All they will find is sand

JVL Introduction

“Two and a half years after 7 October 2023,” Eyal Weizman remind us,  “most of the Gaza Strip – cities, refugee camps, schools, universities, mosques, the health infrastructure, agriculture, wells and the soil itself – has been destroyed and made toxic by bombs, artillery, tank shells and sappers.”

In other words, everything Raphael Lemkin identified as essential to biological existence and the social and cultural continuity of a community, has been destroyed in Gaza.

Destruction has gone hand in hand with reconstruction, changing the topography of the Strip forever. It’s fertile breadbasket, a narrow strip of land perhaps 3-4 kilometres wide on its eastern border, in now under Israeli occupation.

New permanent-looking structures – 48 of them – are being erected there suggesting plans for permanent settlement.

And a new barrier zone will then be needed to ensure their safety…

We seem to be witnessing what Lemkin in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe identified as the second phase of genocide: the removal of much of the population and colonisation by the oppressor’s own nationals; together with a new architecture of control under which those allowed to remain by grace and favour of the oppressor will be forced to live.

RK

PS: Some of what Weizman describes here is encapsulated in a developing Forensic Architerture presentation The Ceasefire in Gaza, a series of slides with commentary about the changing nature of Israel’s occupation of the Strip.

This article was originally published by London Review of Books, Vol. 48 No. 7 on Thu 23 Apr 2026. Read the original here.