Symposium on Forensic and Counter-Forensic Approaches to International Law: Genocide in Gaza – Earth Observation, Surveillance, and the Politics of Control

[Dr. Giuliana Rotola is a space law and policy specialist whose work spans sustainability, governance, Indigenous methodologies, and post-colonial approaches to space norms. She is fellowship coordinator at the Palestine Space Institute.]

Earth Observation as Witness to Systematic Destruction

International law defines genocide as acts committed with the intent to destroy a protected group. Amnesty International’s December 2024 report argues that Israel’s offensive on Gaza includes such prohibited acts, like mass killings, severe harm, and life-destroying conditions, showing a clear intent to destroy Palestinians. Framed by longstanding dispossession, apartheid, and occupation, plus dehumanizing leadership rhetoric, this points to a systematic, state-led campaign of destruction.​

Amid an Israel-imposed information blackout in Gaza, Earth Observation (EO) – satellite imagery, aerial reconnaissance, spatial analysis – has become vital for independent documentation. High-resolution before/after images show neighborhoods leveled within days, allowing analysts to map destroyed buildings, craters, fields, and displacement routes in near real-time. These “eyes in the sky” verify atrocities when reporters cannot enter, providing concrete evidence for legal and historical records.​ However, this witnessing capacity is itself uneven and contingent. Satellites are owned, tasked, and licensed by states and corporations that decide what is collected and who is allowed to see it. And what is happening in Gaza shows that EO is never just about what can be seen from above, but about who controls it and can strategically limit visibility.

Mapping Destruction and Displacement: The Systematic Targeting of Civilian Infrastructure

Earth Observation exposes a systematic, non-proportional obliteration of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure. UNOSAT high-resolution imagery shows that in the first seven weeks of Israel’s 2023 assault, 18% of all structures (37,000+) were damaged and more than 10,000 were leveled. A peer‑reviewed spatial analysis found over 60% of health facilities, 68% of schools, and 42% of water/sanitation sites hit, with about a third of each destroyed. The damage clusters so tightly around these protected sites that there is less than a 1% chance it is random, which provides strong evidence of deliberate or indiscriminate targeting. EO also documents extreme cases, such as Khuza’a, which was razed in May 2025 through a methodical campaign outside active combat that included farms and greenhouses. ​

EO makes clear that Israel’s genocide in Gaza includes forcibly displacing and concentrating survivors. After the 13 October 2023 order, which forced 1.1 million people to flee the north in 24 hours, satellite and aerial imagery captured a militarized boundary splitting the Strip and an east–west bulldozed corridor near Wadi Gaza that closed people south. At the Salah al‑Din crossing, overhead images show new Israeli checkpoints where civilians were bottled up, harassed, and in some cases shot for trying to return, mapping coerced herding that turned vast areas into a “no‑man’s‑land.”​

Remote sensing quantifies the exodus: by the end of 2023, 1.9 million people, about 85% of Gaza’s population, were internally displaced. UN satellite analysis reveals a proliferation of makeshift camps and density spikes in the south; imagery captures tents, overcrowded buildings, and traffic jams, while radar tracks mass movements and congestion inside so‑called “safe zones.” The picture is clear: displacement is being used as a tool of destruction, with nowhere safe even after fleeing.​

Digital Reconstruction and Machine Learning: New Frontiers in Evidence Gathering

Beyond static images, EO can now build court‑ready proof of Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. 3D reconstructions by investigative groups bring together satellite, drone, and witness footage to pinpoint blast origins, munitions, and timelines at sites like Al‑Shati and Al‑Ahli, echoing earlier Gaza investigations such as those following the 2014 assault. Time‑series analyses and machine learning can accelerate this work: a 2024 deep‑learning pipeline on high-frequency satellite data flagged thousands of new craters, tracked week‑by‑week intensifying destruction, and showed the disproportionate hit to homes and schools alongside a collapse in cultivated farmland.​​ In short, 24/7 algorithms scanning imagery expose a systematic campaign designed to dismantle civilian life.​

EO, Surveillance, and Palestinian Lived Experience

Yet, resonating with a standard trope in Science and Technology Studies, EO is not a neutral technology. For decades, Palestinians have lived under dense layers of Israeli surveillance technologies that treat them as a population to be monitored, controlled, and targeted.

