Israeli architect Eyal Weizman is a new kind of investigator. He is founding director of Forensic Architecture, which is both a field of study, involving new ways of interrogating violent conflicts, and the name of a research agency. As he says, “We are the people’s forensic agency. We only interrogate militaries, secret services and police forces”. They also investigate the role of corporations and militaries in environmental destruction. (interview with Peter Beinart, 27 November, 24.)

Born in Haifa, Israel, now based in London, Weizman, is Professor of Spacial & Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. Forensic Architecture has a dozen offices from Athens, to Rio to Bogota; their researchers use spacial architectural technologies, in service of political studies and prosecution of war crimes all over the world. They also draw from software development, interactive cartographies, remote sensing, satellite image analysis, “situated testimony”, material analysis and crowd-sourcing.

Although their primary focus continues to be Israel-Palestine, one great example of their range is their ½ hour film, Cloud Studies 2022, which shows their ground-breaking work gathering evidence of environmental destruction caused by petro-chemical industries worldwide – work that gets presented in cases brought by legal activists against corporate developers.

Forensic Architecture provides architectural and media evidence to civil society groups, such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC), and the UN.

Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation (2007), updated 2017, was my first introduction to the work of Weizman and colleagues. In it, he demonstrates the spacial planning aspects of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. He shows the long-standing intent to occupy, displace Palestinians and control the land, through detailed examination of the built environment over time. He shows the fortress-like nature of the settlements, their intentional placement on hilltops, their observation towers for the constant surveillance of Palestinians living in the valleys below, and the tragic fact of Zionist ghettoization of its own people in their segregated, walled-off enclaves.

After more than a year of research, Forensic Architecture has just released an 827 page report called: A Cartography of Genocide; A Spacial Analysis of the Israeli Military’s Conduct in Gaza since October, 2023. This report has been provided to South Africa’s legal team to support their case at the ICJ charging Israel with Genocide. Research entailed viewing 100’s of thousands of videos and testimonies coming from Gaza, “evidence flying at you” Weizman told Beinart. He says that they were looking not so much at the incident itself, “which is actually a war crime”, but at relations between statements and actions, between multiple bits of evidence, at “evidence of evidence” on a meta level. He states that you need to look at intent – cultural and political- which has been produced over a period of decades, to look at history and consider how intent was formed. You can’t understand Genocide without understanding the particular

environment, he says, and because we cannot know what is inside the archive of the Israeli military, what is behind their commands, we need to look for patterns. Actions which are systematic and widespread constitute a pattern. Patterns reflected in commands of the military were found by Forensic Architecture in Israeli destruction of:

1. agriculture
2. health infrastructure
3. public institutions &
4. displacement of Gazans.

Relations between the patterns have a compounding effect, coinciding, working together as a system, multiplying the effects on the population. According to Weizman, each one of the patterns fits a historical pattern, such as weaponizing the denial of humanitarian aid and the use of starvation. Since October, 2023, researchers found that over 70% of Gaza’s agricultural land has been destroyed, together with over 45% of its greenhouses. Those operations deny Gazans the ability to feed themselves. Together with the systematic withholding of food and water, they create conditions of famine. These same patterns were earlier evident in Israeli’s long practice of “putting Gazans on a diet” by calculating the number of calories the population needed just to survive, and restricting the amount of food allowed into Gaza on that basis. They were evident in Israel’s spraying of poisonous herbicides on Gazan farmland which started in 2014, destroying crops and livelihoods, documented by Forensic Architecture in Cloud Studies, 2022. Creating conditions where life is not possible is all part of Genocide.

Why is Forensic Architecture important?

We need the insights provided by research agencies such as Forensic Architecture because we are awash in propaganda disseminated by corporate media. We are at an historic time of recognizing the realities and inequities created and sustained by imperialism, colonialism and corporate capitalism. We need to learn the truth from reliable sources. In their own words: “We are an interdisciplinary agency operating across human rights, journalism, architecture, art and aesthetics, academia and the law. In 2022, the Peabody Awards programme wrote that we had co-created ‘an entire new academic field and emergent media practice’; in 2024, the European Research Council assessed Forensic Architecture as ‘a scientific breakthrough (defined as a revolutionary work that led to deep change in existing paradigms or new methods opening a new stream of research)’… Since 2020, FA has supported the growth of agencies worldwide that practice and apply our methods. The Investigative Commons is both a global network of practitioners, and a physical space in Berlin, within the offices of our sister agency Forensis.” Check them out for yourself at https://forensic-architecure.org .

Next week: Part 2

h/t Michael McNamara for architectural context

Reflecting on this last year, I was hoping to do a somewhat philosophical piece, offering perspective for those grappling with maintaining well-being in a world fraught with climate crisis, violence and suffering.

