15.07.26
Editorial note
Israel Academia Monitor has reported numerous times on Professor Eyal Weizman at Goldsmiths, University of London. The Israeli-born academic is a Professor of Spatial and Virtual Culture and the founder of Forensic Architecture. This group researches human rights violations using architectural, visual, and aerial techniques.
Forensic Architecture is internationally recognized, and its work has been widely used by journalists, courts, human rights NGOs, and museums, among others. Weizman received many honors. In 2019, he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy, and in 2020, he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). In addition, his work received prestigious awards, including the Peabody Award.
However, Weizman is a highly polarizing figure. Critics accuse him of a disproportionate focus on Israel and the production of material that blurs the lines between legitimate forensic investigation and political advocacy.
In April 2026, Weizman published a book titled Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide. In a recent interview, he explained that the book is “looking at the environmental dimension of this genocide.” So, the book “is really what connects the continuity of settler-colonial violence from the Nakba to the genocide. And that is the attempt to expel [Palestinians] and then transform the environment by all sorts of soil practices. So, you know, if in the post-1948 part of the Nakba, the way in which the soil is transformed is through the plows that actually are not only used for cultivation, but to completely erase Palestinian presence from the ground, after the genocide, these are the bulldozers that are stabbing the front loader into the ground and basically flipping everything, desertifying the alluvial part, the agricultural part of the Gaza Strip. Ungrounding is unlike any wartime destruction, so we’re not talking here about war, we’re talking about ecocide and genocide.”
He added that the “Forensic Architecture, the organization that I run, when we work on war zones and aerial wars and bombardment… but ungrounding is basically the erasure of all of that. It’s much more than destruction. It’s the erasure of destruction. It’s the erasure of erasure, if you like. The rubbing out of any trace of existence. And that comes out of the same kind of move by which both the Nakba and the genocide and periods in between to a lesser intensity sought to expel Palestinian. But expulsion, ethnic cleansing, if you like, of people from the land require both, you know, enormous amounts of violence or pogroms, massacres and bombardment or what have you, and then the denial of return.”
Also in April 2026, he published an article in the London Review of Books, on the demolition in Gaza titled “All they will find is Sand.” Weizman related that on October 13, 2023, six days after the Hamas attack on Israel, Israel ordered the evacuation of Gaza City, sending Palestinians in northern Gaza towards the southern border with Egypt. For Weizman, Israel was actively seeking to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza by lobbying Egypt to accept large numbers of refugees. Instead of supporting the idea of saving the lives of Gazans, Weizman described it as an opportunity for Israel to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. His article was also picked up by the Spanish newspaper El Pais.
As Israel Academia Monitor repeatedly reported, the Goldsmiths professor exemplifies the formula used by activist scholars who also support BDS: double standards, decontextualization, denying Palestinian agency, and blaming Israel for all problems. For instance, an IAM post, “Weizman’s Double Standards: Ignores Human Rights Abuse by the Palestinians” in 2021, summed up the theme he has used. Decontextualization is evident in his discussion of the refugee camps. In his opinion, “Camps are established with the intention of being demolished. They are meant to have no history and no future; they are meant to be forgotten. The history of refugee camps is constantly erased, dismissed by states, humanitarian organizations, international agencies, and even by refugee communities themselves in the fear that any acknowledgment of the present undermines their right of return.” Conveniently, Weizman forgot to mention that in 1948, authorities in what is now the Jordanian part of the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon, were mostly set up by the authorities that did not grant the Palestinian the right to permanent status. More to the point, the temporary camps were transformed into permanent instruments for condemning Israel.
Evasion of Palestinian agency is also evident in Weizman’s discussion of the much-debated Gaza Tunnel complex. His argument is essentially that tunnels represent a form of “subterranean warfare”—a way for a weaker actor to challenge a militarily dominant state. He examines tunnels as part of what he calls the “politics of verticality,” where control of airspace, ground, and underground spaces becomes central to modern conflict. The fact that Hamas chose to construct the tunnels in densely populated parts of Gaza, rather than the agricultural part of the Strip, has not been mentioned. He also omitted the fact that Hamas housed an elaborate command and control system while using civilians who lived above the tunnels as human shields. Surely, Weizman, who specialized in forensic architecture and aerial surveillance, should have noticed that Hamas deliberately avoided placing the tunnel in agricultural spaces where harm to civilians would have been, by and large, avoided.
Weizman, who has stated that his group employs a variety of materials, including written documents, in its investigations, could have consulted the doctrine of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards that informed Hamas’s military strategy. According to this doctrine, members of the Axis of Resistance militias were encouraged, whenever possible, to embed themselves within civilian populations and operate from public spaces, including mosques, schools, and hospitals. Such practices transformed civilian environments into military arenas, placing noncombatants at heightened risk and complicating Israel’s ability to distinguish between combatants and civilians.
Weizman ranks among the most prominent critics of Israel, not least because of the extensive list of personal and professional honors as well as the considerable influence and visibility afforded by his academic position, publications, and international networks. Unfortunately, he chose his credentials to delegitimize Israel and contribute to the increase in antisemitism and anti-Zionism.
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PODCAST: Why ‘ungrounding’ is the defining feature of Israel’s genocide
Discussing his new book, Eyal Weizman explains how the systematic erasure of Gaza’s built environment is aimed at extinguishing Palestinian life in the Strip.
By +972 MagazineJune 26, 2026
Listen here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
There can be no disputing the extent of Israel’s obliteration of the Gaza Strip since October 2023. Its military forces have damaged or destroyed at least 92 percent of housing units, 95 percent of university buildings, 94 percent of hospitals — and the list goes on and on.
But as Eyal Weizman writes in his new book “Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide,” Gaza is not only a demolition zone; it is also a construction site. Almost nine months into a so-called “ceasefire,” Israeli bulldozers roam freely through two-thirds of Gaza’s pre-war territory, tearing up everything that once was and carving out an unrecognizable landscape of military roads, fortifications, and vast expanses of nothingness.
Weizman is well placed to analyze this process. Over the past two and half years, Forensic Architecture — the research agency he founded and directs, based at Goldsmiths, University of London — has catalogued thousands of incidents of violence in Gaza; conducted audio-visual investigations challenging Israel’s official narrative on several high-profile incidents; and contributed a bank of evidence to the International Court of Justice to support South Africa’s application under the Genocide Convention.
Whereas in traditional warfare, Weizman tells The +972 Podcast, “you tend to see a kind of haphazard, almost random distribution of ruination,” Gaza has witnessed something very different. “Ungrounding is basically the erasure of all that,” he explains. “It’s much more than destruction. It’s the erasure of destruction … The rubbing out of any trace of existence.”
PODCAST TRANSCRIPT: Why ‘ungrounding’ is the defining feature of Israel’s genocide
[music]
Ben Reiff
Welcome to the +972 podcast, your direct line to the journalists, thinkers, and activists struggling for justice in Israel-Palestine. I’m Ben Reiff, Deputy Editor at +972 Magazine, and your host for today’s episode. Our podcast grounds the discussion in lived realities to bring you closer to the issues that matter most between the River and the Sea.
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Ben Reiff
There can be no disputing the extent of Israel’s obliteration of the Gaza Strip since October 2023. The statistics leave no room for doubt, testifying to the damage or destruction of at least 92 percent of housing units, 95 percent of university buildings, 94 percent of hospitals — and the list goes on and on.
