Gaza is not only a story of buildings reduced to rubble. It is a story about what happens when the physical conditions of urban life—homes, hospitals, universities, roads, water systems, memory and community—are progressively dismantled.
There is a word for the destruction of a city that captures something the language of “damage” cannot fully express: urbicide.
The term is at the center of Mourad Benguita’s important 2025 research article, “Urbicide in Israel’s War on Gaza: Architecture of Erasure and the Unmaking of Urban Life (2023–2025),” published in Filistin Araştırmaları Dergisi / Bulletin of Palestine Studies. The article examines Gaza not simply as a battlefield but as an urban environment whose physical and social foundations have been subjected to extraordinary destruction.
And this distinction matters.
Because when a house collapses, we see a destroyed building.
When an entire neighborhood disappears, we begin to see something else.
When hospitals, schools, universities, roads, water systems, electricity networks and sanitation infrastructure are simultaneously damaged or destroyed, the question becomes larger than the destruction of individual structures.
What happens to a city when the systems that make city life possible are broken?
A city is more than its buildings
One of the most powerful ideas in Benguita’s study is that a city should not be understood merely as an accumulation of concrete and steel.
A city is a living network.
A hospital is not simply a building. It is a place where life is treated.
A school is not merely a structure. It is where generations encounter knowledge.
A university is not just classrooms. It is part of a society's intellectual memory.
A road is not merely asphalt. It connects families, hospitals, markets and neighborhoods.
Water and sewage systems are not invisible technical details. They are among the basic conditions of public health.
A cemetery is not simply land containing graves. It is memory made physical.
And a home is more than walls.
It is where a person knows where they belong.
This is why the concept of urbicide—the killing or destruction of the city as a living social space—has become increasingly important in scholarship on modern warfare.
Benguita traces the intellectual development of the concept particularly through scholarship on Sarajevo and the work of theorists such as Martin Coward and Stephen Graham. His argument is that urban destruction can reach beyond the immediate military objective and affect the social, cultural and political conditions that allow urban life to continue.
The distinction is profound.
A destroyed building is a statistic.
A destroyed city is a rupture in human continuity.
Gaza as an urban catastrophe
According to Benguita's study, more than 70 percent of Gaza's built environment had, by the period examined, been destroyed or rendered non-functional. The article draws upon satellite imagery and damage assessments from UNOSAT, UNDP and OCHA, alongside quantitative material from institutions including the World Bank, FAO and the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.
The significance of such destruction cannot be measured simply in square meters.
Imagine a city in which enormous portions of its housing stock disappear.
Then imagine its hospitals operating under conditions of extreme disruption.
Then its roads, water systems, electricity infrastructure, educational institutions and other civic structures becoming increasingly dysfunctional.
The result is not merely homelessness.
It is the unmaking of urban life.
That phrase from Benguita's title deserves particular attention.
Unmaking.
Because destruction does not only remove what existed yesterday.
It can also constrain what becomes possible tomorrow.
A destroyed university cannot educate students until it is rebuilt.
A destroyed water network cannot provide water until it is restored.
A destroyed hospital cannot serve a population simply because the people who worked there remain alive.
And a demolished neighborhood cannot immediately recover the social relationships, memories and institutions that once gave it meaning.
The rubble therefore contains a second story—one about the future.
The architecture of absence
Perhaps the most unsettling dimension of urbicide is that destruction can eventually become absence.
A building disappears.
Then the street changes.
The neighborhood changes.
The landscape changes.
Eventually, someone unfamiliar with the place may look at the empty space and never know what stood there.
This is why Benguita connects physical destruction with questions of memory, identity and political continuity. His study argues that urban destruction can have symbolic consequences because buildings and spaces preserve collective histories.
Cities remember.
They remember through streets named after people.
Through old houses.
Through schools.
Through mosques and churches.
Through cemeteries.
Through markets.
Through photographs.
Through the ordinary geography of childhood.
When those places disappear, memory becomes harder to anchor in physical space.
This does not mean that memory disappears. Gaza's experience demonstrates precisely the opposite: people continue to remember, document, narrate and rebuild meaning amid devastation.
But the struggle becomes different.
The city itself can no longer speak in the same way.
From destruction to uninhabitability
Another important contribution of the article is its attention to infrastructure.
Modern warfare does not necessarily have to destroy every building in order to make an urban environment extraordinarily difficult to inhabit.
Destroy enough interconnected systems and the city begins to fail as a system.
Electricity affects hospitals.
Road destruction affects movement and emergency response.
Water infrastructure affects public health.
Damage to sanitation systems creates additional risks.
The destruction of housing produces displacement.
The destruction of educational institutions interrupts social continuity.
These effects interact.
This is what makes infrastructure so important to understanding contemporary warfare.
The question is no longer simply:
How many buildings were destroyed?
It becomes:
Can the city still function as a city?
That is a much more frightening question.
The ruins are also political
Benguita's article goes further, placing urbicide within broader debates about colonialism, sovereignty and spatial power. His theoretical framework draws on critical urban studies, settler-colonial scholarship, postcolonial geography and necropolitics.
These are interpretive frameworks, and reasonable scholars may disagree about how they should be applied to Gaza.
But the underlying empirical question remains extraordinarily important:
What does the destruction of urban infrastructure do to a population's ability to remain, return and rebuild?
This question moves us beyond photographs of rubble.
It forces us to think about political futurity.
A population does not live only in the present.
People live through expectations:
Where will my children go to school?
Where will I work?
Where will my family live?
Where will we receive medical treatment?
Where will we bury our dead?
Where will our children remember their childhood?
Where will the next generation build its life?
When the physical foundations of those possibilities are destroyed, the consequences extend far beyond the moment of bombardment.
Yet Gaza is not only a story of destruction
There is another dimension of Benguita's study that deserves equal attention.
The article does not portray Gaza simply as passive ruins.
It also identifies forms of social, symbolic and spatial resistance emerging from within devastation. Communities continue to create forms of endurance and political meaning despite the destruction surrounding them.
That may be one of the deepest truths about cities.
A city is not ultimately identical with its buildings.
Buildings can be demolished.
A city's people can continue to remember it.
A university can be destroyed.
The intellectual life of its scholars can continue.
A neighborhood can disappear.
Its former residents can still tell their children what stood there.
A home can become rubble.
Its photographs, keys, stories and memories can survive.
This is why rebuilding Gaza cannot ultimately mean merely reconstructing concrete.
Reconstruction is also reconstruction of memory, community, dignity and the possibility of a future.
What remains after the rubble?
Perhaps this is the question that should haunt anyone looking at Gaza today.
Not only:
How much has been destroyed?
But:
What has destruction made impossible?
And:
What will it take to make those possibilities possible again?
Benguita concludes by calling for further research into post-urbicidal recovery, memory politics and spatial justice.
That is an important direction.
Because the history of Gaza will not end when the bombing stops.
The aftermath will contain another enormous struggle: rebuilding homes, hospitals, schools, universities, water systems, roads and civic institutions—but also reconstructing the social fabric that made those places meaningful.
There will be an accounting of concrete.
There will also be an accounting of memory.
And perhaps, most importantly, there will be an accounting of human possibility.
A city can be measured in buildings.
But a civilization should be measured by what it believes a human being deserves.
Gaza therefore confronts the world with a question larger than architecture:
When we watch a city being dismantled, are we witnessing the destruction of structures—or are we witnessing the destruction of the conditions through which human beings build a future?
The answer may determine how history remembers this moment.
Because rubble is never only rubble.
Sometimes, it is the physical evidence of what a society chose to destroy.
And sometimes, amid the ruins, it becomes the beginning of the question:
What must humanity rebuild—not only in Gaza, but in itself?
Source: Mourad Benguita, “Urbicide in Israel’s War on Gaza: Architecture of Erasure and the Unmaking of Urban Life (2023–2025),” Filistin Araştırmaları Dergisi / Bulletin of Palestine Studies, no. 18 (2025): 397–417. The article was published December 31, 2025, and uses satellite imagery, UNOSAT/UNDP/OCHA damage assessments, quantitative institutional data, and critical urban and postcolonial theory.
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