It is impossible for me, however, to focus on the well-being of the privileged, without needing to suppress awareness of the ongoing agony of Palestinians in Gaza. Israel may have distracted attention from them, by its pager attacks on Lebanese civilians, its daily bombing raids on Syria’s infrastructure, its ongoing provocations of Iran, its devastating assaults on the West Bank, its targeting of Yemen, not to mention the internal chaos and societal disintegration that is occurring inside its own “borders”, but Gazans suffer on. Their suffering has not stopped for one day since the week-long truce a year ago.

Gazan’s broken Ministry of Health can no longer track numbers of dead and missing. The UN’s civil defense teams, first responders and groups like Medecins sans Frontieres have repeatedly had to withdraw personnel from attempted aid deliveries because too many have been killed by targeted Israeli fire.

Gaza now has the largest number of child amputees in the world. Doctors in locations throughout Gaza report gunshot wounds to children directly in the head. Over 70% of Gaza’s population has been displaced at least once. The most recent report of Human Rights Watch details Israel’s deprivation of clean water to Gazans as a genocidal tool. Amnesty International’s latest report is on Israel’s horrifying practice of starvation as a means of genocide.

Kamal Adwan Hospital was one of the last semi-functioning hospitals in northern Gaza, an area which was formerly home to close to one million people.

This same hospital was invaded by the Israeli army a year ago and soldiers found no evidence of Hamas presence. I remember an October, 2023, conversation with a Zionist friend who was extremely concerned that Israel had bombed another hospital, Al Shifa, and felt huge relief that the bombing may have been caused by Gazans. Israel had posted fake audio tapes of Gazans supposedly planning to attack the hospital, which were soon discredited. (The strong Israeli accents were a clear giveaway.) The “most moral army in the world” surely would not bomb a hospital, according to my friend’s Zionist perspective. I sometimes wonder how this person now manages to justify the Israeli military’s relentless, intentional pattern of targeting not only hospitals and medical care facilities throughout Gaza, but also killing those attempting to bring aid – food, water & medical supplies – to these facilities.

The cruelty of Israeli execution of this particular target – hospitals – is hard to fathom. Reports by Palestinian journalist Tareq Hajjaj from inside Gaza describe robots dropping boxes of explosives outside Kamal Adwan hospital for remote detonation; medics returning to their homes for rest only to have their home blown up upon their arrival; soldiers forcing women

evacuees to remove all their clothing; denial of delivery of food, water and medicines, and soldiers’ videos celebrating the humiliation and suffering of their Palestinian victims.

Dr. Hassam Abu Safiya, the steadfast and courageous Director of Kamal Adwan Hospital, says they have pleaded for help from the world for months now; he details the military’s land and air siege of over 75 days on the hospital and makes clear his intention: “We will leave when the last Palestinian leaves”. (Tareq Hajjaj, Mondoweiss, 27 December, 2024.) As of December 27, 2024, the hospital, which held 350 patients and staff, has been rendered inoperable, has been mostly destroyed by fire, and is cut off from communication with the outside world. Dr. Abu Safiya along with numerous others, has been taken by the army, his whereabouts unknown.

So now another of the few hospitals still semi-functioning in northern Gaza has been destroyed, with doctors, patients and hospital staff forced at gunpoint to leave and walk south. Israel now has built a 2.5km. wide “corridor” separating northern Gaza from southern Gaza, so it is able to delineate the area it plans to steal, and according to the Israeli “General’s Plan”, rebuild and populate with settlers.

Further to that end, Israel has established a “resort” (Jonathan Ofir, Mondoweiss, 27 December,2024) in a desalination plant in northern Gaza, near the now-decimated, heavily populated Jabalia refugee Camp. There its soldiers can enjoy their r & r, replete with popcorn, cotton candy & espresso machines, massages & games rooms. Yoav Zeitoun, an embedded journalist writing about the resort for Israeli paper Ynet (in Hebrew) considers it to be a permanent establishment. “We make dreams come true for the soldiers”, he quotes the military as saying. Jonathan Ofir compares it to the chilling movie about the family living next door to Auschwitz, Zone of Interest, but says it’s different because this “resort” is not at the edge of a concentration camp, it is inside one.

This is a time for us to stand up for what Helena Cobban calls “the rules-based international order” (italics mine). As she puts it, “during 2024 Israel and its close collaborator, the Biden administration … punched ever more forcefully and more destructively through all the norms and structures that have constituted that order since 1945”. One of the key components of international law was the protection of hospitals and medics during warfare. “Hospitals…are afforded special protections in times of conflict under the Geneva Conventions and all other instruments of international humanitarian law. (Globalities, Just World Education, 28 December, 2024.) We in the West, who, it might be pointed out, created that body of international law, are fully complicit. Can we stand with the majority of humankind in upholding these institutions, systems and carefully crafted laws designed to protect civilians and wounded soldiers alike in times of violent conflict? Or will we allow that moral vision, supposedly intended for all humanity, to collapse under the weight of Western hegemony? If not, our blatant hypocrisy will be our legacy. The choice is ours to make.