The war in Gaza speaks volumes about the future of warfare—privatized by mercenaries, automated by the large-scale deployment of AI-enabled weaponry, mediated by the live transmission of atrocities, and totally urbanized as they erase life in city centres. Although the human losses in Gaza are staggering—killing 70 thousand people, amounting to outright ‘genocide’—the war has also resulted in large-scale ‘urbicide’ through the annihilation of Gaza’s city spaces. Yet, this aspect of war will not end as the dust of destruction settles; it may resume with a new peace plan that opens Gaza to global capital to reshape its future, as envisioned by Trump.    

Urbanized Warfare and Urbicide 

Modern military operations are no longer conducted in “the middle of nowhere” but in “the middle of everywhere”, as strategist and counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen says about the terrain densely populated by civilian buildings, infrastructure, roads, streets, historical buildings, and networks of wires and concrete. By 2050, it is predicted that about 68% of the world’s population will live in highly urbanized, littoral, connected, and globalized cities; so too will be their warfare.

MOUTs (Military Operations in Urbanized Terrain)—whether insurgency, counterinsurgency, combatting organized crime, or inter-state conflicts—will likely take place in streets and sub-terrains. This type of fighting results in the massive destruction of physical space, producing “feral cities” where minimum conditions of safety and security are absent. Most of this destruction in MOUTs occurs due to the extensive use of the concrete environment for tactical and operational purposes. Consider the grisly scenes of the battles in Mogadishu (1993), Grozny (199-2000), Fallujah (2004), Aleppo (2012-2016), Mosul (2016-2017), Raqqa (2017),  Marawi (2017), Mariupol (2022), Khartoum (2023-present), and others to come.

While it is often controversial to determine if the destruction of these urban centres was intentional or merely collateral damage on a large scale, in Gaza, the destruction of urban space has been deliberate and for the strategic purpose of liquidating the Strip as a living space. For Israeli military planners and decision-makers, it is a component of strategy not only to annihilate Hamas and the Palestinian resistance but to drain the ‘demographic swamp’ that produces it. It is a “final solution” akin to genocide.

This specific form of destruction is referred to as urbicide. Resurfacing in strategic discourse during the ethnic cleansing of the Bosnian War, the term refers to the deliberate, planned ‘killing’ of a city. Like genocide, urbicide entails destroying the national character of the oppressed group to impose that of the oppressor. It targets buildings not merely as physical structures, but as the constitutive elements of urbanity itself. The logic here is the destruction of urbanity for its own sake—erasing the very possibilities of the place. Consequently, urbicide is a fundamentally political act—it forecloses the potential for self-governance and development in targeted cities, which constitutes the core logic of Israel’s destruction of Palestine.

Palestine as an Urbicidal Lab 

The most recent destruction of Gaza is merely a harsh culmination of the consistent urbicide Israel has practiced across the Occupied Territories for the last few decades. This is evident in the erasure of the thriving indigenous Palestinian urbanity in the historical coastal centres of Haifa, Jaffa, and Acre, and in Jerusalem during the Nakba (1948) and in the aftermath of the 1967 war. It is intrinsic to Zionism as a settler-colonial project.

In response, Forensic architecture is a practical approach developed in Palestine to examine whether Israel’s destruction in the Occupied Territories is intentional. Led by scholars like British Israeli architect Eyal Weizman, it uses spatial data and the study of buildings to investigate acts of state violence and human rights abuses. In the 2023 edition of his book Hollow Land, Weizman discusses how architecture and city planning shape political control and dominance in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He examines how settlements and roads are strategically placed to restrict movement and divide Palestinian land. He also claims that the repeated destruction and reconstruction of Gaza’s infrastructure—such as water, power, and hospitals—is a deliberate form of urbicide, aimed at keeping the area unstable and hindering long-term development and self-rule.

