AMY GOODMAN: Israel is continuing to commit genocide in Gaza long past the so-called ceasefire agreement. That’s according to a new report out this week from the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The report also accuses Israeli forces of committing crimes against humanity in the West Bank, including extermination, torture and rape.

The Israeli Mission in Geneva claimed the latest report was part of a “misinformation campaign to demonise the State of Israel” and to “destroy the Jewish state”.

• READ MORE: Ethnic cleansing fears rise as Israel squeezes space in Gaza: UN
• Promotion and protection of all human rights — UN report
• Other Gaza genocide reports

The United Nations-commissioned experts said Israel was “continuing to commit genocidal acts with the genocidal intent to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinians in Gaza”.

They found Israeli forces continued using heavy munitions, drones, quadcopters, artillery and sniper fire in densely populated areas during the ceasefire. They also found that the so-called Yellow Line, which was presented as a temporary ceasefire demarcation, is increasingly encroaching into Gaza and becoming a de facto border.

Well, the organisation Forensic Architecture, which has been mapping Israel’s military conduct in Gaza since October 2023, details exactly how Israel has used the Yellow Line to expand its territorial control of Gaza.

Here’s a clip from the project titled “A Cartography of Genocide”.

NARRATOR: When the ceasefire came into effect, most of the area Israel had depopulated remained under its control. This constituted 54 percent of Gaza, marked by the Yellow Line. The Yellow Line is meant to mark phase one of Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.

Instead, Israel is using the line to expand its control.

Along the Yellow Line, Israel has placed concrete yellow blocks, signaling areas Palestinians cannot approach. We have mapped the position of more than 100 yellow blocks. Most have been placed well beyond the agreed withdrawal line. Over time, Israel is moving these blocks further into the area where Palestinians are concentrated. With every expansion, the military destroys another neighborhood, preventing Palestinian return.

Israel also imposed an additional boundary, which it called the Orange Line. In some places, this line encroaches more than one kilometer beyond the Yellow Line.

At the same time, Israel has entrenched its military presence. Around every 1.8 kilometers along the Yellow Line, it has built a fortified military base. We have documented 34 active bases. Many bases, like this one in Bani Suheila, have been constructed on the ruins of Palestinian homes.

Israel has also demolished and compacted nearby buildings which remained standing. Building by building, Gaza’s landscape is being permanently reconfigured. This picture shows the neighborhood before it was erased.

AMY GOODMAN: On Tuesday, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, called on the ICC, the International Criminal Court, to investigate incitement to genocide by government officials and media figures in Israel.

FRANCESCA ALBANESE: What is happening is not incidental; it is intentional. This is why I provocatively called it mediacide, the systematic destruction of the media’s public function, the transformation of media itself into an instrument through which atrocities can be concealed, normalized or justified.

In a genocide, the systematic attack on the media is part and parcel of the crime.

AMY GOODMAN: More than 250 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed in Gaza since October 2023.

To talk about Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and more, we’re joined here in New York by Eyal Weizman, the Israeli-born British architect, the founder and director of Forensic Architecture. His book is just out. It’s called Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide. Eyal is professor of spatial and visual cultures at Goldsmiths College at the University of London. His previous books include Hollow Land, Israel’s Architecture of Occupation and The Least of All Possible Evils: A Short History of Humanitarian Violence.

Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide                      Video: Democracy Now!

Eyal Weizman is a member of the Technology Advisory Board of the International Criminal Court and the recipient of the 2024 Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize.

Eyal Weizman, welcome back to Democracy Now!

EYAL WEIZMAN: It’s such a pleasure being here, Amy.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s turn first to the title of your book. It’s called Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide. Can you explain what that means?

EYAL WEIZMAN: Yeah. So, in Forensic Architecture, we often look at cities that undergo an aerial bombardment campaign. And even after those bombings, you can see where buildings have stood. You can see a pile of ruin.

