“Housing killing” is the term for the deliberate destruction of homes, and there is another term for the deliberate destruction of cities: urban killing. This term, which, unlike genocide, is not classified as a crime in international law, gained importance after the sieges of Mostar and Sarajevo. But the place where I found all its terrible meaning was in the Gaza Strip. “Attacking cities ensures that people have nowhere to return,” explains Professor Martin Coward, of the University of London. Coward works with the Israeli society Breaking the Silence (BTS), which was mentioned in an extraordinary report in the magazine probabilitySigned by Alona Ferber, regarding the destruction of buildings and infrastructure carried out by the Israeli army. “The soldiers testified that they were ordered to burn the houses in which they resided, and to pour oil on the curtains, books, and mattresses,” Ferber writes. The Israeli newspaper estimated last June that “in practice, the percentage of buildings destroyed in Rafah, for example, is greater than those destroyed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” Haaretz. Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law, visited Gaza in October and said it looked “almost as if a nuclear bomb had been detonated.”
Was the systematic destruction of homes and infrastructure the result 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 indicate that the Israeli authorities are proceeding with the planned destruction of all types of documents proving the nature of the various neighborhoods and towns in the Gaza Strip. In addition, there are groups of volunteers who began (and continue to do so) at the head of powerful excavators to demolish the buildings within their reach, without the Israeli army showing any resistance. Rabbi Avraham Zarbiev famously made clear that bulldozers were no longer merely props: “Demolishing buildings is the way to fight.”
The story presented by Alona Ferber is terrifying. With the support of numerous documentation and analysis centers based in the United States or Great Britain, experts are monitoring the gradual destruction of Gaza, and the methodical, controlled and ferocious manner in which all school, health, supply and sanitation infrastructure has been destroyed.
Forensic Architecture (FA), a research agency based at Goldsmiths University in London, has produced a map of the Gaza war in a project titled “Mapping Genocide,” which states: “Rafah does not exist. East of Khan Yunis does not exist. East of Gaza does not exist.” Ferber wrote that soil destruction involves the use of heavy machinery that destroys everything below the surface, removing the earth in such a way that “it is no longer possible to distinguish where the road was and where the pavement was.”
BBC experts confirm that the displacement experienced by Gazans is “unprecedented and unparalleled since World War II.” The lack of safe places to move to and repeated displacement within a small, densely populated area is highly unusual, according to historians and academics specializing in conflict, forced migration and international law. Nine out of ten Gazans have fled their homes during two years of war, according to the United Nations, while the borders have remained virtually closed.
What is happening in the Gaza Strip, namely its physical disappearance, has been partly crushed by the brutality of the killing of more than 68,000 civilians, including more than 20,000 boys and girls, according to Palestinian figures that certainly do not adjust to reality, given the number of bodies that must remain under this rubble. However, as the weeks passed and the ceasefire held precariously, and as international journalists were gradually allowed in, the horror of the devastation and fear surrounding the future of the people of Gaza became apparent to the world. Will they have to leave the sector at some point? To where? “You could say you miss your town if it still existed. But it doesn’t exist anymore, you know?” Alona Ferber concludes.
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