Article by Christoph Koettl: “For two decades, satellite imagery has been my window into the unreachable.
I’ve used it to expose North Korean oil smuggling and to uncover a mass grave in Burundi. In 2022, the Visual Investigations team at The New York Times used images to rebut Russian claims that the killing of civilians in Bucha, Ukraine, occurred after their soldiers had left. And in the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, these eyes in the sky have been similarly revealing.
I surveyed the damage in Tehran from space shortly after Israeli strikes hit the compound of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, killing him. Our team tracked the damage that Iranian attacks wrought on regional U.S. bases. An image we captured through a satellite company even helped to determine U.S. responsibility for the strike on an elementary school in Minab, Iran, that killed at least 150 people, many of them children. And just last month, we showed how the United States bombed what appeared to be a drinking-water facility, a strike that if done deliberately could constitute a war crime under international law.
We reported some of these stories despite five U.S. satellite providers cutting off access to high-resolution images of Iran and surrounding countries shortly after the war began. The main reason for these restrictions is that Iran might use the imagery to target U.S. troops. This blackout applies to customers who regularly publish satellite imagery, such as news outlets and think tanks…(More)”.
