It is one year since Israel responded to Hamas’s unprecedented cross-border attack on 7 October 2023 by bombing and invading the coastal Palestinian territory of Gaza.
Israel says it is trying to destroy the military and governing capabilities of the Islamist group, which is committed to the destruction of Israel and has been in control of Gaza since 2007, but the war has also had a devastating impact on the people living there.
This visual guide shows some of the drastic ways life has changed for Gazans living through war that has laid waste to the territory and killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians, according to the Hamas-run health ministry.
An old woman and a child try to stay warm by burning brushwood in front of a tent house, in Gaza City, in December 2022 – the woman has her head covered in a chequered shawl and is holding a large stick. The boy, with short dark hair, is lying with his head on her lap under a white and grey patterned blanket.
Image source,Getty Images
Life before the war was tough in Gaza – for years it had been the subject of an Israeli-Egyptian blockade severely limiting who and what could enter and leave, which both countries said was needed for security.
Nearly two-thirds of the population was in poverty, according to the World Bank, and thousands lived in UN-run refugee camps but it also had hospitals, schools and shops.
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Asdaa City was one of Gaza’s biggest amusement parks and offered respite and fun to the two million people – nearly half of them children – who live in the Strip, which is less than a quarter of the size of Greater London.
A Palestinian woman dressed in black wearing a headscarf laughing on a swing ride at the park in 2022 with a boy in dark shorts on the seat behind her – the ferris wheel with red, blue, yellow and green passenger cars can be seen in the background
Image source,Getty
Images of the park in Khan Younis captured before Israel’s invasion and those taken in recent months offer a stark illustration of how a year of conflict has upended Gaza and the lives of those who live there.
The Ferris Wheel seen in the last image can be seen again but now there are makeshift tents in the foreground with small clusters of people dressed in dark clothing sheltering beneath.
Image source,Getty Images
Rides have fallen into disrepair, there’s no power to operate them and thousands of tents have been erected across the site to house families forced to flee there.
A wider shot showing the Ferris Wheel towering over a field full of white, brown and blue tents. Trees can be seen in the distance.
Image source,Getty Images
After the 7 October attacks, in which Hamas gunmen killed more than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals and took 251 more back to Gaza as hostages, Israel began an intense bombing campaign focused on northern Gaza – where it said Hamas fighters were hiding among the civilian population.
How the destruction spread
The northern town of Beit Hanoun, only 2km (1.2 miles) from the border, was one of the first areas hit by Israeli strikes. It sustained heavy damage.
A map dated 12 October 2023 showing Gaza tilted about 45% so it appears horizontally, labelling the cities from south to North of Rafah, Khan Younis, Deir al-Balah and Gaza City. The map is white with roads and populated areas in grey. It show areas assessed as damaged in red. There are small red specks across the whole map but they are bigger around Gaza City and in particular Beit Hanoun, which is highlighted.
Israel continued to bomb Gaza City and other urban centres in the north and ordered civilians to move south of the Wadi Gaza river for “safety and protection” before it began its ground invasion at the end of October.
But Israel was also launching air strikes on the southern cities which hundreds of thousands of Gazans from the north were fleeing towards. By the end of November, parts of the south of the territory lay in ruins, as did much of the north.
A similar map of Gaza dated 29 November 2023 showing bigger red damaged areas across most of Gaza but the top third over Gaza City is almost completely red. The Wadi Gaza river that splits the territory in two is also highlighted
Israel intensified its bombing of southern and central Gaza at the start of December, before launching a ground offensive on Khan Younis, and by January more than half of Gaza’s buildings had been damaged or destroyed.
A similar map of Gaza dated 29 January 2024 showing that all the red areas have grown bigger and denser. The red cluster over Khan Younis is particularly noticeable and highlighted.
One year of conflict has probably damaged close to two thirds of buildings across the Gaza Strip, with Gaza City suffering the heaviest destruction, according to experts from CUNY Graduate Center and Oregon State University who have been analysing satellite data.
A similar map of Gaza dated 24 September 2024 showing even bigger red damaged areas across most of Gaza and now the southern city of Rafah is also showing as a large red area
Throughout the year, Hamas – which is designated as a terrorist organisation by Israel, the UK and many other countries – and its allies have been engaged in intense battles against Israeli forces on the ground. They have also been firing thousands of rockets into Israel.
Vast tent city created
Gaza – only 41km (25 miles) long and 10km wide and bounded by the Mediterranean Sea and closed borders with Israel and Egypt – is now in large parts uninhabitable.
A boy in dark trousers and a sleeveless shirt is running up a street in Gaza passed a white truck marked UN. He is surrounded by the wreckage of buildings with a badly damaged but still standing building in the background. A yellow people carrier can be seen at the other end of the road.
Image source,Getty Images
Entire districts have been razed to the ground. Agricultural land where greenhouses once stood have been reduced to sand and rubble by heavy vehicles and tanks used in clearing operations by Israeli troops.
Before the war, most of Gaza’s 2.2 million people lived in its four main cities – Rafah and Khan Younis in the south, Deir al-Balah, in the centre, and Gaza City, which was home to 775,000 people – but almost the whole population have now been displaced.
A graphic showing that 90% of Gaza’s 2.2 million people – it represents the population of Gaza as a grey row of people and those displaced are shown in red. It includes a timeline showing that by 12 October 2023 423,378 people were displaced and that by 30 September 2024 that number had risen to 1.9 million.
Families have been displaced multiple times as Israel changed the focus of its operation, initially telling people in the north to move south of Wadi Gaza river, which cuts the Strip roughly in half, and later declaring a series of evacuation zones in the south.
Satellite imagery shows a vast proliferation of tents erected by displaced people in al-Mawasi, a thin strip of mainly agricultural land along the Mediterranean coast, close to the Egyptian border, that Israel designated as a so-called “humanitarian area” in January.