But as Eyal Weizman writes in his new book “Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide,” Gaza is not only a demolition zone; it is also a construction site. Almost nine months into a so-called “ceasefire,” Israeli bulldozers roam freely through two-thirds of Gaza’s pre-war territory, tearing up everything that once was and carving out an unrecognizable landscape of military roads, fortifications, and vast expanses of nothingness.
Weizman is well placed to analyze this process, which he describes as “an organized and designed campaign to destroy Palestinian life in Gaza.” Over the past two and a half years, Forensic Architecture — the research agency he directs, based at Goldsmiths, University of London — has catalogued thousands of incidents of violence in Gaza; conducted audio-visual investigations challenging Israel’s official narrative on several high-profile incidents; and contributed a bank of evidence to the International Court of Justice to support South Africa’s application under the Genocide Convention.
I’m delighted to be joined by Eyal Weizman today to discuss all this and much more, so let’s dive right in.
The book provides a huge amount of historical context for understanding what we’ve seen over the past two and a half years, but it also introduces an analytical framework for making sense of Israel’s actions in Gaza. So tell us what you mean by ungrounding and why it’s so distinctively characteristic of Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza?
Eyal Weizman
So firstly, I’d say that the book really is looking at the environmental dimension of this genocide. When it looks at the environment, it is particularly concentrated on soil and ground, which is the kind of resource that settler colonialism is so interested in.
So, ungrounding is really what connects the continuity of settler-colonial violence from the Nakba to the genocide. And that is the attempt to expel [Palestinians] and then transform the environment by all sorts of soil practices. So, you know, if in the post-1948 part of the Nakba, the way in which the soil is transformed is through the plows that actually are not only used for cultivation, but to completely erase Palestinian presence from the ground, after the genocide, these are the bulldozers that are stabbing the front loader into the ground and basically flipping everything, desertifying the alluvial part, the agricultural part of the Gaza Strip.
Ungrounding is unlike any wartime destruction, so we’re not talking here about war, we’re talking about ecocide and genocide. When Forensic Architecture, the organization that I run, when we work on war zones and aerial wars and bombardment, you tend to see a kind of a haphazard, almost kind of like random distribution of ruination. You tend to see buildings collapsing onto the ruins. You see piles of rubble. You know where the buildings stood. You can see roughly the organization of the urban surface, but ungrounding is basically the erasure of all of that. It’s much more than destruction. It’s the erasure of destruction. It’s the erasure of erasure, if you like. The rubbing out of any trace of existence.
And that comes out of the same kind of move by which both the Nakba and the genocide and periods in between to a lesser intensity sought to expel Palestinian. But expulsion, ethnic cleansing, if you like, of people from the land require both, you know, enormous amounts of violence or pogroms, massacres and bombardment or what have you, and then the denial of return. And the denial of return works through the erasure of everything that exists. So there will be nothing to return to. There will be a kind of an unrecognized area.
This is what we see very much, particularly in the 60% that Israel controls in the east of the so-called “Yellow Line,” where without now active conflict in those parts, there is a systematic demolition that could not be justified by any sort of international legal principles of distinction — proportionality, or necessity — so to speak. It’s just a simple, continuous act of erasure, almost like a national project of erasure that is happening in these parts.
Ben Reiff
You connect this practice of ungrounding very directly to one of the prohibited acts under the Genocide Convention. Can you explain how you see the relationship between ungrounding and genocide?
Eyal Weizman
Forensic Architecture, we look at the built and natural environment. There is a particular environmental, or architectural clause, in the genocide convention. So under, after this, you know, special intent, the intent to destroy, and all are in part that defines a genocide, there’s various prohibitions on killing, on reproduction of a society. But one that is very environmental and architectural is what’s called Article 2C that prohibits the calculated destruction of conditions of life.
So, what are the conditions of life? They are effectively a basic kind of question for an architect or geographer to say, “What is the relation between the environment and life?” The way in which the environment is conceived as an infrastructure for life and in a traditional settler colonial context — 18th century settler colonialism, 19th century settler colonialism — the environment that buttresses life is the natural environment. It’s the soil, it’s water, it’s multiple other forms of, you know, the kind of the flora and fauna that exist within that, that provides a people’s conditions of life. In the modern era, these are cities and bits of infrastructure and homes and hospitals, and the systematic, calculated destruction of those are not a direct act of killing, but deny the possibility of society to survive through its being anchored in space.
So it is a kind of genocide by attrition, a kind of a slow motion genocide. In fact, when Lemkin writes his book in 1944 that comes up with the term genocide and later elements of that are incorporated into the 1948 Genocide Convention. But when Lemkin conceptualizes it, he thinks about the settler colonization of the Americas. And he notes that genocide can take place over decades, if not centuries. And that indigenous people displaced off their land are displaced off the means of survival, displaced onto a much less favorable natural environment with less rain, or soil or less water, and would slowly start a process of decline. Indeed, most casualties from the settler colonial projects occur not through direct kinetic violence, although this always occurred as part of displacement of people, but through that intergenerational effects of the degradation of conditions of life.
But there is obviously also a cultural life that is grounded in other types of infrastructure: universities, schools, mosques, cemeteries, archaeological sites, that actually bind people culturally to a place. And so there is cultural political life and there is biological life. And somehow those are related because when the cultural infrastructure for life is destroyed, as it has been during the Gaza genocide — we’re talking about all universities and majority of mosques and cemeteries and archaeological sites systematically destroyed — it breaks the resilience of society that can also mitigate the threat of a biological existence. So those cultural and biological life with us as a human species are kind of entangled and cannot be seen as totally separate. Although, of course, in the Genocide Convention as ratified in 1948, Lemkin’s idea of cultural life was actually ignored.
Ben Reiff
I want to dig into this a little bit more because you’re very clear that this constitutes genocide. But you also write in the book that expulsion was the strategic aim of the war. So do you see genocide and expulsion as kind of two sides of the same coin here?
Eyal Weizman
Yeah, I mean, it is sometimes misunderstood to think that if the continuous aim of Israeli and Zionist settler colonization is the expulsion of Palestinians, that that is not genocide, because they could live somewhere else. Ethnic cleansing and genocide are very related concepts. I think that what was happening in Gaza since, if we just speak about that, since October 2023, is an attempt to kill enough Palestinians, destroy Palestinian life in part, so that they move away. There is no expulsion that is simply the kind of voluntary transfer that Israeli politicians are actually fantasizing about. You need to create that volition and you create that volition through enormous amounts of violence, loss, and destruction. So that is ethnic cleansing and genocide are not opposing concept. You cannot defend yourself and say, “Well, I’m not committing genocide, I’m just committing ethnic cleansing.” The way to expel a population from its place is really through an enormous amount of violence that is indistinct, that is aimed at the foundations of life that has Palestinian society as its target.
I think that the metaphor that I give in a book that is, I think, it’s most apt to understand that principle is the one that I encountered while helping litigate the genocide in Guatemala in 1982. And the Ríos Montt, the dictator of the military, dictator of Guatemala at the time, has a quote that was absolutely foregrounded in his conviction for genocide. And that is when he said, “You need to drain the river to kill the fish.” So in his conception, the fish are the guerrillas, and that he builds on Mao Zedong’s quote, the guerrilla moves amongst the people like fish in the sea or in a river. And the river is the built environment, the river is the natural environment, it’s everything that enables life in a particular location.
