Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide

by Eyal Weizman

From an acclaimed architect and investigator, a devastating, meticulous accounting of Israel’s destruction of Gaza and crimes against its people

'Urgent and essential' DAVID WENGROW
'Extraordinary' ILAN PAPPÉ
'A brilliant, shocking and urgent book for our times' YANIS VAROUFAKIS

Eyal Weizman is one of the world’s leading experts on the relationship between violence, conflict and the environment, both built and natural. As director of the organisation Forensic Architecture, he and his team of interdisciplinary researchers document acts of state crimes and human rights violations around the world, including in Israel and Palestine. Since 2023, the group has worked to produce evidence for the International Court of Justice’s genocide case against Israel.

In this revelatory new project, Weizman draws on that research to bring us on an eye-opening journey across time and into the 'deep cartography' of the area extending from Gaza’s subterranean tunnels through to its militarised topography, settlements and barriers. He catalogues, in unflinching and forensic detail, the Israeli campaigns of violence and displacement that have reshaped the region in an effort to make Gaza and its surrounding areas unliveable for the Palestinian people. Taking us through the broader geographic and historical context, from the Nakba in 1948 to the present day, Ungrounding establishes that architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between coloniser and colonised – and how Israel’s actions after 7 October escalated into violence so extreme and so far-reaching as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of genocide.

Deeply informative and profoundly affecting in its scope and precision, and illustrated with dozens of original images, maps and diagrams, Ungrounding is an essential document of atrocity in our time.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, War, Politics, Middle East, Anthropology, Architecture

406 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 7, 2026

About the author

Eyal Weizman is an architect, professor of spatial and visual cultures and director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Since 2014 he is a global professor at Princeton University. In 2010 he set up the research agency Forensic Architecture (FA). The work of FA is documented in the exhibition and book FORENSIS (Sternberg, 2014). In 2007 he set up, with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour/Palestine. This work is documented in the book Architecture after Revolution (Sternberg, 2014). In 2013 he designed a permanent folly in Gwangju, South Korea which was documented in the book The Roundabout Revolution (Sternberg, 2015). His other books include The Conflict Shoreline (Steidl and Cabinet, 2015), Mengele’s Skull (Sternberg, 2012), The Least of all Possible Evils (Verso, 2011), Hollow Land (Verso, 2007), A Civilian Occupation (Verso, 2003). Weizman is on the editorial board of Third Text, Humanity, Cabinet and Political Concepts and is on the board of directors of the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) and on the advisory boards of the ICA in London and B’Tselem in Jerusalem, amongst others. He studied architecture at the Architectural Association in London and completed his PhD at the London Consortium/Birkbeck College.

Reviews

[Muhammad Ahmad]

I will have a lot more to say about the book but I need some time to process it. I am left overwhelmed and speechless by what I've read. Suffice it for now to say that while some extraordinary books have been written about Gaza, this one for me is the most important, since it presents the most systematic, comprehensive, and irrefutable case that what Israel is perpetrating in Gaza is a genocide (Because this evidence is being used in the ongoing genocide case at the ICJ, it is necessarily ironclad). I am in awe of Eyal and his crew at Forensic Architecture who have painstakingly collected evidence of these crimes, subjected them to rigorous analysis, and produced a record for the ages. No one in the future can say we didn't know.

[Callum Robert Inkster]

Eyal Weizman, and the team at Forensic Architecture, continue to be a shining star in the dark night that is the architectural field. Once again making me proud to call myself an Architect.

Ungrounding is an expansion of his previous work. Where Hollow Land mostly focuses on the West Bank and it's architecture of occupation, and lightly covers some of Gaza it is by no means to a large extent. The roles are reversed here in Ungrounding, where the focus primarily lies upon the Gaza Strip and its envelope. Exploring the history and the material analysis of how we got to where we currently are in Gaza.

The final chapter recounting events that took place since the beginning of this most recent occurrence of the ongoing Palestinians genocide, follows chronological events and highlights the momentous events that took place which were able to penetrate western media. The bombing of Al-Alhi hospital, the killing of Hind Rajab and the execution and attempted covering up of Paramedics. All the while using the foundation of history that the previous two chapters had provided, to constantly showcase how what is occurring in Gaza is not a new phenomenon.

This book will be important in the future we hope to achieve, to allow ourselves to learn from the atrocities that were committed and being committed while many of us simply looked the other way.

