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Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide
Written while the organisation he directs, Forensic Architecture, works to produce evidence for the International Court of Justice’s genocide case against Israel, in Ungrounding Eyal Weizman explores the larger geographical and historical context, from the displacement of the Nakba in 1948 to the present day. In unflinching and forensic detail, Ungrounding shows how architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between the coloniser and the colonised.
It is an extraordinary and eye-opening journey through the ‘deep cartography’ of the area extending from Gaza’s subterranean tunnels through to its militarised topography, settlements and barriers. Territory is never a neutral backdrop nor the location within which a colonisation takes place. Instead, it is a mechanism by which colonisation is undertaken and key to understanding how Israel’s attack on Gaza in the wake of 7 October has escalated into violence so extreme as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of genocide.
It is an extraordinary and eye-opening journey through the ‘deep cartography’ of the area extending from Gaza’s subterranean tunnels through to its militarised topography, settlements and barriers. Territory is never a neutral backdrop nor the location within which a colonisation takes place. Instead, it is a mechanism by which colonisation is undertaken and key to understanding how Israel’s attack on Gaza in the wake of 7 October has escalated into violence so extreme as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of genocide.
416 pages, Hardcover
Published July 14, 2026
About the author
Eyal Weizman
55 books132 followersEyal 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.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
May 24, 2026
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.
May 20, 2026
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.
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.
July 14, 2026
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.
May 25, 2026
Review to come.
July 10, 2026
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?
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?
August 5, 2026
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
The definition further relies on two components:
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.
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.
July 20, 2026
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.
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.
August 6, 2026
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.
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May 15, 2026Haven’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.
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.
July 13, 2026
A book that left me speechless.
August 5, 2026
Complete load of garbage. Don't waste your time.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews