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, War, History, Politics, Architecture, Anthropology

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 · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Vartika · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review to come.

[Callum Robert Inkster · Rating 5 out of 5]

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 the atrocities that were committed and being committed while many of us simply looked the other way.

[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.