Satellite imagery updated to February 2026 reveals that Israeli military operations have erased not only neighbourhoods but burial grounds across Gaza.
What is perhaps most striking about the recently updated satellite imagery added to Google Earth is not only the scale of physical destruction across Gaza, but the systematic erasure of the landscape itself. High-resolution pictures captured on 25 February 2026 show that entire residential districts have been reduced to rubble, while surviving populations are reported to be compressed into densely overcrowded encampments stretching to the shores of the Mediterranean. Among the sites that are said to have been transformed beyond recognition is the Sheikh Mohammed cemetery in the Maan area of Khan Younis, which satellite data suggests has been converted into an Israeli military outpost. Palestinian journalist Muhannad Qishta, whose sisters Reem and Walaa are buried there, described the cemetery's apparent destruction as a profound violation. "Even the dead have not been spared from this war," he said. "How will I feel if I go and find the place a desert, without my sisters' graves to read a prayer over?"
According to the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, Israeli forces are believed to have fully or partially destroyed as many as 94 percent of Gaza's cemeteries, a figure that has not been independently verified but which analysts suggest reflects a broader pattern of geographic transformation. In Rafah, where a red line was drawn — and subsequently abandoned — by the Biden administration in early 2024, the Saudi neighbourhood in Tal as-Sultan, a housing project of some 752 units, is reported to have been flattened entirely. The Swedish village in Rafah, founded in 1965 to shelter Palestinian refugees, is said to have been wiped from the map altogether.…