[midori]

I continue to be utterly furious at the lack of care and attention toward the plight of Palestine on the global stage in the face of such damning evidence. This book incisively applies an architectural lens to look at how physical destruction is calculated and weaponized to destroy the biological imperative of life both short-term (buildings, tunnels, shops) and long-term (poisoning of wells, crops, destruction of waterways). I’m shaking mad, and I’m absolutely stunned by the strength of Weizman’s moral clarity and convictions as he participates in this research and activism.

[Vartika]

Review to come.

[Laurence]

Gripping and horrifying story of the last 80 years of Gaza starting from the Nakba in 1948 through to the end of 2025. the unbelievably cruel and heartless oppression and murder of the Palestinian people by a succession of Israeli leaders. An important book that tells of the conscious Erasure of not just a people but all evidence of their existence through creation of "Terra nullius".

The second half of the book is an almost day by day account of the actions of the Israeli government following the attack by Hamas in October 2023 and is an essential record of the litany of lies and barbarous attacks on innocent women and children.

How can anyone support the actions of an Israeli government that behaves so barbarously?

[Ranjani Sheshadri]

Stunning and authoritative and necessary. Weizman reveals through an intricate analysis of waterways, currents, tides, roads, manmade and natural boundaries, agricultural production, city walls, camps, tunnels, and human migration how the genocide in Gaza is about a callous transfer of land and territory, facilitated by removing the human inhabitants of that land through violence and fear and then rendering the places they used to live uninhabitable or unaccessible. Weizman's earliest analyses focus on moisture and soil, the seizure and redistribution of rich agricultural land in the initial years of the Nakba among Israeli settlers and the forced resettlement of Palestinians across Gaza and the Middle East in less fertile areas. Here, Weizman notes the perpetuation of a myth I have heard about Muslim kings and conquerors in India: that Bedouin (read: Arab) tribes desertified areas of the Middle East through incompetence and ignorance, treating this as a marker of their lack of indigeneity to the land, when in reality they mastered a careful, rigorous system of irrigation and cultivation necessary for a brutal climate. Weizman also reflects how the design of Israeli towns and settlements, populated by militarized settlers who could police the new border, further created a system of exclusion and deprivation. Later, Weizman discusses the myths about tunnel creation and the ways that these myths emboldened the IDF to destroy more homes, buildings, and apartments, and use Palestinians as human shields (another hypocrisy) to investigate potential tunnels. Towards the end of the book, Weizman compares the flooding of these tunnels with seawater, which will eventually pollute already polluted freshwater reserves, to the Romans salting the fields of Carthage after the raze of the city. Yuval Harari recently noted that Jewish identity, so long marked by the violence of the Romans, have become Romans: agents of conquest and colonization. Weizman correctly links the Palestinian territories to South African homelands, to Native American reservations, tenuous homes unanchored from native soil. An interesting piece of the book was the role of Bauhaus architecture in "creating" the aesthetic of Israeli cities, including the walls and barriers that create Israeli- and Palestinian-inhabited zones; however, Weizman also notes that Bauhaus architects also played a role in the design of concentration camps like Auschwitz. Suddenly, this is a less charming piece of trivia.

The haunting part of this book is Weizman's analysis of forensic architecture: the ghost of what remains when populated buildings are bombed, when hospitals are targeted, when whole villages are erased, first physically, then in name, and then in memory, along with all of their residents, the bones of their residents, the graves of their ancestors, the paths and trails and valleys and riverbeds that mapped their lives for millenia, all turned to sand and dust and ash, shifted, subsumed, swept away as if by an errant hand. Throughout the book, Palestinian witnesses to atrocities recount what they saw, where they were, the land they stood on when the missiles fell and the guns turned on them, which Israeli narratives and maps will omit for the pleasure of the West. Areas are demarcated as "humanitarian zones" where Palestinians are shot down trying to bring rations home to their families and "concentration zones" (no elaboration needed). Boundaries and borders shift like sand according to Israeli whims, which politically veer towards the eradication of a foreign presence, a blight on the land, by starving babies, maiming and killing children, brutalizing women, targeting paramedics and healthcare workers as well as healthcare spaces, eliminating journalists, and treating all men (whom Mohammed el-Kurd notes receive far less sympathy than women and children in Western estimation despite being sons, brothers, fathers, lovers, beloved to their families) as enemy combatants, the incarnation of Amalek—the Biblical enemy of the Israelites. Thus the conquest of Palestine and the genocide of its people is painted by Israeli authorities as the righting of a fundamental injustice: to whom should land, and the safety, security, wealth, and prosperity it grants, truly belong? Surely not a lesser people, who are scarcely a people at all (look how they live! Look how they respond to our violence with violence! Were they ever civilized at all? And the uncivilized deserve nothing: not land, not life).

