Estimating damage to civilian areas in Iran

Even if only military areas are targeted, civilian and commercial structures are also damaged, because the real world isn’t separated into discrete, selectable items on a map. Bloomberg analyzed satellite imagery to estimate the type of areas damaged in the strikes.

Each detection was classified into one of six categories: military, industrial, civilian, commercial, government, or unclassified. We separated government facilities from the broader civilian category because these buildings may serve dual military-civilian purposes. Rather than forcing a single label, the analysis preserves the full mix of land use types around each detection — a site classified as “military” might also be 20% residential and 10% commercial, reflecting the mixed-use reality of urban areas.

Sets of Voronoi diagrams are used to show the percentage breakdowns for each detection.