This dual role of EO, as both a tool of control and a potential instrument of accountability, demands caution. Centering EO without centering Palestinian voices risks reproducing the same dynamics that have rendered Palestinians hyper-visible as security subjects and invisible as rights‑holders. Any use of EO for legal and advocacy purposes must be accountable to Palestinians themselves, foregrounding their testimony, organizing, and analysis rather than treating satellite data as a superior or “more objective” replacement.​​

Technology Control and the Politics of Access

Control over EO technology and data remains heavily concentrated in a small set of commercial and state actors, which directly shapes what the world can see of Gaza’s genocide and when. This politics of access is foundational to the genocidal campaign, as it determines the very terms of visibility for atrocities. Such gatekeeping amplifies Israel’s information blackout, selectively obscuring evidence of systematic destruction while enabling surveillance of Palestinians as targets. Reporting in late 2023 showed that key commercial providers, including Planet Labs and others, restricted or delayed access to high-resolution satellite imagery of Gaza, including by removing certain recent images from public platforms and limiting subscribers’ access to detailed views of active combat zones.

These decisions are not technical accidents but exercises of power. When commercial providers can unilaterally turn the satellites on or off, they effectively arbitrate who can document genocide and how quickly. This reinforces a hierarchy where a handful of corporations and allied states control the conditions of visibility, even as they market EO as a democratizing technology.​

At the same time, earlier legal regimes like the Kyl–Bingaman Amendment deliberately blurred imagery of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories for years, keeping key evidence of settlement expansion, home demolitions, and military build‑up out of public view. This history underlines that “data access” is never neutral.​ In the context of Gaza and the genocidal campaign that culminated in the past couple of years, the power to open or close the satellite view is inseparable from the power to enable or obstruct accountability. The same infrastructures that generate high-resolution evidence of genocide can be mobilized to delay, fragment, or hide that evidence at critical moments. The politics of access to EO is therefore not an additional issue beside the destruction on the ground, but part of how that destruction is narrated, contested, and remembered.

EO Data as Evidence in International Law: Promise and Limitations

EO evidence, however, can still carry critical legal weight. High‑resolution imagery and spatial analysis now routinely appear in UN and court filings to corroborate war crimes and crimes against humanity. For Gaza, EO strengthens cases in three main ways:​ (i) Objective corroboration: time-stamped satellite photos can independently verify witness accounts of districts flattened and civilian sites hit. They were used after 2008–09, in 2014, and are likely to be central to current ICC proceedings. (ii) Pattern and intent: clustering of strikes on protected sites (hospitals, schools, water infrastructure) with vanishing odds of randomness signals policy, not accident, and helps show the genocidal intent to render Gaza unlivable.​ (iii) Legal accountability and attribution: imagery of Israeli units and engineering equipment demolishing civilian structures, combined with thermal and infrared trajectories, ties acts to Israeli forces and undercuts official denials.​​

Courts have already accepted satellite evidence of massacres and mass graves in contexts like Darfur and the former Yugoslavia, and European prosecutions of Syrian officials have relied on geospatial analysis. The same evidentiary logic applies to Gaza: EO supports charges of disproportionate bombardment, starvation as a weapon, and unlawful blockade and confinement, and it bolsters states’ duty to prevent under the Genocide Convention once they are on notice.​

However, constraints remain. Coverage gaps (caused by clouds, smoke, orbital timing), selection bias, and political interference are significant factors. Satellites show what and when, not automatically why or by whom. Additionally, admissibility requires expert analysis, corroboration, and shared standards to meet criminal burdens of proof. There is also a capacity gap: judges, lawyers, and activists must build technical literacy to use EO effectively.​

Overcoming the Visibility Shield: the Kyl–Bingaman Amendment and Today’s Access to EO

No discussion of EO in Palestine is complete without the ways intentional obstructions have warped accountability. The Kyl–Bingaman Amendment, introduced in 1997 under Israeli lobbying and adopted as a provision of the US National Defense Authorization Act, hard-coded into US law a politicized restriction over Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories. It bars US authorities from licensing the collection or dissemination of commercial satellite imagery of Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories at a higher resolution than what is already available from non-US providers, so for years global platforms like Google Earth displayed only low-resolution imagery of the area. This is a remarkable example of the extraterritorial reach of a US legislation that with a domestic statute could effectively project one state’s security interests into the global infrastructure of witness Earth from above. This exceptional censorship regime hid evidence of expanding settlements, leveled villages, and military deployments, hindering both science and human rights monitoring for decades.​