That is the definition of genocide and the way that it might interact with counterinsurgency. So the minute that the aim of the military is targeting the foundation of life, including society itself, and it’s built a natural environment, you’re in the genocidal territory. The bombing of the north, which is the kind of those first three, four weeks after October 7th, where you have the most intense bombing of an urban environment in a history of aerial bombardment and history of urban environments is a means for displacement, it’s a kind of a curtain of fire — it’s an enormous amount of fire, distinct or indistinct — that just washed out, or was trying to wash out Palestinians from the north towards the south.
I don’t think Israel and the Israeli military was intending for that campaign to last so long. They thought that with the shock of October 7th on Israeli society, with the enormous amount of support that Israel has achieved internationally in the immediate aftermath of that, that they could change the facts on the ground in a really fast way, like the ‘67 war, and in a few days, just like force all Palestinians out into Egypt, the border would collapse under the weight of Palestinians seeking refuge, and that the door would be locked behind them.
And then a new reality would be created and would be used strategically by Israel to effectively change forever the reality. In that respect, the genocide has failed to achieve its aim, like each and every one of Israel’s campaigns post-October 7 2023, Palestinians held on to Gaza City despite the most intense bombing they held with the fingernails to to that area. Hundreds of thousands of people remain in Gaza City. Of course, there were people that left into Egypt, but Egypt did not allow more people and used various mechanisms to stop and to hold the border. And effectively what happened is that simply the Gaza Strip has shrunk.
Ben Reiff
You also touch in the book on ungrounding that’s taken place over the last year or so in refugee camps in the West Bank. I think we’re seeing something very similar happening in southern Lebanon now as well over the last few months. So clearly, this is about more than Gaza.
Eyal Weizman
Yeah. War on refugees, and the kind of developments with which Israel was kind of flattening and leveling refugee camps, particularly north of the West Bank, most famously the Jenin refugee camp with it, is more than just a way that Israel claims it seeks to contain Palestinian resistance that comes from these places. Israel, now since October 7th, seeks to undo the political category of refugee-ness. And the political category is also, like anything, grounded in environments, in the environment of the refugee camp, which testifies itself for the unresolvability of living, the kind of the complicated part by which Palestinians negotiate the temporariness of the camp as the maintenance of the right of return by the institutions that support refugee-hood, refugee-ness, like UNRWA, for example. So all those things.
The refugee camps are being leveled and that has history in Israeli, in the history of Israeli violence towards Palestinians, say, in Sharon’s 1970 attack on Jabalia, and Al-Shati, and other refugee camps in the Gaza Strip, with a clear and testified intent to undo refugee-ness. Sharon was saying, “If we destroy the refugee camp and we build, ‘decent housing,’ resistance would disappear.” It’s only the presence of refugee-ness that puts into question the very essence and the further existence of a Zionist Israeli state. So this is why it’s a war on refugees, so this is why Jenin and Nur-Shams and other camps are being completely uprooted.
What is happening in Lebanon is also part of that because Israel has kind of used the sort of Gaza doctrine, so to speak — the ungrounding idea — also in Lebanon. The river is Shia rural life in the south of Lebanon, [it] is what put Israel under threat. And therefore, in order to kill the fish, that is, I don’t know, Hezbollah operatives in this part, they need to drain the river. And what they’re doing now is draining that river, destroying conditions of life in that part, so that Lebanese farmers could not return south into that area. Ungrounding is now everywhere and ungrounding is happening in the buffer zone and further buffer zone. I mean the entire Golan Heights is a buffer zone, and then there is a buffering of the buffer, which in 2024 is where they’re taking another piece of Syria to buffer the Golan Heights and you know again leveling of building an infrastructure within that.
Ben Reiff
Ungrounding is a process that takes place on the surface of the land, but there’s a large section of your book that deals with what’s happening below the surface. You talk about the early Zionists’ fixation with soil, including prominent figures in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, such as Yosef Weitz, who led the land department of the Jewish National Fund in the 1930s and 40s. Why did the Zionist movement view soil as being so central to their colonization efforts?
Eyal Weizman
All settler colonial projects, or most of them, are agrarian in their nature, no? So obviously, Weitz was completely obsessed with soil. He was taking soil samples after, you know, there’s a diary entry I think I reproduced in the book, that after the July 1948 expulsion of Lydda and Ramle, he goes and he marvels at the treasure soil they leave behind, this hamra soil, this like red-brown soil that could be used for agrarian production. You can have oil, or diamonds as resources for other forms of colonialism, agrarian settler colonialism needs soil and water. That’s the kind of magnets for its expansion. Soil is a kind of a subterranean or terranean, if you like, kind of infrastructure along which settler colonization kind of progresses and moves.
Ben Reiff
You write in a lot of detail about the origins and development of Gaza’s subterranean tunnel network, which has become synonymous with Hamas, but which as you show actually long predates the establishment of Hamas and has been used for decades both in the smuggling of goods and in armed resistance against Israel by various Palestinian groups. I found it quite evocative the way you describe Gaza’s subsoil as the only part of Palestine still unoccupied. Can you give us a bit of history about how and why this tunnel system developed?
Eyal Weizman
Firstly, as a spatial researcher also born and raised in Haifa, I had to take on several restrictions while writing about the subsurface. So the first chapter about soil and the last about the genocide are full of testimonies that I solicited, original reconstruction mappings, photographs. In that part, I consciously did not use any of those. It is more about telling the story through a conceptual framework of soil rather than mapping out anything that Palestinians are seeking to hide. Because the nature of the subsoil, that move from the surface with its overexposed photographic, top of the soil exposed to satellite images, drones, social media, everything is kind of overtly photography. You cross that threshold and you’re like, all that is shut off.
You’re in a space that is both imaginary and operates as an imaginary space because everyone can project different things onto it and use it rhetorically for different things. So saying that caveat, Palestinians retreat into the subsoil immediately with the beginning of the occupation in 1967 of the Gaza Strip. Many Palestinian dig holes, but later become more complex, into the surface. The surface is occupied, the subsoil is that part of Palestine, which is kind of beyond the omnipresent optics and policing of the colonizer, of the occupier on the surface.
So there is an indigenous knowledge — some people call it the Tarabin well, some people call it Bedouin well, for some people it’s the wells of the region — that Palestinians left landless in 1948 use that technique in order to dive into the subsoil, retreat into that part of Palestine left unoccupied, initially in order to undo those restrictions on conditions of life. If you think about the engineering and calculation of conditions of life, from the Genocide Convention, this is basically siege warfare. Siege warfare does, and this is what Gaza has been undergoing between the two catastrophes — the genocide and the Nakba — is siege, meaning, the land envelope is controlled and things are modulated coming from Israelis. It’s restricting the water coming into Gaza. It’s damming the water of Wadi Gaza before it crosses under the boundary of the Gaza Strip. And later on, after the occupation, it’s allowing more or less labor to come out always as a means of control.
And then during the blockade of the past 20 years, even calories, megawatt electricity, you know, liters of benzene and and diesel are kind of being regulated in a way that calculates and creates conditions of life as a means of control, or degrade conditions of life as a means of control. In order to alleviate those conditions of life, the subsoil was the medium through which Palestinians connected to Egypt, to allow petrol, allow food around, all sorts of goods to come in and alleviate the effect of that blockade. There’s never been an unrestricted flow of goods and people.
So this is one of the origins in like finding the alleviation of conditions of life through the subsoil, just like the soil is the conditions of life during the kind of agrarian existence of people in the Wadi Gaza and the sort of northern Naqab area before the Nakba, the subsoil becomes the conditions of life after that through the smuggling tunnels of Rafah. Those farmers that are pushed into the refugee camps of this part, also have family members on the other side. And then the tunnel network becomes something like a social network, kind of like an internet of things, if you like, because the way it connects, it connects to people that you trust, people with familial or organizational affiliation, so that the network itself is a kind of a diagram of social relations on the top of the surface.
