Erased city

If it was not Palestine, it would have been different. But it is Palestine. Silence.

Everyone is watching. From their tiny mobile screens, in their doomscrolling, they watch what Palestinians are showing us, risking their lives to make the world see, in case the world cares. They show a life under siege and occupation that manifests itself through everyday layers of suffering, trauma, and pain—all accumulating for decades. Everyone is watching, from their TV screens, from the comfort of their homes, the mass destruction of Palestinians’ homes. Many remain silent. Because it’s Palestine. They turn off the TV, whilst the people of Palestine remain in collective shelters, in the cold, hungry, thirsty, dying slowly.

No one could say they haven’t seen the drone footage of mass destruction of architecture, with broken minarets and domes, with homes razed to the ground. No one could say they haven’t seen the videos of displaced Palestinians fleeing their homes walking the same walks their parents and grandparents had done in the Nakba—many people in Gaza have been displaced before. No one could say they haven’t heard the voice of a trapped child in a car calling for rescue, but even when the Palestine Red Crescent ambulance went to rescue her, they were targeted by Israel. No one could say they have not seen how schools and universities have been damaged and destroyed in processes that have been termed educide. But sssshhhhh, keep silent. Because it’s Palestine.

If it was another geography, then flags would be raised on campuses in universities, scholarships and funds would be established so quickly, campaigns would be made to open homes for the displaced, and well-established media platforms that have millions of readers would be provided for impacted communities to write, narrate, and publish their own story rather than talking on behalf of vulnerable and injured communities. Solidarity is selective. It’s all different today. Because it’s Palestine.

In Palestine, in Gaza, Al-Israa University was turned into a military base by the Israeli forces for several weeks. Then in January 2024, a video was released showing the moment it was blown up. In the wars of our time, destroyers not only have destroyed, but also released films of destruction to send symbolic messages to the oppressed and the world that there are no limits.

Whilst the destruction of Al-Israa University is a symbol of the destruction of the academy, it must be seen as part of a system of violence. In a report published by Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor (2024), it is noted that ‘Israel systematically destroyed every university in the Gaza Strip in stages over the course of the more than 100-day attack.’ As of 4 February 2024, the United Nations reported the damage of 14 campuses belonging to the 12 higher education institutions. They also added that 386 schools have sustained damage, ‘including 138 schools that sustained major damage or were fully destroyed’ (UNESCO 2024). A school is not only a building, but rather a place of knowledge production, the site where the future is built, where the next generation will learn. Destroying a school is also destroying the future. Over 4327 students, 231 teachers, and 94 professors have been killed by Israel (Desai 2024). Where is the global solidarity with Palestinian academics?

But it’s not only the university or the school that has been destroyed. Gaza is the target. Erasure of Gaza’s architecture includes both the destruction of everyday places and the targeting of historical cultural heritage sites. It is difficult to see the destruction of cities without understanding the message that it is a destruction of a people. Wissam Nassar, a photographer who studied journalism at the Islamic University in Gaza, noted that:

Israel destroyed everything beautiful in Gaza. Israel aimed to destroy not only people but also stones, infrastructure and historical buildings, wanting to eradicate human life and cultural heritage. (Ahmed 2024)

Since 7 October 2023, when Hamas attacked Israel and killed 1200 Israelis, Israel has damaged thousands of buildings (UNCTAD 2024). A major investigation by the Guardian has detailed the destruction in three neighbourhoods in Gaza, which ‘found damage to more than 250 residential buildings, 17 schools and universities, 16 mosques, three hospitals, three cemeteries and 150 agricultural greenhouses’ (de Hoog et al. 2024). An Israel Defence Forces (IDF) spokesperson told the Guardian in their investigation that:

Hamas operates nearby, underneath, and within densely populated areas as a matter of routine operational practice. As part of the IDF’s operations, it [has] been carrying out strikes on military targets, as well as locating and destroying infrastructure when imperatively required to achieve the goals of the war.

What does achieving the goals of war look like in Gaza? What does the full victory that Israel is calling for mean? Where does this victory end? What is its shape? How many Palestinians need to be killed to achieve this victory? How much destruction is needed to ‘win’?

We live in a time where one city after another is being destroyed. Architecture is not any longer seen as part of the ‘collateral damage’ or on the side of the changing dynamics of wars, but rather it is the target. For many scholars studying the built environment and violence, there is increasing research on the different forms of erasure that communities suffer from during times of occupation, wars, and dictatorships. From burning of books and libraries, to destruction of museums and theatres, from bombing bridges to razing homes to the ground, erasure has become a weaponised tool to collectively punish people. In these processes of punishment, cities become the battlefields; tanks cut through peoples’ streets and orchards to make space for invasions and destructions, shops are vandalised by soldiers who want to destroy something more than a tiny shop. It is a destruction of a people, their livelihoods, their economy, their sense of identity and belonging. The city is erased.

In my research on destruction of cities, I utilised the concept of domicide. This was the focus of my academic book Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria (Azzouz 2023). In the book I argue that civilians are not only forcibly displaced, but that their material culture is being erased to cause deep suffering, ethnically cleanse them, and erase them from their lands. Lyse Doucet, the BBC’s chief international correspondent, wrote the foreword of my book, where she noted in 2022:

Wars of our time, sometimes fought in our name, are not in the trenches; they’re fought street-to-street, house-to-house, one home after another. Why does a hospital, a kindergarten, always seem to be hit in every outbreak of hostilities? After nearly four decades of reporting on conflict, I now often say: civilians are not close to the front lines; they are the front line. (Azzouz 2023, xiii)

Destroyers often give labels to make their wars sound legitimate, sometimes it is the wars on terror or terrorists, and other times it is ‘defeating the enemy’. Thousands of civilians are killed in what is called ‘precise wars’. In the case of Gaza, Omer Tischler, the Israeli Air Force’s (IAF) Chief of Staff, said in a video statement that ‘since the October 7 massacre, the IAF has been conducting a precise, focused and process-based campaign’ (Israel Defence Forces 2024).

