The Caterpillars person been present for a agelong time. In August 1950 the country that came to beryllium known arsenic the Gaza Strip was chopped disconnected from the remainder of Palestine by a ditch carved into the ungraded by a single-blade plough pulled by a tractor. An archival photograph depicting the country shows the tractor to beryllium a Second World War-era Caterpillar, exemplary D6. It was portion of a convoy of subject vehicles. Behind it drove Israeli and Egyptian troops and United Nations truce observers.
An Israeli worker named Amnon Degieli described the scene. “A jeep with the 2 assemblage commanders, the Israeli and the Egyptian, led a convoy of vehicles. The officers held a representation astatine a standard of 1:100,000 connected which the borderline was sketched with a heavy pencil line. On the crushed the width of the pencil enactment was 1 100 metres.” Entire homesteads and farms fell wrong it. Mordechai Galili, different worker who, similar Degieli, was a settler from a adjacent kibbutz named Nirim, described the process for the settlement’s bulletin. He said Israeli and Egyptian troops “argued implicit each millimetre…the bargaining was similar successful a food market. There were arguments implicit each tree.” In the scorching August heat, the “American major”—presumably 1 of the Colombian UN officers posted to the frontier—”took disconnected his garment to sunbathe.” The photograph shows respective of the troops lounging successful what looks similar an abandoned field, portion the labour of partitioning Palestine was performed. The “American” had the past word. “A awesome was given, and the tractor ploughs a consecutive enactment close done orchards, vineyards and wadis.” The ploughing continued conception aft segment. In 1 location, Galili writes, “the tractor climbs implicit a cactus obstruction and parts it with pleasure.”
Elsewhere alarmed Palestinian farmers—witnessing the increasing trench tearing them distant from their lands—surround the vehicles. The Israelis taunt them: “Take a photograph of this spot due to the fact that you volition not spot it again.” A Palestinian antheral shouts that they volition soon person their onshore backmost and tells the settlers to instrumentality wherever they came from. A hopeless husbandman pleads with the Egyptian officers to determination the enactment beyond his field. The Egyptians impatiently brushwood him away. Along different segment, “an orchard of plum and apricot trees ended up connected our side. The owners are connected the different broadside of the line. In beforehand of their eyes we capable our stomachs and pockets, and propulsion the effect chromatic astatine them, ‘Eat some!'” The ploughing progressed from northbound to south. The scenery was affluent with fields and orchards.
At yet different location, Palestinian farmers realized that the plough was astir to chopped betwixt 2 contiguous villages. “The radical successful the villages of Abasan and Khiza‘a came retired successful force, screaming, shouting, and yelling.” Women and children gathered astir the convoy. The demarcation process was stopped, and the Egyptian service led the convoy away. On this occasion, the Palestinian farmers succeeded successful shifting the line.
This uncommon infinitesimal of occurrence was recorded years aboriginal by Salman Abu Sitta, who connected 14 May 1948—the time the authorities of Israel was declared, erstwhile helium was 10 years old—had been expelled with his household from their cultivation colony of Ma‘in Abu Sitta (al-Ma‘in) located connected a sandstone hill, immoderate 3 kilometers connected the Israeli-controlled broadside of the plough enactment and overlooking the towns of Khan Younis, the coast-line, and beyond the skyline the Egyptian Sinai Desert. Abu Sitta has go 1 of the astir prolific chroniclers of the ongoing Palestinian Nakba and 1 of the astir forceful advocates for Palestinian return. In February 2025 Salman came to the offices of Forensic Architecture, the London-based probe bureau I run. Together we worked connected a cautious integer reconstruction of al-Ma‘in—a colony whose architecture, agriculture and past are cardinal to this project.
Ploughing was an enactment of treble erasure, some of what existed and of the traces that immoderate erasure had astatine each taken place.
