“Murder” is the term for the intentional destruction of homes, and there is another for the deliberate destruction of cities: urbicide. This term, which, unlike genocide, is not classified as a crime in international law, gained relevance after the sieges of Mostar and Sarajevo. But where it found all its terrible meaning was in the Gaza Strip. Professor Martin Coward, of the University of London, explains: “Attacking cities ensures that people have nowhere to return to.” Coward collaborates with the Israeli association Breaking The Silence (BTS), which was discussed in an extraordinary report in the magazine prospectsigned by Alona Ferber, of the destruction of buildings and infrastructures carried out by the Israeli army. “The soldiers,” writes Ferber, “testify that they were ordered to burn the houses in which they stayed, pouring oil on tents, books and mattresses.” “In practice, the proportion of structures destroyed in Rafah, for example, is greater than those destroyed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,” the Israeli newspaper estimated last June. Haaretz. Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, visited Gaza in October and said it looked “almost like a nuclear bomb had been detonated.”
Was the systematic destruction of homes and infrastructure a consequence of military attacks or an explicit desire to destroy any remaining cities, towns or communities in Gaza? One of the main problems that will arise when analyzing the desire to destroy and expel the Palestinian population will be the disappearance of any type of documentation. Reliable testimonies explain that the Israeli authorities are proceeding with the planned destruction of any type of documentation that demonstrates what the different neighborhoods or cities of the Gaza Strip looked like. Furthermore, there are groups of volunteers who, driving powerful excavators, proceeded (and continue) to demolish the buildings within their reach, without the Israeli army offering any resistance. Rabbi Avraham Zarbive explained that bulldozers are no longer a simple support: “Tearing down buildings is the way to fight.”
The story that Alona Ferber presented is horrific. With the support of several documentation and analysis centers located in the United States or Great Britain, experts are noting the progressive destruction of Gaza, the systematic, controlled and ferocious way in which all the educational, health, supply and sewage infrastructures have been destroyed.
Forensic Architecture (FA), the research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, has produced a map of the Gaza war in a project titled “Mapping the Genocide”, which states that: “Rafah does not exist. Eastern Khan Yunis does not exist. Eastern Gaza does not exist.” Soil destruction, Ferber writes, involves the use of heavy machinery that destroys everything below the surface, removing the soil in such a way that “it is no longer possible to distinguish where the road was and where the sidewalk was.”
BBC experts assure that the displacement experienced by the population of Gaza “is unprecedented and unlike any other since the Second World War”. The lack of safe places to move and repeated movements within a small, densely populated area are extremely unusual, according to historians and academics specializing in conflict, forced migration and international law. According to the UN, nine out of ten Gazans fled their homes during the two-year war, while the borders remained virtually closed.
What is happening in the Gaza Strip, its physical disappearance, has been partly crushed by the brutality of the deaths of over 68,000 civilians, of which more than 20,000 boys and girls, again according to Palestinian figures which certainly do not fit reality, given the number of corpses that must remain under that rubble. However, as the weeks passed and the ceasefire remained precarious, and as international journalists gradually entered, the world was shown the horror of the destruction and the fear surrounding the future of Gazans. Will they be forced to leave the Strip sooner or later? Where? “You can say you miss your city if it still exists. But it doesn’t exist anymore, you know?” Concludes Alona Ferber.