Imagine what Gaza would look like if IAF wasn’t precise?

Unpeopling cities

Civilians find themselves in the middle of the conflict, ordered to evacuate within their siege or asked to leave ‘for their own safety’ in the processes of ethnic cleansing. They fit their big lives in small bags and flee from one place to another searching for refuge. Cities of tents emerge within the siege, but even in these tents they are targeted. In Gaza, where should people go when nowhere is safe?

In my city of Homs, Syria, peaceful protests were targeted with bullets and explosions. Over half of the neighbourhoods have been heavily destroyed. Across the country, over 14 million Syrians have been displaced, both inside and outside the country. When the government launched their attacks on the people, it wasn’t targeting a specific building, but entire neighbourhoods that opposed the government or sympathised with the revolution. The intention was clear: to punish, torture, kill, and oppress. So they started razing cities, depopulating them, besieging neighbourhoods, destroying, damaging, causing harm, until the population was broken. Today over 6.5 million Syrians remain displaced outside Syria whilst more than 6.5 million are displaced internally.

When cities such as Aleppo, Mosul, or Mariupol are reported in the news, we see them as grey sites of rubble empty of their people, lacking their glamour, beauty, charm, and colours. What did these cities look like before they were razed to the ground? Deanna Petherbridge, who was born in 1939 in South Africa and died in London in 2024, had made a homage to my city in The Destruction of the City of Homs; a drawing that took her around half a year to finish when at the age of 79 (Figure 1). In 2019, she told me that she felt a moral obligation as an artist to try and understand the city, and to respond to its destruction; to think of what it was like to live in a modern city like Homs:

I was working on the drawing with such detail as an act of homage. I was imagining a workshop, I was imagining a house, I was imagining an office space, I was imagining a place of recreation where people could go, I was imagining a mosque, I was imagining something from the past, something from the future, and I felt it deserved the most incredible detail. (Azzouz 2020, 10)

And similar to Petherbridge who felt a moral obligation to understand the pain of others, and to respond in her own artistic efforts, we should do so too. Architects and urban planners who work in practice or research and design the future of cities should not look away from the destruction of cities around the world. We need you. Academics working on critical urban studies, who have the power, funds, prestige, platforms, and voice. We need you. We need you to look and bear witness to the violence and injury, and build bridges of solidarity that connect different struggles with each other. These connections should be treated with a tremendous sense of sensitivity and care by creating meaningful and deep conversations with impacted communities who should lead the way, supported by the solidarity of friends and allies.

Figure 1: The Destruction of the City of Homs, 2016, ink and wash on paper, framed dimensions 1277 mm × 2520 mm × 50 mm. Collection: Tate, Photographer: John Bodkin, © 2016 Deanna Petherbridge.

Yes, the world is watching Gaza, but it won’t watch for long. There is already fatigue from following what is happening in Ukraine after nearly two years since Russia invaded. Syria is completely forgotten even as it remains in ruins. Despite the widespread recognition of the ethics of remembering, we seem to have a compulsion to forget.

Everyone is watching, quickly moving through the images, the sea of videos. Fast. Palestinians are counting the days, every day they post, ‘I am still alive.’ Not everyone is. As people scroll past the images on their phones, or watch through our TV screens, Palestinian journalists and other citizen journalists urge us to see the horrors they live through every day. Some are speaking out and posting until their last breath when they are killed in their PRESS vests. These journalists tell the story that no one else is doing. Rarely are international journalists given access to the Gaza Strip. Stories remain untold, organisations are unable or refuse to bear witness, to make the injury visible and seen. How do we bear witness when the witnesses of Gaza are killed? Throughout history, the people of Palestine have taught us, through their struggle, their archive, their scholarship, research, films, and literature. The world has a responsibility to read it.

Yes, the world is watching Gaza, but it is not looking. Not looking at the destroyed archive, not searching for the untold stories that move beyond the moments of destruction. Nadi Abusaada, a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zürich, has noted that historians of the built environment in Palestine often find themselves documenting destruction rather than construction. But he emphasised the need for other histories to be narrated about cities, where ‘additional stories are waiting to be told’ (Abusaada 2024). But how will these stories be told when the city and its people are destroyed and displaced? Abusaada adds that, ‘with the relentless Israeli colonial violence against our land and people, the pace of erasure surpasses that of history writing. The bulldozer is faster than the pen.’

Who will narrate the untold stories when every day more Palestinians are being killed by Israeli forces? Since October, Israel killed more than 28,000 Palestinians. This bloodshed must stop. On 1 November 2023, Refaat Alareer wrote a poem titled, ‘If I Must Die’. On 6 December the same year, he was killed by an Israeli airstrike. In his poem he said:

if I must die

let it bring hope

let it be a tale

Let us bear witness.

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Acknowledgement

I would like to thank my colleague Fahad Zuberi who read this piece and gave his feedback, and my other colleague who gave his feedback but requested to remain anonymous. I also want to thank the CITY editors for inviting me to write this piece, and for their feedback and edits.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ammar Azzouz

Ammar Azzouz is a British Academy Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria. Email: [email protected]