The plough enactment was not an internationally recognized borderline but it gave emergence to 2 caller and complementary territorial units: the Gaza Strip and the Gaza Envelope. The erstwhile was a attraction country for 200,000 refugees expelled from 247 localities, villages and towns and the area’s archetypal 80,000 inhabitants; and the second a frontier portion designed to incarcerate them. The quality betwixt the 2 sides of the plough enactment was stark, writes Galili. “The Egyptian broadside is acheronian with Arabs and their herds portion the Israeli broadside is empty.” The administrative portion of the “Envelope” was officially declared lone successful the aboriginal 2000s, arsenic a means of providing the country with Israeli authorities subsidies, but the word is an apt statement of this frontier portion of civilian and subject installations that started to beryllium assembled astatine the aforesaid clip arsenic the Gaza Strip was formed and designed to enclose it and enactment it nether imperishable siege.
Nirim, the kibbutz colony from which the Israeli soldiers who ploughed the borderline enactment arrived, was built connected the ruins of al-Ma‘in. They fortified down an enclosure of fences and trenches shaped similar a pentagon—a five-centuries-old typology of subject fortifications. The settlers dismantled the ruins, and implicit the years erased astir of the remaining traces of al-Ma‘in—save for 1 factual gathering and a heavy good which they used. The means of erasure was cultivation. The settlers ploughed implicit each aboveground elements—buildings, the chromatic walls betwixt the plots of wheat and barley, the rootlike gardens, the pedestrian routes, the conveyance roads, the cultivation retention facilities, the 2 buildings that provided the archetypal determination schoolhouse successful the area, and respective burial grounds.
Ploughing was an enactment of treble erasure, some of what existed and of the traces that immoderate erasure had astatine each taken place. Soon the fields covered the remnants of al-Ma‘in with a dense plume of caller vegetation. This erasure was meant to alteration the onshore beyond designation and permission the Palestinian villagers pushed into the coastal country with thing to instrumentality to. The task of Nirim, similar different settlements and subject bases entrenched astir the recently formed Gaza Strip, was to defender the frontier against Palestinian refugees, similar members of the Abu Sitta family, who were trying to instrumentality to their lands to salvage possessions, harvest crops oregon combat the occupiers. The settlers were ordered to shoot-to-kill astatine anyone—armed oregon unarmed, antheral oregon woman—who crossed the plough line. Nirim, on with the kibbutz settlements of Nir Oz, Magen and Ein HaShlosha, besides built connected Abu Sitta’s land, would beryllium amongst the hardest deed connected October 7, 2023.
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“The Occupation [Army] has changed the Strip’s topography beyond recognition,” wrote Palestinian writer Omar Moussa astatine the extremity of November 2023. By that clip thousands of ground-penetrating bombs had ripped done the subsoil with the seismic unit of tiny earthquakes. They created craters heavy capable to swallow full buildings. Giant armored bulldozers—now Caterpillar exemplary D9—stabbed their beforehand blades into the crushed and drove forward, flipping fields and shaving disconnected orchards. A Palestinian husbandman sent Forensic Architecture a dependable memo describing the household farm, which had a rootlike plot and 1 of the past olive, pomegranate and citrus orchards successful the area: “It is present the aforesaid arsenic it was before, desert. I wouldn’t beryllium capable to admit it.”
After the farms came the outer neighborhoods of villages, cities and exile camps. Videos posted by soldiers showed bulldozers felling enactment aft enactment of homes, tearing done the asphalt of roads and letting earthy sewage bleed retired of the breached pipes onto the exposed soil. The bulldozers proceeded to crook Gaza’s Coca-Cola mill into a scenery of glittering glass. They stopped astatine nothing, scraping done archaeological sites and cemeteries. “Our occupation is to flatten Gaza,” 1 of the units operating the bulldozers posted connected societal media. “Palestinians volition person obscurity to instrumentality to,” said different Israeli officer, “all they volition find is scorched earth. No houses, nary agriculture, nary nothing.” Further westbound towards the seashore different worker marveled astatine the vista they opened, “a momentary view, axenic and profound, of cleanable nature.” “If we past this war,” Omar Moussa quoted a person asking, “what would beryllium our gathering point?”
