Active InSAR monitoring of building damage in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas War
This provides timely, low-cost damage data for humanitarian and journalistic organizations in active conflict zones, though it is an incremental application of existing methods to a new context.
The researchers tackled the problem of monitoring building damage in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas War by applying a long temporal-arc coherent change detection method to Sentinel-1 SAR data, achieving 92.5% detection of damage labels with a 1.2% false positive rate and revealing that 191,263 buildings were damaged or destroyed by the end of the study.
Aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip beginning October 7, 2023 is one of the most intense bombing campaigns of the twenty-first century, driving widespread urban damage. Characterizing damage over a geographically dynamic and protracted armed conflict requires active monitoring. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has precedence for mapping disaster-induced damage with bi-temporal methods but applications to active monitoring during sustained crises are limited. Using interferometric SAR data from Sentinel-1, we apply a long temporal-arc coherent change detection (LT-CCD) approach to track weekly damage trends over the first year of the 2023- Israel-Hamas War. We detect 92.5% of damage labels in reference data from the United Nations with a negligible (1.2%) false positive rate. The temporal fidelity of our approach reveals rapidly increasing damage during the first three months of the war focused in northern Gaza, a notable pause in damage during a temporary ceasefire, and surges of new damage as conflict hot-spots shift from north to south. Three-fifths (191,263) of all buildings are damaged or destroyed by the end of the study. With massive need for timely data on damage in armed conflict zones, our low-cost and low-latency approach enables rapid uptake of damage information at humanitarian and journalistic organizations.