“Ungrounding” is a kind of destruction that we have not seen anywhere else. It is actually produced by bulldozers, and nothing has remained of the traces of destruction. In fact, the bulldozer stabs their front loader into the ground and flips the terrain, erasing also the traces of destruction. So, ungrounding is a kind of destruction that traces — that erases the traces of destruction. It’s producing a kind of desertification, if you like, a kind of homogeneous piles of ruin that are unidentified by the people that inhabited that place before.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to turn to a part of that short video that your group, Forensic Architecture, made about the living conditions in Gaza since the start of the so-called ceasefire.

NARRATOR: Inside the concentration area, the majority of Palestinians still live in sprawling tent camps. The population density and Israel’s ongoing siege are severely limiting access to resources.

This orchard in Khan Younis was one of the few still accessible to Palestinians. Since the ceasefire, it has been cleared to make room for tents.

Degraded living conditions are becoming the permanent reality of life in Gaza. Tent camps are surrounded by destruction, and many Palestinians have resorted to sheltering inside and around damaged buildings. On the 16th of September, one of these buildings collapsed, killing at least 20 Palestinians.

Three years into the genocide, the ceasefire is normaliSing ongoing Israeli occupation and expansion, while Palestinian life is slowly being extinguished.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s an excerpt of a clip from Forensic Architecture. And Eyal Weizman, I’m wondering if you can explain what this group does. Because when talking about issues like genocide, why would we be talking about architecture? Talk about the importance of place and erasure and changing the actual geography of where people live.

EYAL WEIZMAN: So, one of the prohibitions of the Genocide Convention speaks about the destructions of a people’s conditions of life. A people’s life, human life, depends on the environment that sustain it. It depends on buildings, on home, depends on infrastructure. It depends on hospitals. It depends on agriculture and open areas. In the Genocide Convention, or in Raphael Lemkin, who actually framed the concept of genocide and understood that you can kill a people indirectly by destroying whatever it is that is necessary to sustain life.

The result of that, unlike the fast or hot components of genocide, where people are executed, murdered, thrown into mass graves, etc., is a genocide by attrition, is a much longer and much more extended process of genocide.

And in fact, genocide by the destruction of conditions of life is typical of settler-colonial genocide. Think about the genocides undertaken in the Americas. It has taken decades or centuries to destroy entire cultures by displacing people, by destroying the environment that they depend on for culture, for sustenance.

And that is what we’re seeing happening in Gaza. It is one of the speeds of the genocides that is happening in Gaza. And I think that since the ceasefire, the so-called ceasefire, began in October 2025, the destruction of the Palestinian people by the destruction and degrading of their environment is the most pronounced means of destroying Palestinian life in the southwestern coast of Palestine, that is also known as the Gaza Strip.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Eyal Weizman, you talk not only about the United States’s weapons to Israel that are used, but also the companies that participate in this ungrounding — for instance, the giant Caterpillar tractors that move much of the rubble and destroy buildings. But you also note in your book, and I quote you, “The Caterpillars have been here for a long time. In August 1950, the area that came to be known as the Gaza Strip was cut off from the rest of Palestine by a ditch carved into the soil by a single-blade plough pulled by a tractor.

An archival photograph depicting the scene shows the tractor to be a Second World War-era Caterpillar model.” And could you talk about that and these American companies that also assist the Israelis in this ungrounding?

EYAL WEIZMAN: Yeah, I was very surprised during my research to find that the Gaza Strip was created, in fact, with a plow, with a plow line, just like, you know, Rome, the legend of Rome, carved — whose border was carved by a plow.

The Caterpillars are an earth-transforming instrument and incredibly useful in Israeli settler-colonial destruction, which is about transforming the environment. There’s a lot of speak now about Israeli use of AI in targeted bombing and mass surveillance, etc.

At the end, what we’re seeing on the ground is much simpler. It’s a kind of the result of — that could have been in any historical settler-colonial genocide: total erasure, ungrounding, the transformation of the environment undertaken by those big monsters of technical equipment, manufactured by Caterpillar here, which produce, in fact, the architecture of genocide.

