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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.”
Additional reading:
- ‘Render it unusable’: Israel’s mission of total urban destruction (+972 Magazine)
- The Killing Of Hind Rajab (Forensic Architecture)
- Israeli Disinformation: Al-Ahli Hospital (Forensic Architecture)
- The Massacre of Aid Workers in Tel Al-Sultan (Forensic Architecture)
- A Cartography of Genocide (Forensic Architecture)