Then there is the origins of the tunnels as tactical tools for warfare. I’m particularly interested in one, as I would, Palestinian architect or architectural student His name is Mohammed Al-Aswad, but starts inventing tunnels and all sorts of contraptions, spatial contraptions to resist and escape the Israeli occupation forces in Al-Shati refugee camp, where he comes from. He builds double walls where he can walk through the house between the walls, and then from the double wall, there’s a tunnel towards the outside, and then all sort of movement along roofs and between walls, and kind of rewire the architecture of the camp as a porous medium where him and his forces could actually move across that area. Then, that kind of expands from there into a kind of a tactical defense and movement system within camps. Somewhere in between the interaction of the kind of landless farmers and the sort of the architecture of resistance, a tunnel network emerges.
But there’s no dispute that there are tunnels under Gaza, but Israel is using the imaginary of the tunnels to do several things. First, to actually create an image of Palestinian as less than humans, as a kind of infestation out of control, beast-like, demonic figures that inhabit the subsoil, as a kind of justification to unground the entire surface. The fact that there are tunnels in Israel’s conception is like what allows it to sort of total desertification of Gaza on top of the surface.
Ben Reiff
There’s a great quote in the book that you include from the recollections of an Israeli military officer in the early 1970s who described finding entry shafts in courtyards, in destroyed buildings, in orchards, in homes, under stairwells, in wells, in clay ovens, and disused toilets. He said they were hidden and camouflaged by weeds, hay, sacks, barrels, or crates. Some of the entrances led to dead-end bunkers used for hiding, while others were used by units of two to three fighters to facilitate hidden movement. Why do you think Gaza’s tunnels have been so perplexing for Israel for almost 60 years? And why, even after two and a half years of ungrounding, have many of these tunnels continued to evade Israel’s attempts to destroy them?
Eyal Weizman
Israel is trying to detect tunnels through ground penetrating radar and ground penetrating radars require a certain kind of silence on the surface. But during a war when bombing is raining in, and also Israel’s own destruction — Israel’s own carpet of destruction that they’ve created — the top soil of Gaza now is full of rubble and all sorts of metal bars, etc., that the ground penetrating radars are distorted by. They’re distorted by all sorts of electrical signals.
It is also structurally extremely difficult to blow up a tunnel. A tunnel is not a thing, like in a sense of architecture, there’s an object that is self-supportive. It’s an absence of a thing. The structural forces of the earth are actually moving and protecting it in multiple other ways.
And the third thing is that tunnels are a process rather than a form. They’re an operation principle, and they could grow relatively easy in the particular soil of Gaza. You have an entire landscape under the soil — multiple layers of sand, sandstone, clay, and water. You have the shoreline, you have underground rivers, you have underground lakes, you have an entire landscape that is invisible to the eye and can only be experienced by texture and moisture and viscosity. You know, the very experienced tunnel diggers know when they cross into clay and how to follow a clay ridge that goes up and down in the subsoil. That is a kind of a very specific, very unique form of knowledge.
Ben Reiff
I want to talk a little bit about Forensic Architecture’s work over the past two and a half years, which has been incredibly vast. I mean, as well as verifying and cataloging and archiving thousands of videos from Gaza, you’ve also carried out a number of high profile investigations into specific incidents, such as the bombing of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in October 2023, and also the killing of 15 paramedics and NGO workers and the subsequent cover-up of those killings by the Israeli army in March 2025.
You’ve also contributed extensively to legal cases seeking to bring some kind of accountability and justice, perhaps most notably by supporting the South African application to the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of genocide. There are so many crimes you could have investigated or legal cases you could have joined. I’m curious how you’ve envisioned your role as an organization during this period and how you made those decisions.
Eyal Weizman
Yeah, this is a very good question, because indeed, when people think about Forensic Architecture, they think about a kind of like scene of reconstruction — we would spend a year, sometimes more than a year, on a few split seconds — and reconstruct what happened by modeling and building in the social media-circulated videos and testimonies of place and doing those really very, very careful, minute reconstructions. We’ve done several that you’ve mentioned here, and also including the killing of Hind Rajab and others.
But particularly the challenge of a genocide case is not so much the clear construction of the question of who’s done it, and there’s a question of intent, of genocidal intent, the special intent, the intent to destroy all or in part. From a legal perspective, it is actually understood by pattern of conduct, pattern of military conduct. So if you analyze an incident, a bombing of a hospital, you’re within, usually within the range of international humanitarian law, war crime. Is it proportionate? Was it a military necessity? Genocide is really about the simultaneous application of a huge multiplicity of actions.
So, we have taken in and analyzed and catalog thousands and thousands or tens of thousands of incidents. Some of them are attacks on hospitals, some of them are attacks on schools, some of them are destruction of agriculture, some of them are attacks on aid, some of them are shooting and killing of civilians, etc. Some of them are expulsion, acts of expulsion, etc. And we want to see the relation between them.
When you see that attacks on the hospital occur at the moment that Israel wants to expel a particular area, and when you see that attack on agriculture, on the food sovereignty of Palestinian in Gaza, or an attack that was simultaneously to attack to the sinking of all fishing boats, and then Israel at the same time attacks aid coming in, there is a compounded effect of different and separate action that lead to and support the declaration of genocidal intent articulated by Israeli politicians and military figures at the beginning of the of that campaign and later throughout it. So that is really where our work was mainly articulated in and that is collected in a piece of work called “A Cartography of Genocide” that includes those thousands of verified incidents and time-space relation between them showing that they add up to a particular, or fulfilling, a particular intent.
Ben Reiff
The verification part of your work, as you mentioned in the book, usually relies on kind of identifiable urban markers. But Israel’s ungrounding of Gaza has flattened much of the landscape. So what techniques has your team developed in order to overcome that challenge?
Eyal Weizman
The whole art of what’s called geolocation that we started back in early 2010s, and with also partner organizations like Bellingcat and Syrian Archive and others, is really about, “Okay, you see videos from the ground, here’s an antenna, here’s a minaret of a mosque, here’s a particular roof of a building, here, this is the angle, this is when and where it happened, etc.” But Gaza is not only a demolition zone, it’s also a construction site. So the demolition of Gaza has transformed the topography of the Strip completely because the way that the Israeli army is actually kind of invading an area, it’s collecting all the rubble of neighborhoods it has destroyed, piling them up into an artificial landscape — it loves hilltops, the Israeli army — and then from the top of those landscapes, they put snipers or tanks and then moves on.
So effectively, you have a kind of what I call the earth storm, a kind of a changing topography that is continuously like a gelatinous kind of medium. The earth is turned into this gelatin thing. In this way, memory of a place is really what you have. Sometimes a means of torture was taking Palestinians, I don’t know, from Jabalia, and putting them where their home was and allowing them to see and then telling them this is where you are. The panic that ensues by the old contours of your existence are kind of anchored in space and that ungrounding erases the memory in that way.
Re-grounding initially begins with acts of historical and memory recollections. We were using what we call situated testimony, particularly with the two survivors of the medic massacres of March 2025, where we reconstructed with them the massacre as as a transformation in the landscape and built a model with them from memory of this landscape anchoring the recollection, making them understand what has happened, because after the massacre, those survivors were interrogated and tortured, and they were blindfolded. And then when they saw the site, they couldn’t understand what happened and where they were. Slowly through the reconstruction of the soil and its transformation, we were able to reground memory in place.
