When American Tomahawk missiles hit a girls' school in Minab, Iran on February 28 - the opening day of the war - commercial satellite images released by Planet Labs, combined with video footage, allowed journalists and analysts to identify the precise buildings struck and assess the munitions likely used. That kind of independent investigation has now become virtually impossible, "Hvylya" reports, citing The Economist.
Planet Labs has since expanded its imagery restrictions from a four-day publication delay to a two-week blackout covering the entire Middle East conflict zone and all of Iran. The policy shift means that any strikes occurring now will not be subject to the same level of open-source scrutiny that the Minab incident received in its immediate aftermath.
Over the past decade, commercial satellite imagery had become the backbone of open-source intelligence, enabling researchers and journalists to pierce the fog of war and hold governments accountable. Jeffrey Lewis of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies noted that imagery quality and volume had reached a level where it was genuinely useful for battle-damage assessment - a capability that served accountability as much as it served military planners.
The Minab case demonstrated exactly how that accountability worked in practice. Cross-referencing satellite photographs with ground-level video made it possible to reconstruct the strike with considerable precision - the kind of analysis that human rights organizations and war-crimes investigators routinely rely on. Without timely imagery, such reconstruction becomes a matter of months rather than days, if it happens at all.
Vantor, formerly Maxar, has its own longstanding restrictions on images of American bases and has limited Ukrainian imagery since 2022. But Planet had historically been more open. Its reversal has closed the last major commercial window into real-time events on the ground. European and Chinese satellites offer partial alternatives, but Sam Lair of MIIS said the core problem remains coverage frequency - even available sources cannot match the revisit rate needed for timely post-strike analysis.
Also read: "Mowing the Grass" Forever: Trump's Iran Victory Risks Repeating Israel's Gaza Trap.