The definition of genocide according to the UN is "any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such

a) Killing members of the group;
b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."

The definition further relies on two components:

"A mental element: the "intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such"; and

A physical element, which includes the following five acts, enumerated exhaustively:

a) Killing members of the group
b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

There can be no argument that what is occuring in Palestine is a genocide, perpetuated by a people so separated from their own history that "Never again" has been rendered meaningless.

Dr. Mahmoud Abu Nujaila, who died in the November 2023 strike on Al-Awda Hospital, wrote a message on a whiteboard knowing his days were numbered, reading "Whoever stays until the end will tell the story. We did what we could. Remember us." This book is an act of remembrance, and remembrance is an act of resistance against grotesque violence and dehumanization that has been one hundred years in the making and is still ongoing.

[George Kanakaris]

This monumental book is a haunting account of how Palestinian dispossession was carried out.The Israeli occupier changed the entire landscape by destroying villages, gardens, orchards, and even cemeteries. Get this : On 27 May 1948, Egyptian soldiers caught two Israeli soldiers near a well north of Gaza City. They admitted to throwing typhoid and dysentery microbes into the water.Another number : Since 1967, Israel has imprisoned over 800,000 Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, accounting for about 20 per cent of the total population and about 40 per cent of all Palestinian men.This enormous work proves once again what the occupier intended from the very beginning, the 1940s: the expulsion of the original population for lebenraum for the benefit of the new Third Reich: Israel. What about this : ' Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said “it may be just and moral” to starve 2 million Gaza residents until Israeli hostages are returned, but “no one in the world would let us.” If your blood doesn't start boiling while reading this book, you have a problem.

[Michelle van Schouwen]

This book is a testimonial to the civilization erasure that is key to the ongoing forced movement and genocide of Palestinians. It spans the period from the 1948 Nakba to today. Weizman painstakingly documents Israel's intentional destruction of both natural and built environments in Gaza. Understanding the process Israel has taken in trying to rid itself of Palestineans is both heartbreaking and enraging. The "before and after" satellite photos and diagrams of refugee migration following various orders are memorable and sad.
Anyone who holds an opinion about Palestine and Israel should read Ungrounding, The Architecture of Genocide.

[Kriegslok]

"After erasing the traces of their previous existence, Israel could claim that Palestinians had never inhabited these places. At most it was an empty land briefly traversed by nomads. This conception was translated into a legal strategy that governed dispossession. It was based on an environmental fantasy that was tautological, self-serving and went against all the evidence."

The author of this book was born in Israel and trained as an architect. He has used his professional expertise to effectively investigate the founding myths of the Israeli state and expose the foundation of lies and violence on which that state is constructed. Key to his work, and informing this book, is the agency "Forensic Architecture" which he set up as "... an investigative agency that mobilises architectural knowledge and technology to investigate state violence" . Central to the work of "Forensic Architecture" is the process known as "ungrounding", a process which "... aims to remove a society from its place and erase all traces to its previous existence. It extends from the buildings down to the soil beneath them. It is a type of violence that is earth-shaping, terra-forming". The careful methodology demonstrates how it is possible to reconstruct from the ashes of the crime scene the evidence of the crime. Weizman notes that Israeli colonist bureaucrats studied earlier ethnic cleansings of Armenians, Greeks, Kurds and Turks; and also Walter Christaller's "Theory of Central Places" used by him during WWII to draw up plans for Nazi occupation of the occupied East. It is not just the removal of what was there before colonisation that is of interest but the construction that follows. This not only aims to erase traces of what was, but to create outposts and bastions of colonisation and the infrastructure to make return for the expelled a lethal experience.