Ben Reiff
I think we’ve spoken quite abstractly about the horrors of the last few years, but a lot of the story of this genocide has also been personal to you and your team at Forensic Architecture. You write about how several of your friends and colleagues at Ain Media were killed in Gaza, along with at least 14 members of your colleague Nour’s family, and the search for answers about what happened to them really fused the professional with the personal. I wondered if you’d feel comfortable telling us about some of these friends and colleagues and the work they were doing before they were killed.
Eyal Weizman
Yeah, so the connection with Ain Media, like many other connections with Palestinian organizations, was formed by a former colleague of mine called Shourideh Molavi, who was actually often in Gaza and established that relation with Ain Media and conducted various collective investigations with them. She was a close personal friend of Roshdi Al-Sarraj, who’s the son of the legendary mayor of Gaza City, Yahya Al-Sarraj, and we were in touch. We were doing investigations together. I mean, I never met him in person, but he was on team calls and we were partnering on investigations. To a certain extent, they were the closest colleagues, our sort of sister organization in Gaza.
As immediately after October 7, 2023, Roshdi was asking us to help him find his colleagues or our colleagues in Gaza whose traces were lost. There’s so many Palestinians whose bodies have still not been found or buried under rubble, etc. We don’t know what happened to them. We know that there was bombing in the area where they were on October 7th itself, and the traces disappeared. So while, you know, Roshdi and his colleagues were looking for them on the ground. We were looking for them amongst the social media, the storm of videos that was coming out of Gaza. On the 22nd of October, Roshdi himself was killed in a targeted strike, covering his wife and daughter. It’s an incredibly heartbreaking set of actions and we were so involved and in there.
Then day after day, Nour and other colleagues and friends, Palestinians from Gaza and elsewhere, who had members of the family there come in and report about family members caught under…I remember in April 2025 Nour’s family was caught under a pile of rubble in Khan Younis. Her aunt and children, Nour’s cousins, were alive, under the rubble. They were knocking from under the pile.
Members of Nour’s family who knew that she was out asked for help. We were trying to call everybody that we knew and their sister, as you say. And we’re trying to alert the Red Cross, I mean, the Red Crescent said, you know, “We cannot approach. Israelis wouldn’t allow us to get near that place.” Every breath is painful in a situation like that, because you know people are still alive, crushed by buildings, and you experience it live.
So people think that, of course, we weren’t in Gaza, we didn’t experience anything directly, like what Palestinian experience there, but I’ve never experienced anything like that in my life. In that instance, the slow extinguishing of life of that family there was horrific. We were just seeing Nour at the time, dealing with that, continuing to work, doing everything that she could to try and rescue her family, who obviously perished, was enormously painful.
Ben Reiff
Wow, yeah, I can’t imagine, thank you for sharing that with us. The book closes by touching on the various reconstruction plans proposed for Gaza’s future by the American government, the Egyptian government, and also by Gazan civil society, none of which look anywhere close to becoming reality. But you also end by looking further into the future where you envision a process of what you call re-grounding through the return of Palestinian refugees, not only I think to their destroyed homes inside Gaza, but also to the communities that were destroyed during and after the Nakba 80 years ago.
I wondered if, to finish, you could tell us kind of what you see as the first step that’s necessary for that process of regrounding to take place?
Eyal Weizman
I think this is the relation between the finding of evidence — photographic material — to existence, that resists the logic of grounding, resists the logic of erasure. There’s always a trace, there’s always a weak signal, there’s always something remaining, even that survives the bulldozers and survives the plows of the 1950s. These are often anchors for return. We see it, I don’t know, still in the Wadi Gaza basin with Al-Araqib, no? I mean, it was a community that returned and the buildings were demolished 200 times, more than 200 times now..
They returned to a cemetery that exists there. So those traces are really important, they are anchors. If you learn how to see, and how to amplify weak traces and really through the combined force of testimony and critical analysis of images and cartography and whatever you have in order to reconstruct those or to find and map those traces, those become the anchors for return. And the resistance to the ungrounding logic of settler colonialism is indeed insisting on those weak traces and maintaining them as acts and anchors of return.
Ben Reiff
I think that’s a great place to end. Thank you so, so much, Eyal, for joining us and for your time. I would urge all of our listeners to go and read the book. It’s really an incredible piece of work. Thank you for joining us.
Eyal Weizman
Thank you, Ben.
Ben Reiff
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This episode was produced by Jennifer Cutler, with help from the +972 Editorial Team. Make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a review. It really helps new listeners find the show. Visit 972Mag.com for in-depth reporting, analysis, and opinions from the ground in Israel-Palestine, and don’t forget to download the +972 app and subscribe to our newsletters.
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The UN Genocide Convention of 1948 lists five acts that constitute genocide when committed with the intent to destroy a group in whole or in part. The first two concern mass killing and serious bodily or mental harm. The fourth and fifth are concerned with interrupting the biological continuity of a group. The third prohibition, framed in Article II(c), forbids ‘deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction’. This refers to indirect forms of killing, those that don’t target human bodies but the environment that sustains them. Sufficient ‘conditions of life’ require buildings, hospitals, social infrastructure, sewage and water systems, power grids, agriculture. The intentional destruction or degradation of such structures undermines a people’s ability to survive, leading to a slower and more tortuous form of annihilation.
The idea that the built environment determines a group’s conditions of life recalls the modernist conception of architecture, prevalent when the word ‘genocide’ was first conceived and defined by the Polish Jewish jurist Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. Modern architecture offered to calculate and improve the conditions of life. Cities were to be laid out in accordance with public health principles, and homes, in Le Corbusier’s famous definition, were to be ‘machines for living in’, calibrated to maximise the supply of biological necessities – heat, hygiene, air circulation, food and even sexual reproduction.
Architects’ Data (1936) by the German modernist architect Ernst Neufert is still used by architects looking for the most efficient dimensions for kitchens, bedrooms or even park benches. In the 1920s Neufert was an assistant to Walter Gropius, director of the Bauhaus. Later, on behalf of the Nazi Party, he oversaw the standardisation of Germany’s building industry, which was largely powered by enslaved labour. Several Bauhaus graduates designed concentration camps. The deliberate degradation of living conditions inverted the task of modern architecture from the enhancement of life to the production of death.
Lemkin defined genocide as being aimed at ‘the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups’. He was thinking about the way the Nazis saw the Jewish ghettos and enslaved labour camps as means of slow, indirect extermination. But he was also aware of the colonial origins of this mode of destruction. Though direct acts of massacre took place in colonised territories everywhere, slow, indirect killings have more often been the means of annihilating Indigenous peoples. Dispossessed of their ancestral habitats, separated from the land on which they depended for sustenance and ritual, forced into reservations, Indigenous populations were destroyed to free up the best land for European settlement.
