A new book details Israel’s destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza

https://archive.is/IZ7ew

From the article:

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.