: The estimated population in Gaza, with one million under the age of 18, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.
8-10,000: The estimated number of bodies still buried under rubble in Gaza, according to the UN Development Programme.