Two and a half years after 7 October 2023, most of the Gaza Strip – cities, refugee camps, schools, universities, mosques, the health infrastructure, agriculture, wells and the soil itself – has been destroyed and made toxic by bombs, artillery, tank shells and sappers. The most systematic destruction was caused by D9 bulldozers made by the US company Caterpillar. These giant armoured machines stabbed their blades into the ground, churning up fields, felling orchards, flattening homes, tearing through roads and ploughing through cemeteries. The tide of destruction flowed inwards from Gaza’s perimeter fences, pushing Palestinians into enclaves referred to by the Israeli army as ‘safe areas’ and ‘humanitarian zones’, though they were never safe or humane. These overcrowded coastal sites, such as al-Mawasi, with its barren sand dunes, were without housing, healthcare or other services, and were continuously bombed from the air and attacked on the ground. The bulldozers turned the agriculturally rich land of eastern Gaza into a monochrome desert of crushed grey cement mixed with the area’s yellowish soil. Entire cities such as Rafah, towns such as Beit Hanoun and refugee camps such as Jabalia were erased. When buildings are bombed or bulldozed, their remains – plastics, wiring, solvents, insulation, asbestos – release toxic chemicals into the soil. Some bombs penetrate the ground before exploding and release heavy metals or metalloids – such as uranium, lead and arsenic – deep underground. Many of these substances are slow to decay and will affect the composition of the soil for decades. A lived-in landscape has been turned into what a former Israeli general, Giora Eiland, described as a place ‘where no human being can exist’.
Lemkin understood conditions of life to include not only the infrastructure that enables biological existence but social and cultural continuity too: religious buildings, schools, libraries, heritage sites. In Gaza most of these have also been systematically demolished. The Genocide Convention ratified in 1948 did not mention the ‘cultural genocide’ that Lemkin argued should be included. Entire sections were left out of the convention. Imperial powers such as Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, which were then attempting to suppress anti-colonial uprisings, wanted genocide to be defined in a way that would not restrict their activities. Settler-colonial states – Australia, the United States and Canada – that had destroyed the physical heritage, culture and language of Indigenous peoples also objected. But cultural and biological life are not separate domains when it comes to national survival. In Gaza the systematic devastation of the environment – fields, water sources and the fishing industry – destroyed the ability of the society to feed itself. Attacks on schools and mosques reduced its capacity to organise and offer mutual care to mitigate the worst effects of scarcity, thus aggravating famine. The simultaneous destruction of one domain amplifies the harm caused by the other.
On 13 October 2023, six days after the Hamas attack on Israeli settlements and bases around Gaza, Israel ordered the evacuation of Gaza City, sending Palestinians in northern Gaza towards the southern border with Egypt. A document prepared by the Israeli Ministry of Intelligence and leaked to the online journal +972 explained the reason for this: it recommended the full-scale expulsion of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip into the Egyptian Sinai, arguing that this would ‘yield positive, long-term strategic outcomes for Israel’. The destruction of conditions of life was intended to hasten the Gazans’ departure. The biggest campaign in the history of aerial bombardment rolled like a carpet of fire from north to south.
The mass expulsion of Palestinians from Gaza to Egypt has been an aim of Israeli governments since December 1948, when the army first tried and failed to cleanse this last remaining enclave along Palestine’s Mediterranean coast. It tried again during the 1950s and intensified its effort after the 1967 War, when Israel occupied both the Gaza Strip and the Sinai desert. Hamas’s attack on 7 October 2023 gave Israel another opportunity. Expulsion plans were trumpeted by Israeli politicians and media spokespeople. Benjamin Netanyahu confirmed that he was actively seeking to transfer Palestinians out of Gaza. Israeli and some US officials started lobbying Egypt to accept large numbers of refugees. For eight months the Israeli army refrained from occupying the border area near Rafah, leaving the exit to Egypt open.
Many Palestinians, remembering the consequences of the mass displacement of 1948, refused to leave their homes. They remained in the ruins of Gaza City despite the bombing, and despite the denial of aid. Egypt policed the border closely and refused to let in Palestinians en masse, allowing entry only to those who could pay extortionate sums. Unable to achieve its goal, Israel sought instead to concentrate Palestinians into an ever smaller area of the Strip until the next opportunity for displacement arrived. Outside these zones, total destruction was meant to prevent their return to the areas from which they had been expelled.
The destruction was most complete close to Gaza’s fences. The IDF calls the area bordering Israel a ‘buffer zone’. It is a no-go area for Palestinians, a shetah hashmada, Hebrew for ‘annihilation zone’: any Palestinian entering it, or sometimes even approaching it, is shot on sight. The victims included Palestinians, many of them children, who wanted to see what could be salvaged from the ruins of their homes, to retrieve food aid that had been parachuted in, or who simply lost their way in a newly unfamiliar landscape. The flattening of all structures in the buffer zone was intended, among other things, to remove any hiding places and expose Palestinians to snipers. Before October the zone was between 300 and 500 metres wide. Two weeks into the war it was extended to a kilometre. By the spring of 2025 it was two kilometres wide; soon after it was three kilometres, with everything inside systematically bulldozed. Because the buffer zone now covered such a large area, snipers couldn’t be used everywhere and Palestinians were murdered instead by quadcopter drones equipped with grenade launchers. During the day people were easy to see against the monochrome backdrop; at night the drones’ thermal sensors registered their body heat.
Throughout military history, buffer zones – the Rhineland after the Treaty of Versailles of 1919, the strip between Kuwait and Iraq following the 1991 Gulf War, the DMZ between North and South Korea, or the land between Turkish and Greek Cyprus – have been means of maintaining ceasefires by keeping armies apart. In the eight decades since the establishment of Israel, buffer zones have instead been used as a means of occupation, displacement and erasure. Under the terms of the armistice agreement between Egypt and Israel that ended the 1948 war, Israeli forward positions were drawn roughly three kilometres east of where the present border of Gaza now lies, as the Palestinian historian and cartographer Salman Abu Sitta has shown. The line crosses al-Ma’in, the village where he was born and from which he was expelled with the rest of his family on 14 May 1948. Al-Ma’in and other Palestinian villages were soon cleared and replaced by the agrarian kibbutz settlements that were attacked on 7 October 2023. The settlers expanded Israeli territory through cultivation, removing the remnants of Palestinian homes, roads and fields. They ploughed over cemeteries because these were often places Palestinians returned to. Soldiers and settlers were instructed to shoot anyone, armed or unarmed, who crossed into the zone.
Before the 1967 War King Hussein of Jordan secretly offered to keep the West Bank as a buffer area if Israel promised not to invade. Israel occupied the territory nevertheless. After the war, a security masterplan drawn up by the former military commander Yigal Allon called for a strip of the Jordan Valley ten to fifteen kilometres wide (covering roughly a third of the West Bank) to be annexed and settled to become Israel’s eastern buffer zone. Ethnic cleansing of Palestinian farming communities in the area started shortly after this, and has continued on and off ever since. Expulsions have accelerated radically since October 2023, and have increased even more since the start of the US and Israel’s attack on Iran, with the Israeli army promoting and participating in settlers’ pogroms throughout the remaining Palestinian communities. Bezalel Smotrich, a West Bank settler and the Israeli minister of finance, had already promised early in 2025 that Palestinian villages and cities in the West Bank would come to ‘resemble Rafah and Khan Younis. They will also be turned into uninhabitable ruins, and their residents will be forced to migrate and seek a new life in other countries.’
A similar process took place in the north of the country. During the 1967 War Israel occupied the Golan Heights with the explicit aim of creating a buffer zone between the Syrian army and Israel’s agrarian settlements in the upper Jordan Valley. Further settlements were built across the occupied area and in 1981 Israel formally annexed it. In December 2024, after the fall of Bashar al-Assad, the IDF extended a ‘sterile defence zone’ further into Syrian territory, expelling Syrian residents, destroying military and civilian buildings including the al-Golan hospital and the al-Andalus cinema in Quneitra, and bulldozing orchards, forests and fields, piling the soil to construct military outposts, trenches and earth berms.
