Blurred Palestinian and Israeli satellite imagery complicates reconstruction

The last wave the violence between Israel and Palestine ended on May 20, after the two sides agreed on a ceasefire.

Most of the dead and devastation on the Gaza Strip were suffered, where airstrikes killed more than 230 people and destroyed more than 1,000 residential and commercial buildings. The New York Times described the landscape as a “sea of ​​waste,” as many hospitals, power lines, schools, sanitation systems, and roads were damaged or destroyed.

Palestinians are beginning a long process of reconstruction, backed by humanitarian organizations, and are looking back on the conflict for signs of human rights violations, aided by investigative journalists. But this work is harder and more expensive than the lack of good satellite images of Israel and Palestine in free mapping tools.

At the height of the violence, open source researchers have indicated on Twitter Regions like Gaza appear much more blurry on platforms like Google Earth, where they collect satellite images from a variety of sources. The reason is obscure U.S. regulations, called the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment, which banned U.S. companies from providing high-resolution satellite imagery in the region because of security concerns expressed by Israel. It was the regulations it was disbanded last year, and the limit is similar to the resolution adopted in other parts of the world. Many commercial satellite imagery, such as Planet Labs, quickly adapted its products to popular free tools, including Google Earth, however.

The comparison between the images provided by Planet Labs and those found in Google Earth shows a significant difference in resolution.

More detailed images allow us to see the characteristics of buildings, count individual trees, identify vehicles on the road, and count the lines printed on the sidewalk. They show more color variation, with specific shapes of things like squares and blocks. In free services, satellite images of Israel and Palestine are updated less frequently than in the world and elsewhere. In Google Earth, for example, some areas of New York have five different satellite images for 2020, and some areas of the city of Gaza have five images in the last 35 years.

This is causing a great deal of change for the people on the ground, as well as the humanitarian organizations that are trying to help the Palestinians in their reconstruction work.

More dangerous and more accurate

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been working in Israel and Palestine since 1960, providing health services and other assistance to people during and after the outbreak of violence. It helps rebuild the community. The ICRC is currently carrying out repairs to the Gaza Strip water system, electricity grid and sanitation system.

Many of these activities involve the use of satellite imagery. “In times of conflict, we use images to detect the extent of the damage and destruction,” says Christoph Hanger, a spokeswoman for the ICRC. When he is allowed to enter a conflict site, he uses images to plan his movements. Once the conflict is over, “up-to-date satellite imagery is essential for detecting changes in the ground,” Hanger says, to see how air attacks affect buildings and infrastructure and to identify areas that should receive more attention.

The images provided by free tools like Google Earth are exaggerated to use ICRC. Poor resolution, Hanger says, “increases the chance of misinterpreting images and thus results in a less effective operational response.” As a result, he added, the organization is forcing the use of satellite commercial imaging providers because they are more expensive and require additional human resources.

Blurred evidence

Degraded satellite imagery also affects people far from Israel and Palestine – digital researchers who throw images and videos of the conflict over them to identify possible human rights violations. They use information that is open to the web, content shared on social media, images and videos created by Israelis and Palestinians, and satellite imagery available on free tools like Google Earth.