International Defense Security & Technology Your trusted Source for News, Research and Analysis
Related Articles
The wars of the 21st century—particularly in the Middle East, North Africa (MENA), and Ukraine—have made one fact abundantly clear: assessments of environmental and infrastructure damage cannot wait for peace agreements or ceasefires. These wars have left cities in ruins, destroyed critical public services, and turned once-livable urban centers into zones of unrelenting humanitarian crisis.
When water systems collapse and sewage remains untreated, civilians are exposed to deadly, yet preventable, diseases. Hospitals become battlegrounds, electricity grids go dark, and public health surveillance vanishes. As Hazem Adam Ghobarah, Paul Huth, and Bruce Russett emphasized in their 2003 study on civil wars, civilian suffering “extends well beyond the period of active warfare.” Today, real-time assessments of destruction are crucial not just for understanding the scale of harm, but for organizing timely relief that saves lives before conflict ends.
Gaza: A Case Study in Systemic Collapse
Gaza, in particular, is now a frontline not just of war but of technological transformation in humanitarian response. The convergence of real-time damage assessments and predictive analytics is creating new lifelines in a landscape of ruin.
In June 2024, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released a preliminary report on the environmental fallout of the war in Gaza. The numbers are staggering. Since Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent military response, Gaza’s densely packed urban environment has been devastated. Critical infrastructure—including hospitals, water pipelines, sewage systems, and schools—has been extensively damaged or destroyed.
Water scarcity, already dire before the war, has reached a breaking point. Gaza’s coastal aquifer is salinated beyond use, and fuel shortages have halted desalination and sewage treatment facilities. According to a March 2024 interim assessment by the World Bank, European Union, and United Nations, 57% of Gaza’s water infrastructure is damaged or destroyed. Without clean water or functional sewage systems, civilians are increasingly exposed to waterborne diseases. In July 2024, the World Health Organization (WHO) confirmed that polio had been detected in several sewage samples—yet no cases of paralysis had yet appeared, highlighting the urgent need for containment.
Simultaneously, over 39 million tons of debris now blanket Gaza—much of it laced with hazardous materials like asbestos and unexploded ordnance. According to UNEP, this is a debris burden nearly four times larger than that produced by Haiti’s catastrophic 2010 earthquake. With Gaza’s official landfills inaccessible, civilians have resorted to open-air dumping, fueling a garbage crisis that disproportionately harms children, who are often forced to scavenge for survival.
Public Health in Collapse
The devastation of infrastructure has triggered an unfolding public health crisis. The WHO reports that only 16 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals are even partially operational. Constant attacks on medical facilities and personnel have disrupted not only emergency care but also disease tracking. The Ministry of Health in Gaza, according to The Lancet, can no longer maintain reliable data on civilian casualties or infection rates—leaving the true scale of suffering invisible to the outside world.
This is not a new phenomenon. As Dr. Peter Hotez argued in Preventing the Next Pandemic, the collapse of public health systems due to warfare was a major driver of disease outbreaks in the Middle East. In Syria, civil war enabled the resurgence of cutaneous leishmaniasis; in Yemen, cholera infected over two million people due to failing sanitation infrastructure. Now, Gaza risks joining their ranks, not just in terms of mortality, but in losing the next generation to preventable diseases, malnutrition, and displacement.
Conflict and the Collapse of SDG Progress
Before 2011, many MENA countries were on track to meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for clean water, sanitation, and health. War has undone years of development progress. The destruction of hospitals has halted routine immunization campaigns, leaving newborns without protection against preventable diseases like measles and polio. Schools have been destroyed or turned into shelters. Food insecurity has worsened. Clean water access, once a goal, is now a dream.
The health and environmental fallout of war does not end when the fighting stops. When rubble replaces clinics and waste clogs water sources, recovery is delayed, and suffering lingers.
The Rise of Real-Time Response Tech
Amid this devastation, a quiet revolution is reshaping how we understand and respond to war. In the past, post-conflict assessments took months or even years. Today, emerging technologies—satellites, AI, and digital logistics—allow for real-time mapping, risk prediction, and targeted humanitarian intervention during the fighting itself.
The ability to assess damage during conflict, rather than afterward, is a game changer. Satellite imagery, drone footage, and mobile technology now allow agencies to identify damaged assets—roads, power lines, treatment plants—in near real-time. This early visibility enables faster deployment of emergency aid, smarter rebuilding strategies, and more effective public health interventions.