Right now since the so-called ceasefire began, it has become possible, or more possible, for private companies that use American and European-made bulldozers and excavators to actually enter into the Gaza Strip.

Previously, during — before the ceasefire, it was — they had to be insured with a lot of money. Now the ground transformation, what we call terraforming, of Gaza has been accelerated.

And there is — just Gaza has turned into an enormous construction site by Israeli-operated, US-made excavators of that, such that are transforming the landscape, that are building roads and military bases, that none of that manifestation of the environmental transformation of Gaza points to the fact that Israel is intending to follow the next clauses or obligation that it has under the ceasefire agreement — i.e., withdrawal from Gaza.

They are setting a permanent architecture of control made out of all the rubble and ruins of Palestinian homes. The rubble and ruin of Palestinian homes are piled into that landscape, that there is a giant earth berm, six meter high, now being stretched all along the — what is called the Orange Line, which is one kilometer further into Gaza than the Yellow Line. It is leaving only some 30-something percent of the Gaza Strip for the survivors of the genocide in Gaza, all along a 40-kilometer-long earth berm, six meters high, made of thousands and thousands of Palestinian homes.

Now, many of those homes were actually bombed during and before the so-called ceasefire. There are bodies. In fact, we are mapping the location of bodies of Palestinians that could not be extracted under the rubble of their own home. We know there are about 10,000 Palestinians missing. Many of them are under the rubble.

And when Israel is shuffling that rubble into all sort of shapes and berms and military bases and roads, they are actually moving human remains. So, in addition to Francesca Albanese’s report on the killing of Palestinian, murder of Palestinian journalists, we know that the shuffling of that rubble is destroying evidence for the genocide. Israel is actively acting against court order, against the order of the ICJ, destroying the evidence of the genocide that it has perpetrated.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Eyal Weizman, in your book, you talk not only about the destruction of the soil, but you talk also about the subsoil and the hundreds of miles of underground tunnels that remain the only, as you say, unoccupied part of Palestine. Could you talk about that and how the Israelis have attempted to deal with that?

EYAL WEIZMAN: So, the book really is a 100-year history of the southwestern coast of Palestine. It’s divided into a chapter dealing with soil, with the agriculture of the Indigenous population, and then the agricultural settler colonialism built in its stead by Zionist colonies around Gaza.

And it describes the emergence of the tunnel project, indeed made by Indigenous Palestinians, many of which are farmers who knew how to dig wells in that threshold, in a part of Palestine that is close to the desert, where digging for water is so important and so complicated. Some of the traditional wells of the Palestinians, 200,000 Palestinians that were displaced into the Gaza Strip during 1948, had incredible Indigenous knowledge about how to dig tunnels.

They were made landless in the Gaza Strip, thrown onto the sand dunes along the coast, but knew how to build a project, a subterranean project, that was made initially to bypass the siege that was imposed on Gaza.

Gaza has always had a very robust trade with Egypt. I mean, in fact, the oldest trade route in the world, that the Romans called the Via Maris, runs from Alexandria through Gaza to the rest of Palestine and then the Levant. That trade route was cut by the formation of the Gaza Strip, and then the border between Palestine and Egypt.

And the trade was running through the subsoil.

So, the tunnel project began as a means to alleviate the conditions of life that Israel imposed on Gaza. Only later, it became a military, a resistance project — in fact, I would say, one of the greatest pieces of architecture of liberation, if you like. \

Palestinians may have lost control of the land, but controlled entirely the subsoil. So, while about 85 percent of all buildings that were standing in Gaza prior to October 7, 2023, are destroyed, only the opposite number of tunnels have been destroyed. The majority of the tunnel project is still intact. It could withstand Israeli bombardment.

But tunnels are also Israel’s excuse for ungrounding. So, be they as effective as they are, they are located in specific places, but Israel destroys continuously the totality of the surface and the subsoil in places that it occupies, and based that destruction on the existence of tunnels. Israel likes to call the tunnel project “the metro,” as if every point is connected to everything else, creating an image of totality in the subsoil.

