Two years of death and devastation in Gaza, visualized

Mohammed Zediah may count as one of Gaza's lucky ones. "Blessed" is the word he uses.

Two years of war have left Gaza in ruins. Thousands have been killed. Many more are displaced and malnourished. Zediah has found shelter in a small, crowded room he shares with eight family members. He is able to cook lunch each day over an open fire. Once a week, he fills up water bottles from a nearby communal water distribution point.

When a mosque across the street from the house where he was staying earlier in the war with 44 members of his extended family was destroyed in an Israeli airstrike, shrapnel flew at them from every direction. No one was seriously injured. Zediah has said goodbye to 10 friends, but not to any direct family members. He knows he's an outlier.

"We have had to constantly adapt to a strange and difficult life," the graphic designer said in a WhatsApp message sent in early October from the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza. Zediah, 25, is from Gaza City, in the north, where Israel has launched a ground offensive aimed at defeating what it describes as Hamas's "last stronghold" in the Palestinian enclave. He has been displaced multiple times across the strip. His father's friend is hosting him in Nuseirat.

"Ghosts fleeing bombs and destruction," is how he describes Gaza's civilian population − himself included.

Hamas fighters invaded southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing at least 1,200 people and kidnapping 251 more, according to Israel's government.

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Two years later, the 25-mile-long, 7.5-mile-wide stretch of Palestinian coastal land − about the size of Philadelphia or Detroit − is unrecognizable.

In late September, the White House and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have released an ambitious 20-point plan to end the war and bring home all remaining hostages. Hamas, which has lost most of its senior leadership and military organization, has agreed to parts of the peace plan but hasn't accepted all the conditions.

For two years, Israel has not permitted independent access to Gaza, and it disputes many of the assertions about conditions there. However, aid groups, humanitarian organizations, visiting doctors, local journalists and Gazans themselves say most of the civilian population in the besieged strip face a daily struggle to find food, medicine and hygiene products because of insufficient supply, a breakdown in law and order and skyrocketing prices. Fuel is scarce; so is water. There is no electricity. Sanitation and health systems have collapsed.

Since the beginning of the conflict, agriculture in Gaza has sustained substantial damage. Land and infrastructure crucial to food production, including tree crops like olive groves and fruit orchards and fields for growing vegetables, have been virtually wiped out. A satellite analysis led by He Yin at Kent State University shows heavy damage to agricultural land, particularly in the northern half of Gaza.

The analysis revealed roughly 91.7% of Gaza's total cropland was damaged by Aug. 10, 2025. The latest findings were included in the United Nations Environment Programme's second assessment of Gaza's environmental damage, published in September.

Jan Egeland is secretary general of the Norwegian Refugee Council, an aid group. He said that in Gaza City – Zediah's hometown – hundreds of thousands of people are encircled by Israeli shelling, drones and troops. Egeland said civilians can't access aid and have been ordered to leave the area without guarantees of safe passage.

"Life has been reduced to a fight for water and bread," he said.

Across the wider enclave, the United Nations estimates that more than 90% of homes have been damaged or destroyed. Overcrowded shelters mean that many Gazans are sleeping in the open, on the streets, or in what's left of bombed-out buildings that are missing walls and ceilings. Parks are covered in debris and dust and shorn of any greenery.

More than 2 million Palestinians are being told by Israel's military that they need to go to al-Mawasi, in the south, the strip's main designated "safe zone." The area represents just 3% of Gaza's landmass, and many can't afford the high cost of traveling there, let alone a tent to sleep in. The U.N. says that over the course of the war, al-Mawasi has been subject to periodic military strikes despite having no obvious military value.

For the sick, the wounded, the elderly and those needing maternity services or other forms of specialist or trauma care, the situation appears especially dire. None of Gaza's 36 hospitals are fully functioning, half are no longer in service, and a dwindling number of those that are partially open offer only limited services, according to Doctors Without Borders, an independent humanitarian and health crisis group.

"We just pray that we won't still be like this when winter comes," said Rana Hejji, 35.

She is nine months' pregnant. Her husband has a neurological disorder. In early October, one of their two young daughters was sick with a high fever and had a seizure. The family is sleeping in a tent on the grounds of a destroyed housing project in Deir al-Balah in central Gaza. The tent is made of scraps of wood. They are not getting enough food.

"We went from danger to danger," Hejji said, describing her family's story of multiple displacements.

The Israeli military says it has gone to great lengths to avoid civilian deaths and harm in Gaza. It vehemently rejects preliminary findings from the United Nations that its warfare in Gaza may be consistent with the characteristics of genocide, with mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions and displacements intentionally imposed on Palestinians.

Israel's political leaders say the military operation is intended to defeat Hamas and to secure the release of the hostages held by Hamas. Forty-eight are still being held by the militant group, only 20 of whom are presumed to be alive.

But the war has nevertheless come at great cost to human life in Gaza.

More than 66,000 Palestinians have been killed, according to the Hamas-run health ministry, which does not distinguish between civilian and combatant deaths in its accounting of casualties. And a recent estimate from the Palestinian Ministry of Health – which is based in Ramallah, in the West Bank, a separate, noncontiguous Palestinian enclave – concluded that at least 30% of Palestinians killed over the past two years in Gaza have been under 18. Those figures dwarf the number of fatalities in previous bouts of fighting between Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza since 2005, according to data from the Israeli human rights organization B'Tselem.

According to the Palestinian health ministry, over the past two years in the enclave at least 1,400 Palestinian families have been wiped out, meaning every member of a family has been killed. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists says at least 189 journalists have been killed in Gaza. More than 900 Israeli soldiers have died fighting in the war.

Beckie Ryan is the Gaza response director for CARE, an aid group that runs a health clinic in Deir Al-Balah. She said that as the war in Gaza enters its third winter, there are few signs conditions will improve for Gaza's civilians even with a ceasefire.

CARE's clinic can treat 200 people a day, but an estimated 400 people a day show up. There is still virtually no meat of any kind available for purchase in the markets. It can cost up to $40 for a few pounds of onions; a tent can cost $1,500. October begins the third year that children have no access to schools.

"We can see a shift in people's mental attitudes," Ryan said. "Before, the war was intensive and difficult and really heartbreaking. Now, there's just a lack of hope and energy. We're looking at generations of traumatized people."

Sources and methodology: Death toll data is from The Institute for National Security Studies, an Israeli national security policy research institute, and from the World Health Organization's Gaza emergency situation reports, which rely upon data provided by the Israeli Defense Forces, the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, the Palestinian Ministry of Health, and other organizations. Damage analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University; analysis of 3-m PlanetScope imagery © 2025 Planet Labs PBC conducted by Dr. He Yin of Kent State University based on research published in Science of Remote Sensing. Satellite images ©2025 Vantor.