The accountability costs were real. Through the Second Intifada and repeated assaults on Gaza into the mid‑2010s, investigators struggled to secure sharp satellite proof and often had to rely on non‑U.S. sources or outdated declassified images. Only once foreign satellites made KBA effectively moot, and U.S. authorities eased it around 2018–2020, high‑resolution evidence surged, enabling detailed public mapping of Gaza’s destroyed neighborhoods and West Bank land grabs.​

The 2023–25 genocide in Gaza confirms that technical barriers have lowered but control has simply shifted: instead of a single statutory blur, there is now a patchwork of corporate policies, export controls, and opaque “security” decisions that can limit access at critical moments, as seen in Planet and other companies’ restrictions and delays on Gaza imagery after October 2023. The lesson is broader: control of technology means control of narrative.​​

Building Capacity for Justice: Centering Palestinian Agency

Documenting a genocide is only the first step; the ultimate goal is to achieve justice and prevent further atrocities. Gaza sits at the intersection of technology, law, and persecution, demanding capacity‑building on all fronts. Technologists are learning to translate findings for courts; lawyers and judges are learning how to admit and weigh digital evidence; activists are learning how to integrate EO into campaigns and legal strategies. Conferences and blogs can serve as spaces of cross‑pollination, briefing pro‑Palestinian organizers and attorneys on EO tools while sensitizing data scientists to legal and ethical stakes.​

Capacity must also reside with Palestinians themselves, who are already producing, curating, and interpreting evidence of what is being done. Rather than treating them as passive subjects of surveillance, EO work needs to recognize and support Palestinians as analysts and archivists of their own evidence, keeping narrative and data rooted in community experience. For external institutions and allies, this means investing in Palestinian technical training, research institutions, and secure infrastructures for storing and governing EO data, so that those who choose to engage these tools can do so on their own terms.

Palestinians indeed already live under pervasive digital surveillance; using EO for accountability must protect dignity and privacy, focus on patterns and destruction rather than exposure of private lives, and resist any slide into “humanitarian surveillance” that reproduces colonial dynamics, to have open, rights‑respecting access to high-quality EO and rigorous, community‑accountable methods that turn witnessing into enforceable accountability.​​

Conclusion: From Visibility to Accountability, Beyond Technological Determinism

What is happening in Gaza is a scar on humanity’s conscience: a genocidal campaign that decimates and uproots a captive civilian population under the guise of “military necessity.” Earth Observation has become a powerful means of witnessing: satellites do not stop bombs, but they stop the bombers from hiding. By capturing the scope and pattern of destruction, EO evidence makes clear that this is not a “conflict” but a deliberate effort to bring about the physical destruction of a people.​

To call it genocide is a factual and legal conclusion grounded in meticulous mapping and pattern analysis, aligned with Palestinian testimony and decades of documentation of Israeli apartheid and settler‑colonial violence. EO is helping assemble a robust dossier for war crimes and genocide prosecutions, but visibility alone is not enough – especially when it is contingent on the decisions of a few states and corporations that can blur or selectively release what the world sees.​​ So what is at stake here is not only whether atrocities are recorded, but who holds the power to interrupt that recording. Unless the ownership and governance of EO infrastructures themselves are contested, the same actors who facilitate witnessing can also support erasure.

The task now is twofold. First, to turn visibility into accountability by ensuring EO evidence is used in courts, UN mechanisms, and political arenas. Second, to resist technological determinism and keep Palestinian voices at the center, treating EO as one tool among many in a broader struggle for liberation rather than as a savior technology.​​

In the face of genocidal violence, neutrality is complicity. This article adopts a non‑neutral stance because the facts and law compel it: Gaza is enduring a one‑sided campaign of destruction by a powerful state against a captive population, and EO that pretends to be “balanced” in the face of this reality only serves the oppressor. It is now up to scholars, technologists, advocates and global institutions to use EO in ways that challenges surveillance and corporate control, centering Palestinian narratives that expose the reality of the genocide, and transform every destroyed home, every forced exodus, and every documented violation into building blocks for justice.