Many people are living in crowded tent settlements packed into roundabouts, courtyards and between rubble in Gaza City. Photo / Heidi Levine, For The Washington Post
Blocks upon blocks of crumbling buildings, punctuated by vast tent encampments. Scenes of devastation where neighbourhoods once stood.
A chance to ride along on a Jordanian aid flight last Wednesday local time carrying out airdrops over the Gaza Strip offered a rare opportunity for low-altitude aerial views of the scale of destruction and displacement in the territory.
Gaza has been closed to foreign reporters since Israel began its military operation in response to the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.
Views from above have been limited largely to satellite imagery, Israeli military photos, and drone footage from Gazan journalists and media workers - at least 186 of whom have been killed, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The images show the destructive impact of Israeli bombardments that have damaged or destroyed much of Gaza, repeatedly displaced most of its population and left more than 60,000 people dead, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.
The Israel Defence Forces says it only targets militants. It blames civilian deaths on Hamas, saying the militants operate in populated areas.
“IDF actions are based on military necessity and in accordance to international law,” the IDF said in a statement at the weekend.
Hamas fighters killed about 1200 people, Israel says, and took about 250 others back to Gaza as hostages in the 2023 attack. More than 450 Israeli soldiers have been killed in Gaza.
Sky News and BBC journalists who reported from aid flights from Jordan last week said they were told that Israel had prohibited filming Gaza from above.
The organisations did not say how the directive had been conveyed. Sky reported that it was informed Israel could delay or cancel aid flights if its journalists filmed Gaza.
The IDF declined to comment on the matter.
A Washington Post photojournalist was given no such instructions before boarding a Royal Jordanian Air Force flight last Wednesday local time.
On a subsequent flight on Friday local time, a member of the Jordanian flight crew told her she was not allowed to film Gaza, only the airdrop.
The imagery here is from the first (Wednesday) flight, when two Jordanian C-130 transport planes, in co-operation with the United Arab Emirates Air Force, dropped more than 16 tonnes of food and baby formula into Gaza, with Israel’s permission.
Most of the photographs were taken through the plane’s windows, looking east towards Gaza City.
A close-up shows seven schools flattened by Israeli strikes: al-Zahawi Preparatory School for Boys, Asdood Secondary School for Boys, Abo Thar al-Ghafary School, Julis Secondary School for Boys, al-Awda Primary School, Sarafand Preparatory Male School and Samy al-Alamy Male School.
Tents for displaced people occupy the school courtyards. Photos posted on Facebook just days before the war began showed young students lined up there.
A lone building standing in a lot occupied by displaced peoples’ tents is El-Helou International Hotel, home to a cavernous ballroom adorned with gold gossamer and lit by chandeliers. It was once a popular venue for weddings and gatherings in the north of Gaza City.
Rubble, collapsed buildings, and tent encampments occupy ground where Maqoussi Mosque and the Ministry of Economy stood.
The mosque’s dome slumps into its flattened roof. Next to the mosque stands the ruined facade of Sheikh Radwan Health Centre, a clinic destroyed earlier in the war that was run by the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees.
A zoomed-in image shows the ruins of the Jabalya refugee camp. Jabalya, the site of fierce fighting between Hamas and the Israeli military in previous conflicts, was effectively besieged by the Israeli military from October to December 2024.
The delivery of food and water and access by civil defence and paramedics were mostly denied, and large swathes of the neighbourhood were demolished.
Adel, the Royal Jordanian Air Force pilot who flew the aid drop mission, said the sight of Gaza from the air “made me shocked”. Adel saw “growing” destruction compared with when he last flew over Gaza during the first round of airdrops last year, he added.
He withheld his last name because he was not authorised to speak publicly.
“Everyone who will see this area will be shocked,” he added. “We hope [for] this war to finish. We need to give them more and more food, because they are starving over there.”
It was “very sad” to see the Gaza Strip from above, Maher Halaseh, 36, a Royal Jordanian Air Force navigator who also took part in last year’s airdrops, said on Friday.
“Everything is different. There’s no buildings, nothing. A lot of tents on the shoreline. I start to see it when all the buildings were there. Nowadays, there’s nothing. They are dying over there.”
A closer look shows how hundreds of thousands of Gazans are living, in makeshift tents erected anywhere space can be found, including on the beach in Gaza’s south.
Humanitarian groups say the airdrops that resumed this week, while better than no aid at all, are much less efficient than sending aid by land.
Aid organisations have called them “an absolute last resort”.
Instead, they have urged Israel to open land crossings and allow a high volume of trucks to enter Gaza. Israel says it does not restrict aid to Gaza.
Jordan has become a staging area for the airdrop effort, with support from governments in the region and Europe, in response to escalating scenes of starvation.
Airdrops are neither precision-guided nor do they come with the ability for organised distribution on the ground.
In past waves of airdrops, heavy boxes of aid fatally crushed aid seekers and led them to the sea, where they drowned trying to reach food, health officials said.
- Washington Post photojournalist Heidi Levine captured imagery of Gaza from a Jordanian Air Force aid flight.