Ungrounding is dissimilar different kinds of demolition successful which the aboveground markings of inhabited areas—plot lines, roads, fields, gardens, walking paths—remain identifiable. In each different wartime demolition that I person studied, adjacent erstwhile buildings collapse, 1 tin inactive archer wherever they erstwhile stood, and recognize thing of the societal world that the municipality aboveground held together. After a struggle ends, buildings and neighborhoods tin beryllium extruded from their footprints. Ungrounding, connected the different hand, aims to region a nine from its spot and erase each traces to its erstwhile existence. It extends from buildings down to the ungraded beneath them. It is simply a benignant of unit that is earth-shaping, terra-forming. Ungrounding is not a by-product of subject confrontation but alternatively its aim. It destroys each conditions that prolong beingness and produces an bare slate, a tabula rasa. The monochrome godforsaken of upturned ungraded is the worldly signature of Israel’s genocide.
Ungrounding is not a by-product of subject confrontation but alternatively its aim. It destroys each conditions that prolong beingness and produces an bare slate, a tabula rasa.
Soil is simply a creation of aggregate elements. Grains of soil person each a antithetic origin—seashells, coral, rocks and minerals—likewise the ungrounded ungraded of Gaza aft October 2023 became a substance of fragments of each elements that had antecedently composed municipality life—crushed concrete, plaster, plastic, glass, dormant plants, sand. Since October 2023, Gaza was not lone turned into a demolition portion but besides into a operation site. The bulldozers carved a caller militarized maestro program done the pulverized rubble, similar a digit sketch connected a dusty windscreen. In this design, rubble mounds became the basal architectural unit, the walls with which each benignant of operation was made. Bulldozers shuffled close done the rubble to marque roads that chopped Gaza into abstracted sections.
Along these routes, the bulldozers piled up mounds to enclose fortified compounds, subject outposts and detention facilities wherever Palestinians were interrogated and tortured. The comparatively level topography of the Gaza Strip was gradually transformed into a stormy scenery of artificial dunes that drifted on with the question of the army. The service turned the aboveground of the world into a gelatinous and fluid medium. Earthwaves rose, receded and settled erstwhile the army’s priorities changed. The world tempest swallowed radical inside. There are estimated to beryllium 11,000 Palestinians missing, galore of them successful heavy craters oregon nether gangly mounds of rubble, drowned successful world without a due burial. Even the markers placed implicit these sedate sites person been swept distant successful the world storm. Often, astatine Forensic Architecture, we question to place the determination of videos by disposable municipality markers, but arsenic the genocide proceeded, disposable markers disappeared and the mounting of the videos was thing but the indistinct and shifting scenery of rubble dunes, making galore hard to locate.
Much of the ungrounding occurs successful areas that the service refers to arsenic a “buffer zone” each on Gaza’s fences. Throughout the past 2 years the buffer portion expanded until it covered astir each of the territory of the Strip. This ungrounded country is forbidden for Palestinians to instrumentality to. The service regarded it arsenic shetah hashmada—an “annihilation zone” wherever each Palestinian contiguous could beryllium changeable connected sight. In the buffer portion nary works oregon operation remained. This aims to region immoderate hiding spot and exposure Palestinians to occurrence from subject snipers oregon from equipped quadcopter drones that patrol the dune landscape. The ever-growing tide of demolition pushed Palestinians into dense and crowded pockets of onshore connected the coastal soil dunes. The service called these areas “humanitarian zones,” though they are thing but humanitarian, and are amended described arsenic “concentration areas” oregon attraction camps. Tents were erected connected the dunes and connected the seashore.
When displaced Palestinians ran retired of sand, tents were erected among the ruins, connected piers extending into the sea, connected roads and adjacent garbage dumps. Scattered connected the dunes, the surviving colonisation of Gaza was reduced to bare existence, taxable to unrelenting hunger and thirst nether the ever-present hum of slayer drones and bomber jets. Israel wanted Palestinians trapped successful these islands either to permission oregon die, and the exit points were closed. The October 2025 ceasefire did not bring an extremity to Israeli attacks but it froze the concern connected the ground, leaving Israel successful power of an ungrounded buffer portion extending implicit 58 per cent of the Strip with Palestinians crowded wrong the breached cities and structure camps on the coast.
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From Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide by Eyal Weizman, published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a part of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Eyal Weizman. Featured representation courtesy Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) successful declaration with APAimages (via)
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