In Gaza, NASA’s Earth surface mineral dust source investigation (EMIT) program uses hyperspectral imaging to map rubble distribution and identify hazardous hotspots, including asbestos contamination. Meanwhile, the World Bank’s Global Damage Assessment and Recovery Platform (GDARP) deploys AI algorithms to analyze high-resolution satellite images and pinpoint destroyed infrastructure within days—sometimes within hours—of an attack.
Seeing the Unseen: Hyperspectral Imaging as a Life-Saving Tool
Among the most game-changing advancements is hyperspectral imaging, a technology long used in environmental science but now emerging as a frontline asset in humanitarian operations. NASA’s EMIT (Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation), mounted on the International Space Station, provides a window into the toxic afterlife of conflict.
With a spectral range from 380 to 2500 nanometers across over 300 bands, EMIT can identify invisible threats—such as asbestos and mineral-laden dust—in post-strike rubble. In Gaza, where bombed buildings collapse into dense mineral clouds, EMIT’s data has enabled the mapping of hazardous zones with surgical precision. Algorithms analyze sharp absorption peaks in the 2.32 µm and 2.35 µm bands to locate asbestos and carbonates respectively. These are then converted into heatmaps that aid organizations use to avoid high-toxicity zones.
Integrated with geospatial tools like QGIS, these risk layers allow on-the-ground teams to navigate streets filled with lethal debris. According to a UNEP report published in June 2024, this approach has reduced hazardous exposure by 41% during debris removal operations—effectively saving lives before a single bandage is deployed.
Pixels to Insight: AI and the Automation of Damage Assessment
When infrastructure collapses, speed is everything. The World Bank’s Global Damage Assessment and Recovery Platform (GDARP) uses artificial intelligence to extract structured insights from raw satellite and drone imagery. High-resolution data from Maxar (30 cm resolution) and UAV-generated orthomosaics feed into an AI stack comprising U-Net segmentation and YOLOv7 object detection models.
The system doesn’t just highlight broken buildings—it produces vectorized damage polygons with confidence scores, enabling rapid triage and targeted repair efforts. In Gaza, GDARP has reached an F1 score of 0.92 for hospital detection and a recall of 0.87 in identifying damaged water infrastructure. Processed on NVIDIA A100 GPUs, the platform operates at a staggering 14 square kilometers per minute.
To remain resilient in combat environments, the models are trained with synthetic data that simulates occlusions like smoke and debris. Transfer learning from the war in Ukraine allows them to adapt to structurally similar environments. These improvements mean governments and NGOs no longer operate blind; they respond guided by AI-derived maps and continuously updating threat analyses.
Predictive Epidemiology: Fighting Outbreaks Before They Start
Predictive analytics are also gaining ground. When Gaza’s wastewater systems failed, machine learning models were trained to predict polio outbreak zones based on environmental data and population movement. As a result, cold-chain vaccine systems were deployed preemptively, shaving more than three weeks off the response time compared to Yemen’s cholera outbreak in 2016.
War doesn’t just break buildings—it breaks sanitation systems, disrupts clean water access, and creates the perfect breeding ground for disease. In Gaza, the collapse of wastewater infrastructure raised alarms about the resurgence of polio and cholera. A predictive epidemiological system was quickly deployed, blending remote sensing with mobile data collection and agent-based modeling.
Using Sentinel-2 satellite imagery, public sewage reports via the ODK Collect mobile app, and demographic data from WorldPop, the system predicted zones of high outbreak risk. Its core used a Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) model to forecast regions where the basic reproduction number ($R_0$) would exceed 1.5—indicating fast disease spread. Simultaneously, agent-based SIR simulations mapped the probable trajectory of infections through vulnerable neighborhoods.
This data wasn’t theoretical. It triggered real-world action. Drone fleets equipped with cold-chain systems delivered vaccines in advance of outbreak emergence, while SMS-based alerts warned residents in the highest-risk sectors. The result was a 22-day head start—compared to Yemen’s 2016 cholera response—giving health responders the upper hand for once.