The first part of the book is concerned with demonstrating how this architectural forensics is carried out using a wide range of source material, photographic, cartological, official documentation, eyewitness statements, with much evidence sourced directly from the perpetrators. By combining these multiple source materials investigators try to reassemble what has been erased. The aim of genocide is to remove and deny the existence of the previous inhabitants, something currently happening to Ukraine as Russian scorched earth tactics erase all that was there to provide "... an empty slate, a tabula rasa". Something which Weizman identifies in the "... monochrome desert of upturned soil " [which is] "... the material signature of Israel's genocide".

The middle section of the book concerns itself with the subsoil. The digging of wells and water security has become central to both resistance and attempts to ethnically cleanse through drought by water engineering. Expertise in tunnelling from knowledge gained in well digging has been central to the survival of Gaza through periods of Israeli siege. There is a fascinating study of the siege economy of Gaza based on tunnels to supply the enclave from Egypt and the politics and profits of their operation which I had never fully appreciated.

The final part of the book looks at the horrors of 7 October 2023 and those which emanated from it. Say Weizman "The failure of the Israeli army was at its base conceptual. It could not fathom a level of sophisticated coordination by Palestinian fighters it denigrated, following colonial tropes, as 'gunmen in flip-flops' ". He goes on to examine the Israeli response running a forensic comb through the debris and uncovering the actions and events excused as a "just response" typified by the "Dahiya Doctrine" of disproportionate response where "... breaking international law became a value in itself". For Weizman the genocide of Palestinans after 7 October 2023 was not born out of the events of that day but rather "... had been gradually put in place throughout more than a century of colonisation, and eight decades of of Jewish supremacy and apartheid". This last section of the book is quite overwhelming, revelation follows revelation, this is not simple reportage of crimes against humanity, it is a careful study of events and their connection to historical precedent and the publicly declared aims of Israeli officials.

It is noted that Bauhaus architect Hannes Meyer in his manifesto stated that a building is "... a biological apparatus serving the needs of body and mind" and that buildings and cities should be "... the calculation and enhancement of hygiene, air circulation, heat, nutrition and even sexual reproduction" or "conditions of life calculated". Conversely says Weizman "... the destruction of architecture could be understood as the destruction of the shell without which biological life could not survive". In closing he states what is probably the obvious "architectural reconstruction could function as the continuation of genocide by other means".

For anyone wanting an all round and fully up to date comprehensive guide to the foundation of Israel and the ethnic cleansing, and arguably genocide, at the heart of the Israeli state project this is the book to read. There are a great many excellent critiques of Israel by Israeli born Jews but I think this is the best and most powerful I have read to date.

"Indigenous peoples are expelled or exterminated because they get in the way, or because the repeatedly attempt to return to the areas from which they have been displaced."

[Els]

De auteur, van oorsprong een Joodse Israëli opgeleid als architect, maakt deel uit van Forensic Architecture, dat technieken ontwikkelt om geweld van staten en bedrijven te onderzoeken en documenteren. Niet alleen voor Gaza en de Westbank maar ook voor andere conflictgebieden. Materiaal van FA wordt o.a. ingezet bij juridische procedures voor het ICC en ECHR.
In dit goed geschreven boek is grond, bovengronds en ondergronds, het uitgangspunt. Daar is een goede reden voor omdat grond de basis is van 'settler colonialism'. Anders dan andere vormen van kolonialisme die menskracht of grondstoffen willen exploiteren, heeft settler colonialism als doel een nieuwe samenleving te creëren op gekoloniseerde grond en dat kan alleen als de oorspronkelijke bevolking/ samenleving verdwijnt. Weizman beschrijft dit proces in detail en trekt historische paralellen. Een voorbeeld: Palestijnen die tijdens de Nakba van hun land verdreven waren en probeerden terug te keren, werden doodgeschoten. Hetzelfde lot treft Palestijnen nu die de gele demarcatielijn in Gaza oversteken.

Vanaf het begin van de twintigste eeuw hadden joden getracht grond in Palestina te kopen. Dit werd echter bemoeilijkt doordat de meeste grond gezamenlijk eigendom was en dus niet of niet makkelijk kon worden aangekocht. In 1948 was slechts circa 3,5 % van het grondgebied van voormalig mandaatgebied Palestina in handen van het Joods Nationaal Fonds (JNF). De oorlogen van 1948 en 1967 veranderden dit ingrijpend doordat er veel grond werd veroverd en overgedragen aan het JNF.
Tussen 1949 en 1951 werden meer dan 200 settlements gesticht langs de grens, waaronder veel bij Gaza.

