A new forensic report has tracked and mapped Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza by focusing on its operational patterns. In an eight-hundred-page report, the University of London Goldsmith’s Forensic Architecture project describes how Israel has decimated Gaza’s population, destroyed habitation and infrastructure, and cut off aid to concentrate the remaining Palestinians to a shrinking and constantly unstable territory in what can only be described as a genocide.

In “A Cartography of Genocide: Israel’s conduct in Gaza since October 2023”, the Forensic Architecture project undertakes a spatial and typological investigation of Israeli operations over ten months. Intense aerial bombardment wrecked much of urban Gaza but only presaged an even more brutal ground assault. The operation began with the widespread slaughter and expulsion of Palestinians from their homes, which were systematically wrecked along with hundreds of mosques, hospitals, shelters, and roads.

Cumulative destruction of agricultural land between October 2023 and June 2024 [PC: A Cartography of Genocide]

Meanwhile, the Israelis set about constructing military installations. First was a major east-to-west corridor, called Netzarim, that split off the northern Gaza strip -a site of especially brutal slaughter- from the south. This was followed by a barricade over the strip’s east, and finally, a third, so-called Philadelphi barrier in the south cutting off the Gaza strip from the Sinai. A clear long-term military presence is a clear aim, but it has come along with a systematic assault on the territory’s Palestinian population that can only be described as genocidal.

With a twenty-strong team led by Eyal Weizmann, Nour Abu-Zaid, Omar Fertawi, and David Piscatelli, the Forensic Report presented its findings to the South African government, which in part funded the research. It forms an important part of the South African case, first opened in the winter of 2023-24 by foreign minister Naledi Pandor, against Israel in the International Court of Justice that attempts to bring some measure of justice for the countless Palestinians killed in what is perhaps the most blatant and internationally-enabled war crime of recent years.

-by Ibrahim Moiz for MuslimMatters

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