Urbicide in Israel’s War on Gaza: Architecture of Erasure and the Unmaking of Urban Life (2023–2025)

This article investigates the role of urbicide—defined as the systematic destruction of urban environments—in Israel’s military strategy during the war on Gaza from 2023 to 2025. It explores how the erasure of infrastructure, housing, and essential services served not only as a means of military incapacitation but as a deliberate strategy to dismantle Gaza as a space of urban life, memory, and sovereignty. The scope of the research moves beyond physical damage to examine the strategic, political, and symbolic implications of urbicide within the broader settler-colonial framework. Methodologically, the study adopts a mixed empirical and theoretical approach, combining: satellite imagery analysis and damage assessment reports (UNOSAT, UNDP, OCHA) to map patterns of destruction; quantitative data from the World Bank, FAO, and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) to assess demographic and infrastructural impacts; and theoretical insights from critical urban studies, settler-colonial theory, and postcolonial geography. Findings reveal that over 70% of Gaza’s built environment has been destroyed or rendered non-functional, with entire districts rendered uninhabitable. The unmaking of urban life is shown to be not collateral, but integral to a strategic logic aimed at disabling civic infrastructure, displacing populations, and erasing the viability of future sovereignty. Yet, the study also identifies countercurrents of symbolic and spatial resistance, as civil society, local actors, and communities reconstitute forms of endurance and political meaning from within the ruins. The study concludes that urbicide is a structural tool of domination in settler-colonial warfare, and calls for further research on post-urbicidal urban recovery, the politics of memory, and spatial justice in colonial and postcolonial contexts.

This article investigates the role of urbicide—defined as the systematic destruction of urban environments—in Israel’s military strategy during the war on Gaza from 2023 to 2025. It explores how the erasure of infrastructure, housing, and essential services served not only as a means of military incapacitation but as a deliberate strategy to dismantle Gaza as a space of urban life, memory, and sovereignty. The scope of the research moves beyond physical damage to examine the strategic, political, and symbolic implications of urbicide within the broader settler-colonial framework. Methodologically, the study adopts a mixed empirical and theoretical approach, combining: satellite imagery analysis and damage assessment reports (UNOSAT, UNDP, OCHA) to map patterns of destruction; quantitative data from the World Bank, FAO, and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) to assess demographic and infrastructural impacts; and theoretical insights from critical urban studies, settler-colonial theory, and postcolonial geography. Findings reveal that over 70% of Gaza’s built environment has been destroyed or rendered non-functional, with entire districts rendered uninhabitable. The unmaking of urban life is shown to be not collateral, but integral to a strategic logic aimed at disabling civic infrastructure, displacing populations, and erasing the viability of future sovereignty. Yet, the study also identifies countercurrents of symbolic and spatial resistance, as civil society, local actors, and communities reconstitute forms of endurance and political meaning from within the ruins. The study concludes that urbicide is a structural tool of domination in settler-colonial warfare, and calls for further research on post-urbicidal urban recovery, the politics of memory, and spatial justice in colonial and postcolonial contexts.