The Architecture of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza
The Architecture of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza A new book describes the destruction of Palestinian life street by street. While many Americans believe that Israel has committed a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza over the past three years, attempts to understand what really happened there and hold Israel accountable have fallen short so far. The legal case at the International Court of Justice has been stalled by American and European opposition. The ferocious debate over the term itself has degenerated into partisan flamethrowing and definitional nitpicking. The campus protests that erupted in the spring of 2024 were violently repressed and have largely gone away. A new book by the British Israeli architect and political activist Eyal Weizman tries to fill that void by telling the story of Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza street by street, farm by farm, and hospital by hospital. What sets Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide apart from this polarized discourse is its determined focus on the physical and its analytical tone. The evidence, collected by Weizman and his team from audios, videos, and interviews and subjected to rigorous analysis, is overwhelming. Their efforts produced the “Cartography of Genocide,” an interactive and constantly evolving digital map that details “an organized and designed campaign to destroy Palestinian life in Gaza.” By the end of the book, the question is less whether Israel’s actions should be regarded as genocide and more what to make of a genocidal process that seeks to not only remove a people but to fundamentally and permanently transform the land. While many Americans believe that Israel has committed a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza over the past three years, attempts to understand what really happened there and hold Israel accountable have fallen short so far. The legal case at the International Court of Justice has been stalled by American and European opposition. The ferocious debate over the term itself has degenerated into partisan flamethrowing and definitional nitpicking. The campus protests that erupted in the spring of 2024 were violently repressed and have largely gone away. A new book by the British Israeli architect and political activist Eyal Weizman tries to fill that void by telling the story of Israel’s systematic destruction of Gaza street by street, farm by farm, and hospital by hospital. What sets Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide apart from this polarized discourse is its determined focus on the physical and its analytical tone. The evidence, collected by Weizman and his team from audios, videos, and interviews and subjected to rigorous analysis, is overwhelming. Their efforts produced the “Cartography of Genocide,” an interactive and constantly evolving digital map that details “an organized and designed campaign to destroy Palestinian life in Gaza.” By the end of the book, the question is less whether Israel’s actions should be regarded as genocide and more what to make of a genocidal process that seeks to not only remove a people but to fundamentally and permanently transform the land. Weizman is the author of the acclaimed Hollow Land, which dissected Israeli methods of settlement and physical control in the West Bank in the 2000s. He is also one of the creators and driving forces behind Forensic Architecture, a research agency whose investigations have played critical roles in documenting genocide from Guatemala to Namibia, torture prisons in Syria, and human rights abuses in Mexico. Weizman worked closely with South Africans in their petition against Israel to the International Court of Justice, providing detailed reconstructions of Israeli actions, which are scattered through the text of his new book. His outrage over state violence is not confined to Israel, but it is personal: Multiple members of his team were killed over the course of the war—victims of the very campaign that they worked to document. Weizman situates Gaza within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, telling a history of the territory through its soil. Gaza rises from the ocean to the desert, offering one of the most fertile and productive agricultural zones in the Middle East. He shows how Palestinian farmers made the Gaza breadbasket bloom long before Zionist settlers arrived and describes how the 1948 partition severed those farmers from their lands and crops, with much of the most fertile land passing into the hands of the kibbutz settlements installed along the new border. His narrative traces the physical transformations imposed on Gaza through the brief Israeli occupation in 1956, the much longer occupation after 1967, and the blockade that followed Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s 2005 disengagement, where “control previously enacted on the ground was relocated to the perimeter and to the airspace above.” Though the trigger for the recent Israeli onslaught was Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023, which killed some 1,200 people—mostly Israeli civilians—the stage was set much earlier during the 16 years of draconian blockade imposed by Israel, with Egyptian support, starting in September 2007. Israel withdrew troops and settlers from the Gaza Strip but maintained and gradually expanded one of the most punishing blockades in modern history, in what Weizman calls an “unparalleled exercise in population control … a slower way of continuous killing.” The gradual violence of the blockade was routinely punctuated by eruptions of extreme violence that caused immense human and physical damage while doing little to curb Hamas’s military expansion. In December 2008, Israeli bombing failed to meaningfully impact the tunnel system that Hamas had been constructing underground. In 2014, when Israel destroyed and damaged thousands of buildings, the post-conflict reconstruction site allowed Hamas to rapidly expand tunnels since “soil could be extracted without becoming visible to Israel’s optical surveillance from above.” In May 2021, Israel dropped 450 bunker-buster bombs in a master stroke intended to collapse the tunnels, but a few months later, Israel admitted that plan had failed, according the book. Throughout, Hamas was able to tax and control tunnel-based trade with Egypt, consolidating its power over Gazan society while maintaining its ideology of resistance. There is a reason that human rights observers viewed Gaza as a moral atrocity long before 2023. Soil and sand remain a theme throughout the tragic narrative. “The ungrounded soil of Gaza after October 2023 became a mixture of fragments of all elements that had previously composed urban life—crushed concrete, plaster, plastic, glass, dead plants, sand,” Weizman writes. As a result, Palestinians were “breathing the dust of what used to be their cities and homes.” By centering the physicality of the soil, Weizman joins a wave of outstanding younger scholars who have made environmental impact central to the documentation of war. Kali Rubaii’s Resurgency details the effects of decades of sanctions, bombings, and war on farmers in Iraq’s Anbar province, with harrowing accounts of fertile land turned toxic. Munira Khayyat’s A Landscape of War shows how Lebanese civilians have adapted to decades of Israeli invasion, bombing, defoliation, and sowing of cluster munitions across southern Lebanon. Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins’s Waste Siege explores the production and management of trash in the West Bank as well as the ecological effects of continuous occupation and violence. But Weizman’s goals here are not strictly academic. His prose shimmers with barely contained rage at the horrors that his team observed, that Israelis deny, and that the media is barred from covering on the ground. Parts of the book read like a murder mystery, as he explains the methods and evidence that his team used to painstakingly reconstruct specific war crimes or events, showing how Israeli spokespeople produced and deceptively edited misleading or unsupported claims. Familiar horror stories, such as the destruction of the Al-Ahli Hospital or the killing of young Hind Rajab, take on new life in his clinical, precise dispatches. There can be something tedious, even actively perfidious, about how Israel’s defenders force analysts deep into the weeds, arguing over microscopic details when the big picture is clear. But Weizman does it well, and the forensic demonstration of what happened at the micro level provides essential support for the credibility of the larger narrative. And that larger narrative is as devastating as it is infuriating. Weizman shows how Israel’s invasion of Gaza included an intentional, systematic plan of destroying the conditions for Palestinian life and rebuilding the land into something available for Israeli resettlement. Bulldozers carve new routes through Palestinian neighborhoods, destroying homes and farms in a wide margin on both sides: “An entire military architecture emerged, growing within and gradually replacing Gaza’s cities from whose rubble they were made.” This was not simply an invasion. It was a complete destruction from the ground up of the society that had once existed. “It rolled into Gaza like a tide,” he writes. “Wherever it extended, the area was ungrounded.” Israel had long declared buffer zones where any Palestinian would be killed. It relentlessly expanded those zones as the invasion proceeded. Palestinians never really knew where the demarcation line ran. At any moment, they might wander into an unrecognized forbidden zone and be killed on sight. By July 2025, this buffer zone covered 82 percent of Gaza’s territory, according to Weizman. Gaza’s population was systematically herded into increasingly smaller “safe zones” that were anything but safe, forced to live on the sand dunes and in areas lacking even the most basic necessities of life. The intermittent closure of Gaza to aid reinforced the misery: “The humanitarian zone on the dunes is where conditions of life were calculated to keep people barely alive, to make conditions so unlivable that Palestinians would want to leave the moment the borders opened.” Meanwhile, in the territories emptied of civilians, U.S.-provided bombs “landed on residential and commercial tower blocks, shopping centers, schools, mosques, bakeries, banks, the beach promenade, hospitals, the legislative council, bookshops, publishing houses, libraries, hundreds of educational faculties, universities, food warehouses, restaurants.” Weizman demonstrates how the ungrounding of the buffer zones created environmental catastrophe, poisoning the soil for generations. “Pipework in the shallow subsoil was cut by the bulldozers and wastewater bled out. Without fuel, sewage facilities spilled millions of liters onto the exposed surface which from there made their way into the subsoil,” he writes. By October 2024, almost 4,000 greenhouses were destroyed, orchards were bulldozed, and almost all cows, sheep and poultry were eliminated. By April 2025, more than 80 percent of Gaza’s farmland had been destroyed, according to the book. What could account for such extreme destruction? The psychological and political shock of Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7 radicalized Israeli society, fueling a thirst for revenge. But, as Weizman shows, the ways and means of war in Gaza were only more extreme versions of Israeli military practices that long predated the Hamas attack. Israel had long engaged in massive, disproportionate attacks on civilian infrastructure; the Dahiya doctrine of 2006 formalized the devastation of civilian areas in Lebanon as a strategy of war. But what sets Weizman’s book apart from other depictions of Gaza’s horrors is that he takes Israeli concerns about tunnels and Hamas insurgent practices seriously. Much of the book, in fact, is taken up with fascinating depictions of those tunnels—how they were made, how they have been used, and their effects on Gazan society and economics. Along the way, he unpacks and dismisses a fair amount of Israeli propaganda. The tunnels were never an underground metro with the elaborate furnishings depicted in Israeli graphics. If there had been such an interconnected system, after all, it would have been exposed the first time that Israeli soldiers entered a tunnel—and would have succumbed to various Israeli tactics such as seawater flooding, poison gas, or carpet bombing along the supposed route. Israeli disinformation served a purpose: “The description of a parallel world inhabited by a complete metro system coextensive with the Gaza Strip is propaganda meant to justify the total destruction of the surface.” And in the aftermath, “the subsoil under Gaza has become a giant mass grave.” The tunnel war was replete with ironies. When Hamas ran out of ammunition, it was able to repurpose unexploded Israeli munitions into improvised explosive devices. As it built new tunnels, the sand’s “binding strength is improved by adding crushed rubble from bombed buildings.” The Israeli failure against the tunnels, as with the failure of the systems in place along the wall on Oct. 7, was conceptual as much as technological, rooted in an inability to truly believe that Hamas had agency or the ability to surprise. The concept informing Israel’s war, its dehumanization of Gazans, and its practices of ungrounding led inevitably to the scale and depth of destruction that has left an indelible stain on Israel and on humanity. It is impossible to read Ungrounded without renewing the churning rage that once accompanied news about Gaza. “The monochrome desert of upturned soil is the material signature of Israel’s genocide,” Weizman writes. He makes the case for considering Israel’s destruction of the living conditions in Gaza through starvation and environmental degradation, not only direct killing and expulsion, as a core part of the essential meaning of genocide. Marc Lynch is a professor of political science and international affairs at the George Washington University and the director of the Project on Middle East Political Science. His most recent book is America’s Middle East: The Ruination of a Region. X: @abuaardvark