When Palestinian journalist Muhannad Qishta attempts to locate the graves of his sisters, Reem and Walaa, in Khan Younis, he finds that the Sheikh Mohammed cemetery in the Maan area no longer exists — replaced, according to recently updated satellite imagery on Google Earth, by the tents and armoured vehicles of an Israeli military outpost. The erasure of this single cemetery is widely understood to be representative of a far broader pattern: the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has reported that Israeli forces have fully or partially destroyed 94 percent of Gaza's cemeteries, transforming places of communal mourning into military infrastructure. High-resolution satellite images captured on 25 February 2026 are said to document a landscape in which entire residential neighbourhoods have been reduced to rubble, and the surviving population has been compressed into overcrowded encampments stretching to the beaches of the Mediterranean. In Rafah, the Saudi neighbourhood in Tal as-Sultan — a housing project of some 752 units — has been flattened into mounds of debris, while the Swedish village, founded in 1965 to shelter Palestinian refugees, is reported to have been converted into a military zone.

Only faint outlines of streets are said to remain where communities once stood. For many Palestinians, the newly updated maps are regarded as providing a wide-angle record of what rights organisations have characterised as an ongoing genocide, in which nearly 73,000 people are estimated to have been killed. The geographic transformation of the Strip is considered by analysts to be so extensive that major residential centres have become, in practical terms, unrecognisable. It is worth noting that questions of accountability remain deeply contested.