2025/06/17 by Corey Scher, Scher, Corey, Jamon Van Den Hoek +1 · 2 voices
Engineering · #Geophysical Methods and Applications #Remote-Sensing Image Classification #Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) Applications and Techniques #cs.CV
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.14730
openalex publication_date 2025/06/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Aerial bombardment of the Gaza Strip beginning October 7, 2023 is one of the most intense bombing campaigns of the twenty-first century, driving widespread urban damage. Characterizing damage over a geographically dynamic and protracted armed conflict requires active monitoring. Synthetic aperture radar (SAR) has precedence for mapping disaster-induced damage with bi-temporal methods but applications to active monitoring during sustained crises are limited. Using interferometric SAR data from Sentinel-1, we apply a long temporal-arc coherent change detection (LT-CCD) approach to track weekly damage trends over the first year of the 2023- Israel-Hamas War. We detect 92.5% of damage labels in reference data from the United Nations with a negligible (1.2%) false positive rate. The temporal fidelity of our approach reveals rapidly increasing damage during the first three months of the war focused in northern Gaza, a notable pause in damage during a temporary ceasefire, and surges of new damage as conflict hot-spots shift from north to south. Three-fifths (191,263) of all buildings are damaged or destroyed by the end of the study. With massive need for timely data on damage in armed conflict zones, our low-cost and low-latency approach enables rapid uptake of damage information at humanitarian and journalistic organizations.