Het onrecht dat Palestijnen wordt aangedaan, heeft vele gezichten. Door grond als uitgangspunt te nemen slaagt Weizman erin de werking van dit systeem tot in de haarvaten te beschrijven.
Het indrukwekkendst is het deel over het tunnelnetwerk onder Gaza. Door Israël wordt dit voorgesteld als het zenuwcentrum van Hamas. Maar daarmee, zo maakt dit boek goed duidelijk, wordt de Palestijnse gemeenschap en haar overlevingskracht te kort gedaan. Het netwerk was van levensbelang voor alle inwoners van de strook. De aanleg van tunnels was niet zonder gevaar, het is zeer gespecialiseerd werk en in handen van bepaalde families. Het kostte sommigen het leven en maakte anderen rijk, maar het was voor iedereen in Gaza bittere noodzaak. Weizman beschrijft dit alles uitvoerig en overtuigend.

Ik kan me goed voorstellen dat de auteur dit boek wilde schrijven. Het bood hem de kans om alle afzonderlijke reconstructies en getuigenissen met elkaar te verbinden en in historisch perspectief te plaatsen. Niet het eerste boek misschien om te lezen over wat zich op Palestijns grondgebied afspeelt, maar wel onontbeerlijk voor wie in detail wil begrijpen wat er gaande is. Het laat je als lezer niet los.

[.zhar]

It was not started on October 7th.
‎
‎October 7th 2023. Hamas attacked the Gaza envelope and the aftermath is the ongoing genoside that's still happening even as I'm writing this review. For the zionist supporters they'll say that Israel has the right "to defend themselves", but do they? What was the reason for Hamas attacking Gaza Envelope? This book explains it all.
‎
‎For more than 70 years, the indigenous people of Palestine has been a victim of Israel's settler-colonialism. The Israel occupation has long planned for the expulsion of the entire Palestinian people even pre-nakba (1948). What's worse is that the act of Ungrounding - which also the title of the book - is Israel's main weapon (along with the bombings, killings, comcentration camps, and weaponized hunger) to not only expelling the Palestinians, but also erasing the memory of their existence. They alter the overground and underground aspects of the land, damaging the subsoil - and the damage will definitely last for a long time as stated in the book.
‎
‎It was never an act of self-defense, it was a systematic act of atrocity and once again, it was NOT started on october 7th.

[FYa]

Haven’t done anything else for the last two days than read this book… Very difficult to read and absorb. The angle through which history and the present unfolding in Palestine and Israel are described , through soil and land , is very interesting.

While the horrendous details of the occupation and the Gaza war are described in great detail, I personally felt that similar perspectives were missing when it came to describing the terror of Hamas, both against its own population and against Israeli civilians. In my opinion, the storytelling sometimes connects history and the present in selective ways, occasionally leaving out important developments and dynamics in between.

That being said, FA is doing incredibly important and difficult work. The book is very thoroughly researched, and I do think it is an important read. At the same time, I believe it should be read with the awareness that this is, in my opinion, not the full picture and not all perspectives that need to be included.

[Victoria]

A brilliant piece of research gathered from many researchers and some near victims of the genocide in Gaza. Eyal W is a great team leader and has deep scientific skills in reconstructing how different parts of Gaza have different capacities to grow different kinds of plants and the villagers are specialised in how to harvest water in different ways in tune with people’s needs. Copious photographic evidence is provided showing how the various villagers were skilled in water retention, while settlers’ communities gradually encroached and changed the entire geography . Very well written .

[Emily Silva]

An extremely well researched and important read. Eye opening and heartbreaking.

If you are looking to better understand Gaza, read this book! I recommend the physical copy since there are maps throughout the book to get a grasp on how systematic and devastating the genocide in Gaza is. I believe this will be one of the important genocide books of the 21st century and hope it’s taught in schools.

[Sarka]

A book that left me speechless.

[E H]

Complete load of garbage. Don't waste your time.

[Hesham Mohamed]

Definitely the most important book of the year.

[Bryce]

Unique testimony to the genocide in Gaza, intense moral clarity with a forensic tone.

[Michiel Tummers]

What a book!! Totally deserving of the 4.80+ rating on goodreads. Learned so much from it