Polygon layer and initial analysis of the IDF survey announced today (August 27, 2025) of “open spaces” in southern Gaza available for refugee habitation

This afternoon, August 27, 2025, The Israeli army (IDF) spokesman denounced rumours about lack of open space to accommodate the close to a million people the IDF intends to relocate from Gaza City in the next phase of the war. The IDF, he claimed, had surveyed the southern part of the Gaza Strip and, in fact, found “vast areas” that could be used as a haven for those displaced by the impending (re)occupation of northern Gaza. He posted a map of these in the same massively deficient format and style as I have discussed in a series of data postings and analysis over the course of the war. In order to be intelligible, the map needed to be georectified to the standard orientation of maps in which the top is north, then hand traced to a vector layer as the tracing on the image is ambiguous and pixelized, and then overlaid onto a legible base map (in this case recent PLANET satellite imagery). This dataverse posting includes this vector layer of today's IDF “open spaces” map as a KML and a brief analysis of some questions it raises.