Israel’s latest invasion of Lebanon has involved the expulsion of 600,000 Lebanese from a new buffer zone. Israel has bombed all the bridges across the Litani River, thirty kilometres away from the border, in order to cut off the area from the rest of Lebanon and has started systematically demolishing the villages closest to the border. The return of Lebanese inhabitants to these villages will be prohibited, Israel Katz, Israel’s minister of defence, said, ‘until the safety and security of the residents of the north [of Israel] is ensured’ – an impossible demand. An Israeli settler organisation has published plans for the ‘settlement of southern Lebanon’, producing maps that give Lebanese villages Hebrew names and provocatively advertising plots of land for sale.
This exemplifies the circular logic of Zionist settler-colonialism: settlements are built to mark and protect the state’s border, but that makes them vulnerable to attack and so a buffer zone is established to protect them. Afterwards, this buffer zone is itself settled to mark and protect the newly expanded borders, at which point another buffer zone becomes necessary. In this manner vulnerability is produced and then mobilised in a feedback loop that the genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses has called ‘permanent security’.
Throughout the past two and a half years, Gaza has not only been a demolition zone but a construction site, reshaped according to Israel’s blueprint. The bulldozed remains of buildings were piled into a landscape of earth berms, which were then shaped into barriers, detention facilities and military outposts from which Israeli tanks and snipers commanded the area where survivors were concentrated. The scale of the earthworks was so great that Israel’s two hundred bulldozers were not nearly enough – many were damaged by the Palestinian resistance – and Israel urgently needed two hundred more. In late 2024 the Biden administration delayed their export and they weren’t sent until Trump took office. In the meantime the IDF hired private bulldozer operators, many of them West Bank settlers.
If Palestinians ever tried to return to the demolished zones, an Israeli bulldozer operator called Abraham Zarbiv said, they ‘will be returning to nowhere. Tens of thousands of families are left without papers, without childhood photos, without ID cards, they remain with nothing. If they return, they will not know where their home is. All they will find is sand.’ The erasure of the built environment was mirrored by the destruction of records of it. Municipal plans, historical maps and property deeds were destroyed when Israel bombed Gaza City’s Central Archives in November 2023.
The army ‘changed the Strip’s topography beyond recognition’, the Palestinian poet Omar Moussa wrote that month. ‘If we survive this war,’ he quoted a friend as asking, ‘what would be our meeting point?’ After the First World War the unprecedented facial injuries caused by high-explosive shells destroyed soldiers’ sense of identity. The territorial equivalent of this is the disorientation that Palestinians feel when exposed to the places that used to be their homes. A new form of psychological torture emerged. Blindfolded Palestinian captives were taken back to their old neighbourhoods, now a sea of rubble. ‘When we took the cloth off their eyes,’ Zarbiv reported, ‘they were completely disoriented, they did not understand where they were.’ Zarbiv, who is also a rabbinical court judge, has been chosen to light a torch at Israel’s Independence Day celebrations.
On the night of 23 March 2025 Israeli troops murdered fifteen first responders and buried their bodies under high earthworks near Rafah. Asaad al-Nasasra, a medic with the Palestinian Red Crescent, one of two survivors of the attack, was interrogated and tortured inside a hole dug nearby by bulldozers. He described his ordeal to researchers from Forensic Architecture, who were using his descriptions to try to model the changes to the landscape. When his blindfold was removed, he realised that ‘they had changed the place completely. When I saw the place, it made me feel hysterical. I couldn’t understand anything.’ In order to reconstruct the incident, the researchers worked with Earshot, an open-source audio investigative unit, which analysed the sound of gunfire recorded on the phone of one of the murdered medics. Lawrence Abu Hamdan, who founded Earshot, told me that the demolition had also radically transformed the acoustic landscape. Usually, he said, audio recordings of gunshots in urban areas reveal sound echoing from many different directions. Here all that remained were three walls that had somehow survived the demolition. The new landscape enabled clear echoes, making it possible to reconstruct incidents from their sound signatures.
In the weeks that followed the massacre, earth and rubble in this area were piled up in a series of structures next to the site. They surrounded an open space, which soon became one of the compounds operated by the newly conceived Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, an organisation funded by US and Israeli entrepreneurs that supposedly took on the role of distributing food aid, bypassing the UN. Its feeding stations concentrated starving Palestinians in four specific locations, all near Israeli military sites, three of them close to the border with Egypt. Hundreds were massacred by Israeli soldiers and US mercenaries when they were forced to compete for rations.
The present ‘ceasefire’ came into effect on 10 October 2025. Under its terms Gaza was divided into two zones by a Yellow Line that ran roughly along the edge of the buffer zone, leaving the Israeli army in control of 54 per cent of Gaza. By December, Israel had unilaterally shifted the line west, bringing the area under its control up to 58 per cent. Eyal Zamir, Israel’s chief of staff, described the Yellow Line as Israel’s ‘new border’ with Gaza.
The line was drawn along a sandstone ridge that runs parallel to the coast, around three kilometres inland. At about seventy metres above sea level, it offers Israeli forces control of the Palestinians forced into the area near the sea. The ridge has organised life in the region since antiquity. Every year millions of cubic metres of granite from the Ethiopian plateau erode into sand that is carried down the Nile into the Mediterranean. Tides deposit large quantities of this sand along the Palestinian shoreline. Millennia ago one of these ancient dunes petrified into the sandstone ridge – a formidable barrier that dams the eastward drift of other sand dunes along the coast. West of the ridge the area is primarily sand; east of it, the soil is fertile. For many generations most of Palestine’s wheat and barley fields were cultivated by Bedouin tribes in the fertile plains of the Beersheba region. These farmers were among the two hundred thousand Palestinians expelled from their land and incarcerated in a beachside enclave between the towns of Rafah and Gaza in the final months of 1948. A sliver of this soil between three and four kilometres wide remained within the borders of Gaza. In recent decades this fertile land was Gaza’s bread basket. Now all of it is on the Israeli-controlled side of the Yellow Line.
At Forensic Architecture we identified a new earth berm that has been built along much of the path of the Yellow Line, as well as seven new military outposts. One of them was constructed on the site of a cemetery. Altogether there are 48 outposts east of the Yellow Line. Zamir has said they are the bases from which further incursions into the coastal area will be launched if necessary. At first the new outposts were no more than piles of earth and rubble, organised into variously shaped enclosures. But in recent months the enclosed areas and the roads leading to them have been asphalted. Electricity poles have been erected and the roads lit. Closely packed prefabricated buildings have been erected inside the bases, and tall towers on the perimeter carry communications and surveillance equipment. The bases no longer appear to be the provisional arrangements that Trump’s ceasefire plan claims them to be, but permanent instruments of occupation. The newly paved roads connect the bases to a matrix of control that is linked to Israel’s road network and communications grid.
West of the Yellow Line, Hamas is the governing body. Survivors live in and between the ruins or in massive tent encampments. The winter cold – the temperature can drop as low as five degrees – has led to deaths from hypothermia, particularly among infants. The summer, bringing heat of more than forty degrees, is fast approaching. In past summers children have suffocated in enclosures made from plastic sheeting or with improvised tin roofs: permanent structures are not allowed. Puddles are breeding grounds for mosquitoes; rubbish dumps are piled high; wastewater runs free and there are rodents everywhere. Israel does not allow the chemicals and pesticides that could help treat these problems into Gaza. While some medical services have been partially restored thanks to the effort of Palestinian medics and international NGOs, the health system barely functions. The scarcity of medicines and degraded hygiene mean that even minor injuries lead to infection. More than 40 per cent of dialysis patients in Gaza have died due to lack of treatment. The surviving population of Gaza has been reduced to a condition of bare existence, subject to unrelenting hunger and thirst under the ever present hum of killer drones and bomber jets. By keeping control of how much aid can enter – it was temporarily shut off in March after the US-Israeli attack on Iran began – Israel can continue to calibrate the conditions of life. It wants Palestinians to leave or to die slowly. Still, videos recording Gazan life under genocide show people cooking over communal fires, running open-air schools and submitting theses to universities whose buildings no longer exist.
