Gaza’s destruction compares only to the most severely impacted cities in Ukraine,” Corey Scher, from Oregon’s “Conflict Ecology Lab, . “Because impacts from conflicts such as the Syrian Civil War still have not been comprehensively assessed, we have to go back to the Second World War. The extent of damage is greater than… in any single German city during that conflict and, on a percentage basis, there is more damage across Gaza than there was as a result of the US firebombing of Dresden.”
Forensic Architecture (FA), the research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, has mapped the Gaza war in a project called “A cartography of genocide”, incorporating a variety of sources, including video, photographs, written testimony, and satellite and remote-sensing imagery. (South Africa commissioned a report based on the mapping for its submission in the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.)
“Rafah doesn’t exist. East Khan Younis doesn’t exist. East Gaza [City] doesn’t exist,” says Eyal Weizman, FA’s director, when I ask what its research suggests is left of the Strip’s cities. “Then you go beyond the ‘yellow line’, where the [IDF’s] extended buffer zone [is], and you have a patchwork of buildings and rubble.” After the ceasefire came into force on 10th October, Palestinians returning to homes across Gaza were met with a similar sight: buildings burned out, damaged or levelled to the ground.
Throughout the war, the Israeli government has argued that the IDF only targets civilian infrastructure being used by Hamas, or because it has a military justification for doing so. But Israeli leaders were threatening widespread destruction and displacement of the local population from the start.
On the evening of 7th October 2023, in his first address to the nation after Hamas’s massacre in southern Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu vowed not only to “forcefully avenge this dark day”, but to raze the Strip. “All of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in, that wicked city,” he said of Gaza, “we will turn them into rubble. I say to the residents of Gaza, ‘Leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere.’” On 12th October, Israel’s Air Force posted on X that it had “dropped about 6,000 bombs against Hamas targets”, along with photos of razed buildings.
Similar statements were made by Israeli politicians, public figures and the wider public. “Flatten everything, just like Auschwitz is today,” the head of a council in northern Israel said in a radio interview in December 2023. According to FakeReporter, an Israeli monitoring group, on X from 7th October to mid-November 2023 there were around 18,000 mentions in Hebrew of appeals to flatten, erase or destroy Gaza (and from then to mid-October this year there were a further 68,000 mentions). There have been some calls, too, to lay waste to Gaza’s cities. One of Jerusalem’s deputy mayors, Aryeh King, did so repeatedly. “It’s been 18 days since the pogrom… that the Nazis carried out in the Gaza envelope,” he posted on Facebook on 24th October. “Benjamin Netanyahu Gaza, Khan Younis, Rafah and Beit Lahiya are still standing. Shame on you!”
Prospect
11/25
