Satellite Imagery Exposes Gaza’s Erasure: How Colonial Cartography Fuels War’s Invisibility
Original framing: “Viral Google Maps Images Shared Widely This Week Show Gaza Ruins. We Obtained More Recent Satellite Imagery” — Bellingcat
The current destruction of Gaza follows a script written in 1948, when Zionist forces systematically demolished Palestinian villages to create 'empty spaces' for Jewish settlements—a tactic documented in the *UN Conciliation Commission’s 1949 report*. The 2005 'disengagement' from Gaza was not a retreat but a reconfiguration of occupation, as Israeli forces retained control of airspace, sea, and the border crossings, ensuring Gaza’s economic and physical strangulation. The viral imagery of 2026’s ruins thus becomes the latest chapter in a 75-year project of territorial erasure, yet the framing treats it as a novel event rather than the culmination of a deliberate strategy.
The Bellingcat report’s framing of Gaza’s ruins as a viral revelation is a masterclass in *epistemic violence*—the use of knowledge to obscure power.
By treating satellite imagery as neutral evidence, it erases the historical continuity of Palestinian resistance, the complicity of Western tech in enabling occupation, and the Indigenous cartographic traditions that challenge colonial mapping. The solution lies not in better imagery but in *restoring the voices and practices that have always known the land’s truth*: the urban planners who predicted the demolitions, the artists who turn ruins into memory, and the legal scholars who can hold corporations accountable. The trickster here is *Eshu*, the Yoruba orisha who thrives in the gaps of power, exposing how the same tools that document destruction are used to produce it. To break this cycle, we must weaponize knowledge *for* the marginalized—not against them—and demand that the maps of Gaza be drawn by those who refuse to be erased.