Israel-Hamas War 2024: Assessing Gaza Strip Building Damage from Sentinel2 Satellite Imagery

This 54-minute tutorial demonstrates how to independently assess building damage in the Gaza Strip using freely available Sentinel2 satellite imagery. Learn to analyze infrastructure destruction during the Israel-Hamas conflict by comparing imagery from January 2023 to January 2025. Follow along as the instructor uses ProRaster Scientific software to evaluate changes in perceived lightness of 8-3-1 bands, creating a methodology that supports UNOSAT's official damage assessments. The comprehensive walkthrough covers downloading Sentinel2 data, importing it into ProRaster, creating scene sequences, generating building masks using NDVI and street map WMS, visualizing destruction patterns, calculating perceived lightness differences, and computing damaged areas. The tutorial provides a data-driven approach to understanding the conflict's physical impact during the mid-January to mid-March 2025 ceasefire period, without relying on potentially biased reporting from involved parties or media.

Syllabus

0:00 Introduction
1:51 UNOSAT Building Damage Assessment Dashboard
4:54 Methodology summary
9:18 Downloading Sentinel2 data
11:44 Importing Sentinel2 into ProRaster
14:57 Creating a Scene Sequence
17:50 RGB rendering using bands 8-3-1
19:40 Creating a Gaza polygon
21:00 Creating a building mask using NDVI
28:41 Creating a building mask from a Street Map WMS
36:34 Visualising the destruction
40:41 Perceived Lightness Difference
45:23 Visualising the changes
48:14 Computing the damaged area
52:24 Final visualisation and summary
0:46 Displaying the terrain raster