The news reports this morning said that Gaza has been cut in half. By the time of writing this late this evening, the reports are saying that Gaza city is now encircled. I wanted to get a view of the city so I could better understand what is happening, but sadly the maps of this area are lacking details.

Here is a map view from Google maps:

As you can see from the satellite view, there are a ton of details left out in the map view:

Believe it or not, the above maps from Google are the best maps of this area online, according to a cool comparison of Google Maps vs Microsoft Virtual Earth vs Open Street Map by Aid Worker Daily.

The best maps I was able to find were at ReliefWeb:

There is a real strategic opening here for better data. The lack of maps must be a big deal for news organizations – better maps are key for telling better stories. For example, Andy Carvin’s piece Comparing the Scale of Gaza and Israel to DC, Baltimore and New York gave me a better sense of how small Gaza is. After reading this article, I wish the media was doing a better job of showing how sections of the city are going to be wiped out by this war.

I head from one friend at DAI, “Street addresses in the West Bank and Gaza are notoriously tough to pin down. There is an effort to get the streets named and accurate maps drawn in Ramallah right now (most streets are known by a variety of names depending on when you learned to drive) and overall WBG addresses tend to be based on specific buildings that people are familiar with.” Of course good street maps are key for aid organizations that need them to get their job done.

Open Street Maps,, whose coverage is currently still lacking, is in an amazing position to overtake Google and help get really detailed data on the map. This is because Open Street Maps is an open project that allows anyone to trace and upload data files, and given the international attention on the area we expect people to start doing this. We’re hoping to help improve the maps ourselves too. I dropped ReliefWeb a note asking if I could trace their maps and put them on www.openstreetmap.org. I will post back when I hear back from them.

Notes: Some of the best coverage on the war is at: http://electronicintifada.net/new.shtml. For an Israeli angle, check out their new YouTube channel that just launched before New Years.