Apple Maps puts all buildings back in Gaza | Hacker News Reader

Apple Maps puts all buildings back in Gaza

twitter.com

63 pointsnewspaper127 comments

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.

The deletion of place names, roads, business labels, etc throughout the southern half of Lebanon suggests that there's basically no way ignorance is involved.

You can 100% delete those without needing to update map data, my statement still stands, there's plenty of mainstream news sources that confirm that Apple has not updated their mapping data for the region since at least 2023. Google updated theirs in 2026 and one news org immediately compared Google Maps in the region vs Apple Maps in the region:

https://english.elpais.com/international/2026-09-29/gaza-bef...

> It wouldn’t surprise me if Apple simply isn’t aware that this has changed in its app.

Yet they were pretty quick to change Lake Ontario to Lake America. OTOH, if Apple has no idea what its own app is serving, that shows poor state of their monitoring system, right?

This is satellite imagery. Its common for this to be outdated af, especially outside of EU/US. It costs A LOT to process these compared to just switching a single label in a database.

If there's anything to worry about it's that MS will stop providing aerial imagery to https://www.hotosm.org/ as it seems they slowly give up on Bing maps altogether. Cool they atl donated em so far.

Why would Apple make a remark about this? You can literally go look for yourself and see they've done this. As another commenter pointed out, they almost immediately removed the names of ethnically cleansed towns from Southern Lebanon as Israel wiped them off the map.

> The account that posted the tweet is considered "satire" and antisemitic.

Says who?

> Why would Apple make a remark about this? You can literally go look for yourself and see they've done this. As another commenter pointed out, they almost immediately removed the names of ethnically cleansed towns from Southern Lebanon as Israel wiped them off the map.

They have not updated the satelite images since 2023, this is a known documented thing, news sites have literally compared Apple Maps to Google Maps when they finally updated their images for the region in 2026. Apple can remove roads if it knows they're no longer around, it doesn't mean they have to update satellite images, which has been the case.

> Says who?

Literally browse posts by that account, it doesn't take very long to see antisemitism throughout the account. ...Why are you touchy about that? The tweet is literally rage bait.

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?

Flyby https://x.com/FlyingBeagle_/status/2116029654356336781

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

Why is this being downvoted? Is it factually inaccurate?

Because this is the new culture war topic. Check out OP's history.

This is their moral crusade. Which would be good if it was aimed at compelling Israel to offer a decent 2 state deal and pull out the settlers (with much Israeli weeping and gnashing of teeth), and compelling the Palestinians to accept it. But instead we get absolutist "Israel is evil and must be dissolved" and we're back to the cycle of violence.

Being against genocide and Israel occupying my government isn't a "culture war", which is exactly why people across the political spectrum from left to right are anti-Zionist.

Because they're just taking a tweet by some antisemitism troll account (that is apparently "satire") at face value.

Apple not updating their maps since October 7th for that region is a documented thing. So much so, when Google updated theirs (who also froze theirs) they compared Apple Maps vs Google to see what's changed. The tweet is just rage bait.

https://english.elpais.com/international/2026-09-29/gaza-bef...

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.

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.

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.

This number isn't real lol, you can't calculate these things mathematically , you might be having AI psychosis. Your comment also appears AI generated

The writing level of your comment history is between 7th and 8th grade and you appear to be totally unaware of the field of forecasting or the fact that LLMs are benchmarked on it, which suggests that of whatever holes there may be in my above comment, it'll only be somebody who isn't you that could say what they are.

Furthermore, a simple test of whether I typed out my above comment by hand (as I did) is whether each word is syntactically correct. The word rug-pulling is correct but I did not use it because I prefer the way rugpulling sounds inside the inner monologue as I type it. LLMs, however, are insistent on having perfect syntax, grammar and semantics, even if they keep fucking up the pragmatics.

OK, this comment is even more nonsensical , I'm convinced you're just a bot

Reply on news.ycombinator.com