But indeed, if it would have been a metro, that would have been the dumbest thing to do, because, you know, you expose one connection, and you can travel all along and expose the entire tunnel project. It’s nothing like that, but Israel liked to create that impression in order to justify its total destruction of every area, every neighborhood, of every building, every home, every school, every university, every public building, orchard, field, in areas that it occupies.

AMY GOODMAN: Last year, during a joint news conference at the White House with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Donald Trump, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins questioned Trump about his plan for Gaza.

KAITLAN COLLINS: Just to follow up on what you were saying about the Gazans leaving Gaza, going to other countries, one, where exactly are you suggesting that they should go? And, two, are you saying they should return after it’s rebuilt? And if not, who do you envision living there?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I envision world people living there, the world’s people. I think you’ll make that into an international, unbelievable place. I think the potential in the Gaza Strip is unbelievable. And I think the entire world, representatives from all over the world, will be there, and they’ll —

KAITLAN COLLINS: But not the Palestinians?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: — and they’ll live there. Palestinians also. Palestinians will live there. Many people will live there. But they’ve tried the other, and they’ve tried it for decades and decades and decades. It’s not going to work. It didn’t work. It will never work.

And you have to learn from history. History has — you know, you just can’t let it keep repeating itself. We have an opportunity to do something that could be phenomenal. And I don’t want to be cute. I don’t want to be a wise guy. But the riviera of the Middle East, this could be something that could be so — this could be so magnificent.

AMY GOODMAN: That riviera “could be so magnificent.” And back in 2024, Trump’s son-in-law, former adviser Jared Kushner weighed in on Israel’s war on Gaza, saying Israel should move Palestinians out of the besieged territory, which he said contains “very valuable waterfront property”. He made the remarks during an event hosted by the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School.

JARED KUSHNER: And Gaza’s waterfront property, it could be very valuable to — if people would focus on kind of building up, you know, livelihoods.

You think about all the money that’s gone into this tunnel network and into all the munitions, if that would have gone into education or innovation, what could have been done. And so, I think that it’s a little bit of an unfortunate situation there, but I think, from Israel’s perspective, I would do my best to move the people out and then clean it up.

But I don’t think that Israel has stated that they don’t want the people to move back there afterwards.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you respond, Eyal Weizman, author of Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide?

EYAL WEIZMAN: This is clearly — that architectural plan, development plan, is the continuation of genocide by other means. As we heard, the plan is to remove everybody from the construction site by all sort of excuses — the area is too dangerous, they need a place for the reconstruction, need to fence up the building site, etc.

When Palestinians were pushed out of Palestine, they were never historically allowed to return. And there is no reason to believe that if that ludicrous plan is ever coming into fruition — and I don’t see any indication that it does; all I see is further misery and the kind of strangulation of the population inside this concentration area in Gaza.

But if it does, this is — Palestinians will not be allowed to return.

In the crime of genocide, it could be actually undertaken by destruction, as we have seen, and genocide could be undertaken by reconstruction as a means of destroying a particular national life in that part. And the only people that are not asked what to reconstruct, how they want to live in that area of the Gaza Strip, are Palestinian architects.

But what I see is Palestinian families wanting to return and establish the location of where the house once stood, now mostly dunes of earth and rubble, and rebuild there, next to their community, alongside their neighbors, etc., making the reconstruction actually part of a community rebuilding of the survivors.

And I want to remind us that the return of Palestinians to their homes inside the Gaza Strip and building it on their own terms is absolutely essential, but it’s not the full picture. Palestinians are refugees. Their homes are in areas that is now Israel, and their right of return is actually recognised by the UN.

So, whatever reconstruction would occur temporarily in Gaza is not the full undoing of the crime against the Palestinian people.

AMY GOODMAN: Eyal Weizman, we’re going to break, then come back to this discussion, founder and director of Forensic Architecture, latest book, Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide. Stay with us.

