Angelina Jolie shared Google Earth photos of neighborhoods in Gaza as they looked in 2022 and how they look now in her Instagram posts, and asked for shelters, medical supplies, and humanitarian aid before winter.
“You can now open Google Earth and see what was done to Gaza,” the Oscar winner, who worked as the U.N. refugee agency’s special envoy, wrote in a post on both her Instagram and X accounts.
The photos show neighborhoods in Rafah, Khan Younis, and Gaza City that looked quite different: images from 2022 showed buildings, while later images showed many of them reduced to rubble. According to her, a U.N. analysis says that 82% of Gaza’s structures were damaged by June 16th, and according to one organization, an estimated 94% of Gaza’s people, or 1.98 million people, need shelter.
“Whole neighbourhoods have been reduced to rubble. Homes, schools, universities, hospitals, roads, water and sanitation systems, infrastructure that people depended on to survive have been damaged or destroyed,” she wrote.
She gave an estimate of U.N. figures on destruction that has been done to Gaza according to her: “UN satellite analysis found that, as of June 16th, 2026, 82% of Gaza’s structures had been damaged,” she wrote, and said that as many as two-thirds of that had been destroyed.
“As winter approaches, 1.98 million people, or 94% of Gaza’s population, need shelter assistance and essential items. Aid and shelter materials continue to face restrictions and delays,” Jolie writes.
She notes that only some of the destruction can be seen in the photos because “Google Earth shows the physical destruction with extraordinary clarity. What it cannot show is what it means to live among it, what happened to the families who were killed, and what life is like for those who survived.”
Then she explains what Gaza needs. “What happens next matters,” she writes, “People need shelter before winter. Humanitarian aid needs to reach civilians at the scale required. Hospitals need medical supplies. And the conditions that allow civilians to rebuild their homes, schools, hospitals, and communities need to be created.”
The estimates of damaged buildings came from the U.N. Satellite Center, UNOSAT, which estimated 201,290 damaged structures as of June 16th, of which 134,422 had been destroyed, and 13,848 were severely damaged.
The Shelter Cluster, a coalition of aid organizations led by the Norwegian Refugee Council, estimates that 58% of people there live in critical or catastrophic shelter conditions. They interviewed 1,951 households, and only 10% reported receiving shelter or household aid in the last month.
The coalition appealed for $165 million to meet the most urgent winter needs, and by August, it had received $44 million, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. It is said that Israel allowed more shelter materials to enter Gaza recently.
Updated Google images caused a lot of reaction on social media in late September, though some images are months old. According to Al Jazeera, analysis determined that the photos of Rafah were taken on February 25th, while other reviews found that some images of northern Gaza are dated 2024 and 2025. Israel Hayom reported that Google confirmed that the images are months old.
The war started with Hamas-led militants attacking southern Israel on October 7th, 2023, and killing about 1,200 people, mainly civilians, with about 250 hostages. Israel’s offensive has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians as of now, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which doesn’t distinguish between combatants and civilians. Israel said Hamas is responsible for killing civilians because it uses residential areas.
A truce was established on October 10th, 2025. Half a year later, Al Jazeera reported that Israel’s strikes continued, aid levels didn’t meet the agreed level, and border crossings were opened only intermittently.
Jolie, 51, worked for the U.N. refugee agency as goodwill ambassador for more than two decades and became its special envoy, but stepped down in 2022 to work in the humanitarian and human rights area.
Since the start of the war, she criticized the attack on Israel as an act of terror but also said that it couldn’t be justification for killing civilians in Gaza. At the same time, she accused world leaders of complicity for refusing to call for a humanitarian truce.
In January, Jolie visited the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing, spoke with Egyptian Red Crescent workers, and saw aid in warehouses waiting to go to Gaza. She said at the time that humanitarian access should be “sustained, safe and urgently scaled up”.
“The destruction is visible. The needs are known,” Jolie wrote on Saturday. The question is whether those needs will be met.