The settler movement is lobbying hard for the Israeli government to start constructing settlements within the vastly expanded buffer zone. In December Katz said that Israel ‘will never leave Gaza’, and will turn the military outposts into what are known as ‘Nahal outposts’, which are designed to evolve into civilian settlements. Some of the settlements around Gaza began as Nahal outposts in the early 1950s, as did many of the settlements in the West Bank.
Since even Donald Trump officially opposes the building of Jewish settlements in Gaza, Netanyahu forced Katz to retract his statement. The Israeli government decided to adopt a position of ambiguity and buy time by delaying the army’s withdrawal and building up its positions and infrastructure east of the Yellow Line. The transformation of these military outposts into civilian settlements will have to wait for the world’s attention to shift elsewhere.
In the meantime, fanciful development plans are being floated to cover up the reality of the ongoing destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza, which has become a feeding ground for real-estate sharks cum politicians. On 4 February 2025, during the two-month ceasefire that followed Trump’s second inauguration, the president unexpectedly announced that the US would ‘take over the Gaza Strip’. Gaza, Trump said, had ‘a phenomenal location … on the sea, the best weather’ and would be a ‘Riviera of the Middle East’. While the US had previously downplayed the destruction, Trump’s administration started to talk it up. This was not born of humanitarian concern. Referring to Gaza as a ‘demolition zone’, the administration said that development would require complete evacuation. Palestinians in the beachfront concentration zone would be encouraged to move to a ‘nice place’ elsewhere. Development would bring about the population displacement that the Israeli army had failed to achieve during the war.
To pre-empt Trump’s Riviera plan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the UAE proposed their own masterplan. This was not born of humanitarian concern either, but designed to ensure Palestinians remained in the Strip rather than being expelled into their territories. ‘A green and smart city powered by renewable energy’ was proposed. It was evidently designed to please the Israelis. The buffer zone was integrated into the plan, represented as an ‘open green area’ where no structures were to be built.
In the summer of 2025, a group of Israeli entrepreneurs presented another initiative, the Gaza Reconstitution, Economic Acceleration and Transformation Trust, or GREAT. The people behind it – the venture capitalist Michael Eisenberg, the tech entrepreneur Liran Tancman et al – also proposed and oversaw the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation which established militarised feeding stations in southern Gaza. GREAT continued where Trump’s Riviera vision left off. It proposed a ‘world-class’ beachside resort, with a series of ‘AI-powered’ cities further inland. An ‘MBZ Central Highway’ named after the president of the UAE, an ‘MBS Ring’ named after the Saudi crown prince and an ‘Elon Musk smart manufacturing zone’ were meant to induce those individuals to foot some of the bill. Some Palestinians could remain; others would receive meagre financial assistance towards moving elsewhere.
The ceasefire of October 2025 created an opportunity for this plan to be updated. The Board of Peace is a who’s who of populist authoritarianism: Trump as chairman for life was joined by Benjamin Netanyahu, Argentina’s Javier Milei, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Marco Rubio, Jared Kushner, Tony Blair and others were put in charge of forming a committee to oversee the Palestinian technocrats who would manage day-to-day affairs in Gaza. A new military body known as the International Stabilisation Force would take over security control. As Shawan Jabarin, director of the Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq, said to me, the proposal involved only a semantic change in the logic of occupation: the ISF would simply replace the IDF as an occupying power.
Kushner presented the Board of Peace’s architectural vision at the World Economic Forum in Davos. Project Sunrise added detail to the hallucinatory vision of a riviera with renderings of 180 luxury high-rises, behind which seven clusters of urban and industrial developments were separated by wide roads that traced the route of the military roads constructed by Israel since October 2023 to slice Gaza into controllable sections. East of them was the buffer zone camouflaged as an agricultural area. The proposed architecture of control reached into cyberspace. Tancman, a graduate of Israel’s elite cyber-intelligence Unit 8200, was brought in by Trump to draft a Digital Overhaul Plan. This included the declaration that by July this year a free high-speed internet service would push all social interaction and financial exchange online. The aim was not to help the Palestinian economy but rather to make all financial and bureaucratic transactions subject to Israeli surveillance.
For the Israeli government, reconstruction provides leverage. Large-scale development takes years to complete. With its full control of checkpoints and terminals and every truck of cement and building material crossing into Gaza, Israel can ensure that reconstruction remains a perpetual ‘project’. The image of luxury towers constructed above mass graves, with tens of thousands presumably buried under the earthworks, embodies the logic of 21st-century genocide. The Israeli government now hopes, in the words of the former minister Ron Dermer, that what ‘two years of war did not accomplish will be done by market forces’. The erasure of Palestinian life in Gaza could, counterintuitively, be achieved by architectural means.
In January, Forensic Architecture researchers identified site-work taking place in an area of one square kilometre, surrounded by several military outposts, on the Israeli-controlled side of the Yellow Line, just east of the ruins of Rafah. A leaked US military document revealed that this was a pilot for a programme called Alternative Safe Communities, which will offer accommodation to tens of thousands of Palestinians, vetted for their willingness to renounce Hamas, in communities of modular homes supplied with water, sanitation and electricity; mosques and schools will promote normalisation with Israel in line with the curriculum used by the UAE. An indicative illustration of what is referred to as the Emirati Compound shows the layout of a new type of refugee camp. In the plan, two-storey prefabricated units – not tall enough to ‘threaten’ Israeli forces – are laid out along wide streets that allow Israeli armour to patrol. At the centre is a large park surrounding a single-storey mosque. This, rather than luxury housing and a riviera, is the most that Palestinians can hope for from the reconstruction plans. Residents would enter and exit the fenced-in camp through checkpoints equipped with biometric sensors. The plan also offers help to ‘residents wishing to travel abroad’.
All these initiatives ignored Palestinian planners and architects, although several Palestinian reconstruction plans have been proposed. One of them, the Phoenix Gaza Initiative, was prepared by the Union of Gaza Strip Municipalities, working with Palestinian architects in Palestine and the diaspora, and is grounded in the ‘social and spatial relationships that persist in Gaza’. Erased neighbourhoods and refugee camps – some of which, like Rafah and the Jabalia, are historic centres of Palestinian national identity – are to be replaced, home by home, after carefully re-establishing the land ownership of the erased surface. During the process of reconstruction, each family would be housed near the site of their demolished home, and communities would be involved in the reconstruction.
Reconstruction plans imposed on Palestinians with the implicit aim of destroying Palestinian life in Gaza demonstrate the reason Lemkin reserved a place for architecture in his conception of the crime of genocide. He knew that the way a people organises its space is a manifestation of its history and social structure. ‘Genocide has two phases,’ Lemkin wrote in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The first involves the ‘destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group’ – this was achieved in Gaza by Israel’s devastating bombing. The second involves the imposition of a design by the oppressor, like these reconstruction plans for Gaza. ‘This imposition, in turn,’ he wrote, ‘may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonisation of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals.’
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