[BREAK]

AMY GOODMAN: “Really Real,” Allison Russell and Ganessa James of Rainbow Coalition, performing in our Democracy Now! studio. This is Democracy Now!, “The War and Peace Report”. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González, as we continue our conversation with Eyal Weizman, founder and director of Forensic Architecture, out with a new book, Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide.

Now, Congressmember Rashida Tlaib recently called on the Department of Justice to arrest the Israeli military commander Sean Glass, accused of killing 5-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab.

In 2024, she and six of her relatives were killed as they hid inside the family’s car while attempting to evacuate Gaza City. Two paramedics from the Palestine Red Crescent who attempted to rescue them after Hind called them for help were also killed.

Eyal, your organization, Forensic Architecture, investigated the killings. The findings were featured in the Al Jazeera Fault Lines documentary The Night Won’t End: Biden’s War on Gaza. This clip features Nicholas Masterton of Forensic Architecture, beginning with Fault Lines correspondent Sharif Abdel Kouddous.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: Based off that range from the sound analysis, combined with satellite imagery and photos of the area around the current gas station, they were also able to examine where the shooting could have come from.

LAYAN HAMADEH: [translated] They’re shooting at us. The tank is next to me.

NICHOLAS MASTERTON: We marked all of the bullet holes that we could see from those images. There are holes which appear to be exit holes, so larger openings that are flared, that we witness more on one side of the car than the other.

So this gives us a kind of general direction as to the direction of fire. So, there’s one very distinct line of bullets that we can see at the back, the rear right-hand side of the car, which is a volley of about 30 or so bullets.

You’ll remember at the end of Fabio’s analysis, we saw this ring. And what we were able to do is to superimpose this ring onto the site of the killing. So, we situate the 3D model of the car inside of the site, and we position it in its resting position outside the gas station.

And we’re also able to model the Merkava tank, and we’re able to direct the weapons on the tank towards the car. And this is important, because it allows us to draw a line between the guns on the tank and the entry holes that we see on the Kia.

So, based on positioning the tank in hundreds of places within that ring of 13 to 23 meters, we find that there’s a position immediately to the south of the Kia, which appears to be the most likely position of the shooter, for this recording.

SHARIF ABDEL KOUDDOUS: So, from what you’ve assessed of the Israeli tank position at that distance, is it likely the Israeli soldiers would have been able to see who was in the car?

NICHOLAS MASTERTON: We think that it’s very likely that they would have been able to see who was in the car, because we know that these tanks are fitted with optical equipment, which allows them to see for many kilometers. So, yeah, it seems very likely that whatever was going on in the car 13 meters away would have been easily visible.

AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s a clip of what Forensic Architecture has done in explaining, in investigating what happened to Hind Rajab and her family. And again, Rashida Tlaib, the US congress member, is calling on the military commander in charge of the company responsible for the family’s and the paramedics’ deaths — calling for the arrest of Sean Glass, who commanded the “Vampire Empire” Company. He is a former Navy SEAL who joined the IDF.

Now, Eyal Weizman, I wanted to ask you — put this in a larger context. And that larger context is the — Forensic Architecture is working with the ICC to produce evidence for the genocide case against Israel. Can you talk about the techniques you’re using, the evidence that’s required to prove genocide, while that evidence is being actively erased?

EYAL WEIZMAN: Genocide is a compounded crime of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of acts of violence, of murder, such as the story of Hind Rajab and the Hamadeh family, and the relation between them.

Oftentimes Forensic Architecture spends months, sometimes a year, on a very careful analysis of a single incident. Here, I think that my team has watched tens of thousands of videos recorded by Palestinians, and reconstructed what is taking place. The help that Forensic Architecture is providing the South Africa legal team in the ICJ, the International Court of Justice in The Hague, is in building the bigger picture out of those multiplicity of crimes.