Stephen Graham, professor of cities and society at Newcastle University’s School of Architecture, and other scholars suggest that Israel’s military and political leaders view Palestinian urban development as a security risk, which leads them to intentionally dismantle these environments. Graham’s analysis of Israeli practices during the Second Intifada (2000-2005), especially the destruction of homes in Jenin in 2002, concludes that such actions are part of a systematic “de-territorialization” strategy. This approach targets both the land and civilians, aiming to erase Palestinian spaces and reinforce Israeli control. This paradigm of urbicide and de-territorialization in Palestine makes it a laboratory to develop oppressive policies for use around the world that become more violent and chaotic as elites seek greater control over unruly urban centres ridden by violence, crime, and poverty.

The Unique Urbanism of Gaza 

Prior to the war, Gaza stood out as one of the most highly urbanized areas in the region. The densely populated strip formed a continuous urban environment, with official figures indicating that about 87% of its land was classified as urban. Yet, ongoing issues like limited arable land and the Israeli blockade meant that clear boundaries between ‘rural,’ ‘urban’, and ‘camp’ areas did not really exist.

Gaza also exhibits a distinctive and highly urbanized socio-spatial composition. The urban density in Gaza surpasses that of many major global centres, yet the region has access to only limited infrastructure. Resource and infrastructure stress has intensified due to a 3% annual population growth rate per annum. Prior to the conflict, density—not simply the proportion of urban residents—was the most significant characteristic of Gaza, with an average population density of approximately 6,000 persons per square kilometre. In certain areas, particularly within refugee camps, this density increased substantially, ranging from 26,000 to 50,000 persons per square kilometre.   

Gaza’s urban landscape is defined not just by its density, but by a kind of ‘enforced urbanization’ with no way in or out. This pattern developed after the Nakba of 1948, when the Strip was shaped along ceasefire lines to shelter families displaced from regions like the Negev and cities such as Isdud, Acre, and Haifa. Within Gaza, areas labeled as “refugee camps”—including Jabalia, Al-Shati, and Nuseirat—have, over the past 75 years, transformed from tent encampments into concrete shantytowns and then into crowded, multi-story urban neighbourhoods. While these places are legally recognized by the UN as camps, their physical structure has evolved, blending with the surrounding city and turning into extremely dense slums. This compelled, concentrated growth has effectively made the entire territory resemble a vast ‘mega-city’ of confinement, leaving almost no open land for organic expansion.

Unmaking Urbanity of Gaza 

Whereas it is problematic to prove the crucial component of ‘intent’ in genocide under the UN convention, establishing a case for urbicide offers more accessible paths under international humanitarian law. In Gaza, it is straightforward to prove the deliberate erasure of living space through piles of satellite imagery, videos captured and proudly streamed by IDF troopers, surveillance cameras, and other verified sources. The piling evidence for urbicide can be found in ‘domicide’, a derivative of urbicide referring to the deliberate destruction of the domestic sphere and the removal of private houses as secure spaces. Legally, these acts align with war crimes defined under Article 8 of the Rome Statute, particularly the deliberate targeting of civilian objects and cultural monuments, where the scale of physical scale destruction provides primary evidence of a policy to render the territory uninhabitable.    

By the end of 2024 and the beginning of 2025, assessments conducted by the United Nations and satellite imagery showed that more than 80% of Gaza’s buildings sustained damage or were destroyed. This figure encompasses approximately 320,000 housing units; this translates into over one million individuals being displaced from their permanent residences. Furthermore, the IDF was determined to flatten entire neighbourhoods along with their social networks and commercial significance. In the south, most of Rafah turned into rubble, and in the north, the Al-Rimal district—once a commercial and cultural hub of Gaza City—was flattened.

Gaza’s cultural fabric has also been decimated. More than 972 schoolteachers and administrators, as well as 95 university deans and professors, have been killed. The educational infrastructure, including schools and universities, suffered extensive damage, with entire institutions such as the Islamic University of Gaza and Al-Azhar University being leveled. This systematic targeting of academics and destruction of educational facilities has raised concerns among UN experts and human rights organizations, who refer to these actions as “scholasticide“.

