This is truly ghastly. I can excuse the capitulation on the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario as being issues of locality during a strange and broken administration. But this is... truly a horrifying, willing, cover for ongoing human-rights atrocities and violence. What justification exists for this?

Google doesn't show reality in the north either. It's completely destroyed there too, in the same manner as in Rafah. East Gaza City is also leveled completely.

And it's not like they don't have the data. You can see in Google Earth "archive" how the whole map is a patchwork of randomly old tiles.

Are we just making assumptions? I've built up a few different mapping / GIS related projects over my career, and the satellite imagery can change on a whim, sometimes its spot on, other times its dated, the zoom can also affect it as well, you zoom in and its from years back, you zoom out slightly, and its from last week.

Has Apple made any remark about this to confirm? It would not surprise me if Apple just isn't even aware of this changing on their app. (For those unaware, they source their map data from various sources / vendors, as does Microsoft's Bing Maps.)

Edit:

The account that posted the tweet is considered "satire" and antisemitic. I also looked into when Apple Maps last updated, they stopped showing any live data in the region back in 2023 after October 7th, even in Israel. The post is highly misleading to spark outrage.

> JUST IN: Apple Maps has put all the buildings back in Gaza, because the easiest solution to a genocide is to pretend it isn't happening.

There's no genocide in Gaza. From the WSJ:

> Net of people fleeing the country, the change in Gaza’s population is roughly zero. Not minus 40%. The population even appears to have grown in 2025, before the cease-fire in October.

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/free-expression/naza-has-nada-on...

Apple did not restore any content; the visuals simply had not been refreshed. The most recent update occurred in 2023.

Are insurance firms wargaming the possibility of tech CEOs being invited to Brazil, Indonesia, etc as part of a grand investment summit only to have their persons and legal teams be arrested on arrival in a rugpull, whether the rugpulling country locks them up or dismembers them? Are flight corridors being specially set up to prevent fighter plane interception?

It's less ridiculous than you think. Surveying five frontier LLMs just now four of them gave a probability above 20% that it may happen this quarter, let alone before the end of next year.

I want to believe this is a glitch but then again with Tim Cook (and Apple) has shown many times that he'll do whatever it takes for being in the good graces of the administration.