So, take the Hind Rajab murder, for example. It is part of an attempt to empty, to depopulate, to ethnically cleanse Gaza City. The Hamadeh family — that is, the family where the uncles of Hind Rajab that actually drive the car — are ordered to leave Gaza City towards the south.

At the same time that they are ordered to leave, all the hospitals are being attacked. The Al-Shifa Medical Complex, the largest in Palestine, is being destroyed. They are ordered to go south, to cross Wadi Gaza towards the south, the desert part of the Gaza Strip, while all the evacuation routes are being — Palestinians evacuating along them — are being sniped at, shot by tanks, etc.

So, you need to — with each one of those incidents, you need to see the larger context of what is happening at the same time. When you litigate a genocide — the Israeli side is trying to disaggregate the genocide into simply a multiplicity of actions that they claim may have been an attack that was aimed at Hamas fighters or another military maneuver at a particular point.

And our attempt is to say what does it all add up to, how the bombing of the hospital relates to starvation that is created by the destruction of agriculture and the attack on aid coming in, the sniping and targeting by drones of Palestinians evacuating, how those different acts do not need to be considered each in itself, but have a compounded harm that is larger than the sum of its parts — i.e., if you are destroying agriculture, you deny a people’s ability to feed themselves.

If at the same time you also hit an aid convoy, the effect of one amplifies the effect of another, and you generate famine.

The famine is a means by which people are driven south towards those places that Israel provided a meager amount of food to starving Palestinians, drawing them towards the Egyptian border, where they’re entering into those death traps and sniped at. The entire genocide is an attempt to concentrate Palestinians next to the Egyptian border, where the majority are now located, and then with the next opportunity, when the border collapses or where people would receive permits to leave, or where people will be successfully, by Israel’s standards, be pushed out to empty Palestine out of Gaza — Palestinians.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Eyal Weizman, I’m wondering if you could put Israel’s massive destruction of Gaza into an even wider historical context. How does it compare, for example, to the Allied bombing of German cities in the Second World War or the US firebombing of Tokyo or its carpet bombing of Vietnam and widespread use of Agent Orange and napalm against the Vietnamese?

EYAL WEIZMAN: So, it includes all of those features. You had the use of defoliants being practised on Gaza since the 2010s, by which Israel has been using defoliants along the Gaza border in order to expose the areas for snipers.

The mass bombing of cities has been in Gaza in the first weeks. Even in the first weeks, 25,000 tons of bombs has been dropped on Gaza, more than the entire aerial campaign on German cities. The result of the destruction is more total. I mean, you see entire neighborhoods completely destroyed and the rubble reshuffled.

And so that we’re seeing the most intense use of arms, of explosives, of military equipment within a very, very small part. Remember, Germany is several thousand times the size of the Gaza Strip. And still, within that small area, you have a higher use of explosives.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And what is the most important thing you would like people to learn from this book?

EYAL WEIZMAN: I’d like people to think about the use of the environment, both built and natural, as part of settler-colonial genocide. Historical settler-colonial genocide in the Americas, in southwest Africa, in Namibia, in many other places are about the transformation of the environment.

The environment in the southwestern coast of Palestine is a very unique one. It’s the threshold of the desert. It’s the meeting point of agrarian areas and very dry areas. And that unique environmental conditions has been weaponised during the genocide.

If you look at the direction of displacement of Palestinians, it’s always from the rain-rich north of Gaza and east of Gaza, where the alluvial soil is, towards the sand dunes on the more desert part of the strip. The kind of destruction and erasure of the environment has been one of the means to generate famine.

So, you know, when we think about the Gaza Strip, in many people’s imagination, it is this overbuilt sea of concrete, etc. But the area is a very unique environmental — environment. And that particular environmental conditions have been weaponised to produce the genocide. The amount of toxin that has been released into the soil in Gaza is going to make that soil, that very fertile, rich agricultural soil, uncultivatable for generations.

AMY GOODMAN: Eyal Weizman, I want to thank you so much for being with us, founder and director of Forensic Architecture, author of the new book Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide.

The original content of this programme is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Republished under CC.