Forced Displacement Dynamics and Military Activity in the Gaza Strip, 2023–2026
This study employs a machine-learning framework applied to high-resolution, weekly satellite imagery to reconstruct the longitudinal spatiotemporal dynamics of forced displacement in the Gaza Strip from 2023 to 2026, revealing how successive military operations drove the rapid emergence, contraction, and redistribution of tent settlements while demonstrating the utility of remote sensing for monitoring conflict-induced displacement where conventional data is unavailable.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
In the midst of active war, knowing where people are is often impossible. Traditional ways of counting populations, like sending teams into the field or asking people to register, break down when roads are blocked, cities are destroyed, and safety is a distant memory. Yet, understanding where displaced people have gone is vital for delivering food, water, and medicine. To solve this, researchers have turned to the sky. By using high-resolution satellite images, they can see the physical traces of human movement from above. Instead of trying to count individuals, who are often hidden inside buildings or tents, they look for the shelters themselves. This approach allows for a continuous, bird's-eye view of how a population shifts, expands, and contracts over time, even when the ground below is too dangerous to visit.
A team of researchers has applied this method to the Gaza Strip, creating a detailed, week-by-week record of forced displacement from October 2023 through June 2026. They built a computer system capable of scanning thousands of satellite images, each showing the ground in sharp detail, to automatically spot and count the temporary tents that displaced families use as homes. Because the computer can make mistakes, especially when tents are packed tightly together, the researchers checked its work against a smaller set of images that humans had carefully counted by hand. They used this comparison to correct the computer's estimates, ensuring the final numbers were as accurate as possible. The result is a long-term map that shows not just where tents appeared, but how they moved, grew, and vanished in response to military operations.
The study reveals that displacement in Gaza was not a single, one-way journey. Instead, it was a chaotic and repeated cycle of movement. At the start of the conflict, there were fewer than 5,000 tents across the territory. As the war progressed, this number surged, reaching a peak of more than 276,000 tents by early March 2026. These settlements did not stay put. They would appear in one area, grow large, and then shrink or disappear entirely as people were forced to move again. The researchers found that these shifts happened in waves, often triggered by specific military orders telling civilians to leave certain zones. When an evacuation order was issued, new tents would rapidly spring up in the direction people were told to go, while the old settlements in the evacuated areas would quickly empty out.
A striking pattern emerged showing how concentrated these populations became. By mid-2024, nearly 90 percent of all the tents in Gaza were squeezed into just 16.5 percent of the land, an area designated as a humanitarian zone. This created an extreme density of people in a very small space. However, this zone was not a safe haven. The boundaries of these designated areas changed frequently, sometimes shrinking or moving, which forced people to leave their new shelters and move again. The study shows that even when civilians followed orders to move to a specific destination, they often found themselves in areas that were soon targeted by further military operations.
The researchers also looked at the relationship between these crowded tent settlements and military activity. They found that airstrikes and attacks on civilians frequently happened very close to where people were living. In fact, nearly a quarter of the documented attacks occurred within 50 meters of a tent settlement. When ground troops, such as tanks, arrived in an area where tents had been established, those settlements almost always shrank dramatically within a week, with the number of tents dropping by more than half on average. This suggests that the presence of military forces directly caused people to flee their temporary homes once again.
Even during periods when fighting paused, the pattern of displacement continued. During a ceasefire in early 2025, people began to move back toward the north of Gaza, but they did not return to their original homes. Instead, they set up new tents in areas where their houses had already been destroyed. This indicates that for many, the war had made their former homes uninhabitable, forcing them to remain in temporary shelters even when they were allowed to return to their neighborhoods. The study concludes that displacement in Gaza was a recurring process of removal and concentration, rather than a simple move from one place to another. By tracking the tents, the researchers were able to see the full, shifting geography of this crisis, showing how military actions repeatedly reshaped where people could live, often pushing them into tighter and more dangerous spaces.
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