FOCUS – Angelina Jolie highlights the destruction of Gaza through satellite images

LOS ANGELES, 5 October /ATSH-AA/ – Actress Angelina Jolie, a long-time former special envoy of the United Nations, pointed out the scale of the destruction in the Gaza Strip, publishing before-and-after satellite images which show the great damage caused by the Israeli genocide in the Palestinian enclave.

“You can now open Google Earth and see what has been done to Gaza,” Jolie wrote on Saturday on Instagram, together with the images comparing areas of Gaza before the war with their appearance this summer.

The images show areas near the Al-Kadisije school in the city of Rafah, Khan Younis in southern Gaza and Omar Mukhtar street in Gaza City, where large parts of previously dense urban areas have been turned into ruins.

“Entire neighbourhoods have been turned into ruins,” Jolie said, adding that homes, schools, universities, hospitals, roads, water and sewage systems, and other infrastructure have been damaged or destroyed.

Citing the UN’s satellite analysis, Jolie said that by June this year, 82 per cent of buildings in Gaza had been damaged and that about two-thirds of the damaged buildings were assessed as destroyed.

– The human consequences, humanitarian needs

She also referred to humanitarian data, according to which 1.98 million people, or 94 per cent of Gaza’s population, need shelter and basic items, as winter approaches.

“Aid and shelter materials continue to face restrictions and delays,” she said.

Jolie said the satellite images help to present the physical scale of the destruction, but fail to reflect its human consequences.

“What they cannot show is what it means to live among them, what happened to the families who were killed and what life is like for those who survived,” she said.

She called for civilians to have access to shelter, humanitarian aid and medical supplies, and for the conditions to be created for Palestinians to be able to rebuild their homes, schools, hospitals and communities.

“The destruction is visible. The needs are known. What matters now is whether they will be met,” Jolie said.

Jolie, a winner of two Oscar awards, served as a Goodwill Ambassador of the UN and then as a Special Envoy of UNHCR, the UN agency for refugees, for more than 20 years, from 2001 to 2022.

Since October 2023, Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians and injured over 175,000 others, while destroying about 90 per cent of the enclave’s infrastructure, according to Palestinian data. /os//