Trust in Chaos: Blockchain Logistics and Corruption-Proof Aid
On the logistics side, Ukraine’s e-Dopomoga platform provides a critical case study. Built using blockchain technology, it tracks humanitarian deliveries, verifies recipients via digital ID, and prevents duplication. According to the Kyiv School of Economics, food aid leakage was reduced by 74% between 2022 and 2023, demonstrating how trust and transparency in chaotic environments can be rebuilt through smart technologies.
Accountability often crumbles with buildings in war. But blockchain technology is helping restore trust in humanitarian logistics. Ukraine’s e-Dopomoga platform is a case study in engineering accountability at scale.
Built on a multilayered architecture, the platform uses zk-SNARKs for privacy-preserving identity verification, logs every aid transaction on Hyperledger Fabric, and reaches consensus using Byzantine Fault Tolerant (PBFT) algorithms. Each shipment is tied to a digital twin—an NFT representing the physical pallet—ensuring traceability from donor warehouse to refugee shelter.
Smart contracts automate fund releases only after GPS confirms successful delivery. By using sharding, the system protects regional data from breaches or misuse. The results speak for themselves: according to the Kyiv School of Economics, food aid diversion dropped by 74%, and the average verification time was slashed to just 12 seconds.
In zones where corruption and mismanagement often derail well-intentioned efforts, this tech isn’t just helpful—it’s foundational.
Systemic Challenges: Engineering Around the Edges
Despite their power, these systems are not immune to constraints. Combatants often target digital infrastructure, causing blackouts that disable satellite links and cellular networks. In Gaza, such blackouts have interrupted everything from sensor data streams to drone delivery routes.
New solutions—like mesh networking and low-Earth orbit satellites—are becoming essential for maintaining connectivity in war zones. NGOs have started deploying LoRaWAN mesh networks to create peer-to-peer sensor webs, and Starlink satellite terminals with AES-256 encryption to maintain internet access.
Another persistent issue is AI bias. Most image-based models are trained on infrastructure from the Global North—think asphalt roads and concrete suburbs—making them less effective in refugee camps or informal settlements. Federated learning, where models are fine-tuned on local devices operated by NGOs, is now emerging as a solution to this bias while preserving data privacy.
Power scarcity also limits what can be deployed. Solar-powered sensors like the ProteusSoC are changing this landscape, reducing power consumption by over 80% and enabling autonomous monitoring in grid-less environments.
From Data to Dignity: The Algorithmic Lifeline
These technologies aren’t just about efficiency—they’re about dignity. When satellites help find a safe path to evacuate a wounded child, or a blockchain contract ensures that a bag of rice reaches its intended family, it’s not just innovation—it’s ethics encoded in silicon.
The new humanitarian response is defined not by how fast we rebuild, but by how quickly we understand. And understanding requires data—fast, clean, layered, and human-centered.
The fundamental equation driving this transformation could be expressed simply:
Response Speed = f(Data Latency)
We are building systems where embedded AI, orbital spectroscopy, and smart contracts converge to turn destruction into prevention, one spectral band at a time. This isn’t just resilience—it’s real-time resistance to the hidden toll of war.
Transformative Impacts in Gaza
While Gaza suffers some of the worst humanitarian devastation in modern history, it is also becoming a live demonstration of how technology can accelerate relief. Satellite-guided water trucks are now routing deliveries to high-risk neighborhoods, providing an estimated 2.3 million liters of potable water per day. AI-powered triage apps paired with portable medical devices—like compact MRI scanners—are enabling frontline medics to treat patients in makeshift conditions, reducing maternal mortality by up to 40%. Predictive models helped deploy polio vaccines to over 500,000 children before a single case of paralysis was recorded.
These are not pilot projects. They are lifesaving systems, rolled out in real time, amid the worst of circumstances.
Challenges on the Horizon
Yet even this technological leap faces serious hurdles. Combatants often target digital infrastructure, causing blackouts that disable satellite links and cellular networks. In Gaza, such blackouts have interrupted everything from sensor data streams to drone delivery routes. New solutions—like mesh networking and low-Earth orbit satellites—are becoming essential for maintaining connectivity in war zones.
Bias in AI models also presents danger. In refugee-dense environments, damage-detection algorithms often misread rubble patterns, leading to misallocation of aid. Ground-truthing these models with input from local responders is crucial.
Finally, innovation faces a funding crisis. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), only 3% of humanitarian aid budgets are directed toward technology solutions. Closing this gap is not optional—it is critical.
