CEOAS geographer provides the world with maps of the war in Gaza
By Paul Lask
Spring/Summer 2024
Jamon Van Den Hoek and Corey Scher were doing what geographers often do — making maps. In fall of 2023 they were focusing on creating satellite maps of Ukraine, examining environmental consequences of areas hit by the Russian invasion.
Then Hamas attacked Israel on October 7. Disinformation around the ensuing conflict flourished. Commercial satellite companies began restricting media access to imagery, widening the gulf between what was really happening in Gaza and what was purported.
Helping fill this void, Van Den Hoek, an associate professor of geography in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University, and Scher, a Ph.D. candidate at the City University of New York, applied a novel mapping method that utilizes open-access data from the European Space Agency Sentinel-1 satellite. They have since been “damage mapping” the war in Gaza every week for the past six months.
Sentinel-1 is a radar satellite. Providing imagery across the world, it refreshes its data every five or six days as it traverses the sky. In contrast to optical overhead satellite imagery — think Google Maps “Satellite” mode — radar is more sensitive to texture and form of cities and vegetated areas.
A radar emits a pulse of light like a camera flash, detecting not only how much light returns to the satellite, but how that light is structured and scattered — the outline, shape, and even electrical connectivity of a given region can be identified. This approach gives scientists a greater sensitivity to landscape deformation — one can detect changes in elevation due to things like erosion or compaction during an earthquake. One study showed radar could detect cracks as small as three centimeters.
Some of the most pronounced radar signals come from hard roads and large buildings, markers of stability.
“We track that stability,” Van Den Hoek says, developing a baseline from which to track potential changes.
As the war unfolded Van Den Hoek began to see “very sharp, sudden, and sustained changes” to the landscape at a scale and rate “unprecedented in the 21st century.”
Sentinel-1 is an open access satellite, the data it provides made free and accessible to the public. Van Den Hoek refers to it as a “workhorse” satellite, used by thousands of people around the world. And in Gaza, data from Sentinel-1 and other satellites are complemented by “social media and journalist accounting” of damaged sites throughout the war.
By referencing photographs and videos accessible over social media, Van Den Hoek and Scher can cross-check their assessments of damage. They may suspect damage to a building that is disproved by photographs taken on the ground — a false positive. Researchers could also miss damage that are seen firsthand — a false negative.
After processing each new radar image, Van Den Hoek and Scher send out updated damage maps that are used by journalists and humanitarian groups to try and make sense of what is happening. The GIS-friendly image files are in turn shaped into narratives. Though the raw geospatial data is simply binary code — zeros and ones, where ones are damage — the meaning-making varies depending on a given news outlet.
Van Den Hoek and Scher published the first damage map of Gaza in the New York Times, were credited, and began fielding inquiries from media outlets. They have since assembled a contact list of over 200 journalists from 14 countries that they ping every time they make a new map.
This intense dissemination of their results has led to a broadscale public awareness of the damage extent in Gaza. The data are used by humanitarian groups for coordinating relief, fighting food insecurity, and assessing overall severity of damage in the region. Even the United Nations has taken notice, issuing an economic report citing Van Den Hoek and Scher’s work.
Like an island of certainty in the turbulent seas of disinformation, Van Den Hoek and Scher’s damage mapping is providing the foundation for shared consensus. News outlets from across political spectra reference them, no small feat in our hyper-polarized media landscape.
While not going so far as to say there’s an objective truth, Van Den Hoek sees their work as fostering an agreement of “an approximation of reality” as it relates to the current geographic understanding of what’s happening in Gaza.
There is now transparency to how the damage is being documented. Unanimity on the extent of destruction in the region is essential for post-conflict resolution. How relief groups make decisions, how people start to process what has happened, how to literally rebuild, are questions Van Den Hoek and Scher’s damage maps can assist in answering.
In an interview with Scientific American, Van Den Hoek noted the importance of mapping continuously, rather than at the beginning and ending of the conflict. The intervals are what matter if the world is going to understand the process. “There’d be no sense of the tempo” of the war otherwise, he notes.
Building peace cannot begin if simple facts are in dispute. Van Den Hoek and Scher ‘s work — providing continuous, quantifiable, transparent information — is helping calibrate truth detectors by showing the world how war unfolds in real time.
55.6% of buildings in the Gaza Strip were likely damaged or destroyed by 17 March 2024
North Gaza
69.8% (31900)
buildings
Gaza
73.9% (45800)
buildings
Deir al Balah
46.4% (23100)
buildings
Khan Younis
54.0% (44100)
buildings
Rafah
31.1% (15100)
buildings
Map provided by Jamon Van Den Hoek