Killing the city requires erasing its historical memory as well. The campaign of urbicide in Gaza has included the targeting of cultural and historical sites that once anchored the population’s identity. More than 200 buildings of cultural and historical significance have been reduced to rubble, including mosques, cemeteries, and museums. Gaza’s Omari Mosque, built in the 7th century—though its history as a house of worship traces back to the Bronze Age and the establishment of Gaza by the Sea Peoples—was severely damaged by Israeli bombardment. Once a focal point of Palestinian history and culture, its walls collapsed and its minaret was significantly damaged. Additionally, the Church of Saint Porphyrius (the third oldest church in the world) and the Central Archives of Gaza City were severely damaged or destroyed.

To ensure the uninhabitability of Gaza, targeting the health sector was a major focus during the Israeli operation. A United Nations report covering events from October 7, 2023, to June 30, 2024, notes that at least 136 attacks were carried out on 27 hospitals—of Gaza’s 36 total—as well as 12 other medical facilities. Many suffered severe damage or destruction. In addition, essential water infrastructure such as desalination plants and sewage treatment facilities was deliberately targeted. As a result, the coastal aquifer became contaminated, leading to outbreaks of waterborne diseases like Hepatitis A and Polio. This transformed the city’s water supply from a source of life into a carrier of death. Even as the ceasefire has halted the official fighting, the threat of urbicide continues in post-war plans. 

Urbicide by Other Means 

The ceasefire agreement, signed by U.S. President Donald Trump and mediators in Sharm El Sheikh (October 9) and adopted by the UN Security Council on November 17, 2025, ended hostilities—or rather, the Israeli atrocities and genocide—but it did not end the urbicide of Gaza; it gave it other means. In a broader sense, urbicide can occur through urban planning that prioritizes profit and global capital, leading to displacement, gentrification, and the destruction of affordable, diverse public spaces for the sake of real estate development and luxury consumption.

The physical, violent destruction of the living space paved the way for an economic phase of urbicide under the cloak of reconstruction sanctioned by Trump’s peace plan. It creates a tabula rasa (clean slate) for these schemes, stained only by rubble and resilient people. Trump’s 20-point plan for Gaza aims to end the historical struggle over Palestine through the same neoliberal approach that seeks to bypass the historical, political, and religious complications of the conflict in favor of ‘economic peace’. 

Even during the heydays of bloodshed and destruction, Trump did not shy away from explicitly sharing “his dreams for Gaza” as a “Riviera of the Middle East” via his own social media platforms, utilizing its Mediterranean location for luxury real estate and tourism rather than conflict. Furthermore, the plan proposes the development of “high-tech megacities” along the coast, modeled after the rapid modernization seen in Gulf states like Dubai or the NEOM megaproject in Saudi Arabia.

Obviously, the plan addresses some immediate needs of the population, specifically regarding the flow of aid, the restoration of water desalination, electricity grids, and sewage plants, in addition to clearing the estimated 50 million tons of debris to enable reconstruction. Nevertheless, it shares the logic of violent urbicide by replacing the resistance-based, self-sufficient economy led by Hamas with a globally managed, high-investment model.

 Characteristically, Trump’s model for peace bets on private investments from “thriving modern miracle cities in the Middle East” (alluding to Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar) to fund the estimated $50–$70 billion reconstruction bill. It prioritizes private equity and real estate investment over traditional humanitarian grants. This type of planned urbicide, managed by a colonial-mandate-style “Council for Peace”, aims to erase all legacy of the conflict in Gaza by burying the densely crowded space created by decades of occupation and blockade under a space dominated by global elites, exclusivity, and the exclusion of the indigenous people of Gaza.

While the implementation of Trump’s plan remains precarious, tethered to the fragility of the ceasefire, the irreversible reality of the destruction is already established. The unprecedented scale of devastation in Gaza demonstrates that cities are no longer incidental backdrops or collateral victims of warfare; they are now intentional, strategic targets. As an architecture of violence, urbicide does not merely scar the city; it kills it as a macro-organism, erasing the history, culture, and life it sustains. Consequently, true post-conflict reconstruction cannot simply be an exercise in physical rehabilitation. It must be a resurrection of urbanity itself—restoring not just the walls, but the extinguished spirit of the place.