After two failed attempts in March and April of 1917, the last day of October saw British forces breaking through the Ottoman defences. A unit of the Australian cavalry rode undetected within the still-dry stream of Wadi Gaza's southern tributary, Wadi al-Saba, into Beersheba. They broke through the Ottoman army flank and overran the small Turkish garrison there. The divergence disoriented the Ottoman defenders and the town of Gaza was easily overrun.¹ It took two days for the news to arrive in London.² On 2 November 1917 the letter from the British prime minister containing the Balfour Declaration, promising to support the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine, was sent. The declaration had been written weeks earlier and only awaited this military breakthrough before being issued. The roads north to Palestine's cities were open. Jerusalem fell before Christmas, the Ottoman era of Palestine ended within a year, the British Mandate was established and started implementing the principles of the Balfour Declaration in supporting Jewish immigration and Zionist colonisation.³

After the war, European scientists undertook measurements to determine the exact location of the elusive threshold of the desert. Factoring temperature and evaporation, the desert was defined to be areas with less than 200 millimetres of annual rainfall, the minimum necessary, their experiments showed, to cultivate cereals on a flat surface without artificial irrigation.⁴ From that time on, rain in the region was measured and mapped. Like a shoreline, the rain line ebbs and flows. In plentiful years, grasses flow southwards past Rafah; in drought years the parched yellows of the desert crawl northwards past Wadi Gaza. These fluctuations were averaged out, and a line was drawn on the map. In each meteorological map the path of this line is slightly different, but in all of them it is somewhere between Wadi Gaza in the north and Rafah in the south. From there the so-called 'aridity line' moves east of Hebron and then over the slopes of the Jordan Valley, past the border to Jordan, later to disappear behind Jabal Amman, and continues along the edge of the great Syrian Desert. On most meteorological maps it is across the aridity line that the gradient of blue stripes flips over to yellows and browns.5

The Wadi Gaza line beyond which Palestinians were expelled is no longer the border of Palestine, and artificial irrigation with purified or desalinated water has expanded cultivation southwards well beyond it, further blurring the threshold of the desert. Superimposing the 13 October expulsion order over historical and meteorological maps of Palestine, however, demonstrates a curious coincidence. Israel displaced Palestinians into the 'white part' of Palestine's nineteenth-century maps; and from the blue to the yellow parts of its meteorological ones. The long-forgotten wadi seems to have re-emerged from the Zionist cartographic subconscious — shaped equally by nineteenth-century Christian theologians and travellers and by meteorological science — and has since been absorbed into the gorged ego of the Israeli government, with its expansionary ethos, becoming the main territorial element organising the logic of the Gaza genocide: the largest attempt at population transfer in the history of Palestine.

​​Soil

Geology closely interacted with the area’s history. Life and death on the south-western coast of Palestine is organised in relation to soil. The area is formed by an encounter between sand and sediment, moving in opposite directions. Sand is a mixture of grains of different substances and origins.⁶ It starts its journey from afar. Massive granite rocks in the high plateaus of central East Africa, around today's Ethiopia and Eritrea, slowly erode into small particles of rock (sand is defined as grains around two millimetres in size). Millions of cubic metres of sand aggregate drain annually into the Nile and get carried 7,000 kilometres downstream before pouring into the Mediterranean. There, the sand is transported eastwards by sea currents.

At the bottom of the sea, the Nile sand mixes with small particles of marine skeletons, shells and corals. Coastal waves throw large quantities of this now marine sand all along the Palestinian shoreline. There it rises into dunes that drift, wave-like, further inland. A few kilometres from the coastline the east-drifting dunes meet viscous soil draining in the opposite direction from the Hebron Mountains towards the coast. Small quantities of lime dust from the mountain rocks are enough to crystallise the sand into a brittle and light sand-stone, known locally as kurkar.⁷ The sand dunes get petrified into three ridges, ancient dunes that rise parallel to the coastline. The first sandstone ridge right at the water's edge is a fifty-metre-high cliff overhanging the sea like a frozen wave. It is where the al-Shati refugee camp would be built shortly after 1948.⁸ Some three kilometres inland, the second sandstone ridge reaches eighty metres in height, and is where the al-Bureij and al-Maghazi refugee camps would be built along the southern bank of Wadi Gaza. Approximately ten kilo-metres from the coastline and more than a hundred metres above sea level, is the third and highest of the sandstone waves. It is there that the village of Main Abu Sitta was located, and it is along its entire length that the first line of kibbutz settlements that enclosed Gaza would be built after the expulsions of 1948.⁹

Each of the three types of soil — clay, sand and sandstone — had historically given rise to different manufactured products. Lime-rich clay is suitable for pottery, and the quartz-rich marine sand enabled early experiments in glass production that the areas Phoenician inhabitants were famous for since at least a century before Christ. The natural occurrence of sandstone inspired the area's ancient inhabitants to produce lime-mortar cement, an early form of concrete.¹⁰

The meeting point between sand and sediment is roughly three kilometres from the shoreline. Along it runs the main branch of the region's oldest trade routes, the coastal road known by the Romans as the Via Maris or ‘Way of the Sea’, which linked the kingdoms of the Nile, through northern Sinai and Palestine with those of the Euphrates. If you drive north along this route, on your left will be sand and on your right, fertile agricultural soil. The main facilitators of trade along this route were, in recent centuries, clans affiliated to the al-Tarabin tribal confederacy. The part of this route going through the Gaza Strip coincides roughly with Salah al-Din Road, Gaza's main traffic artery and commercial spine (it was along this road that on 13 October 2023 Israel ordered the southwards evacuation of Gaza City, and on which it attacked those marching).¹¹

BOOK

In his revelatory new book Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide (Penguin, 2026), Eyal Weizman draws on that research to bring us on an eye-opening journey across time and into the 'deep cartography' of the area extending from Gaza’s subterranean tunnels through to its militarised topography, its unique soil, settlements and barriers. He catalogues, in unflinching and forensic detail, the Israeli campaigns of violence and displacement that have reshaped the region in an effort to make Gaza and its surrounding areas unliveable. Ungrounding establishes that architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between coloniser and colonised, forming an essential document of atrocity in our time.

BIO

Eyal Weizman is the founder and director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where, in 2005, he founded the Centre for Research Architecture. He is the author of numerous books, including but not limited to Hollow Land (Verso ,2007), The Least of all Possible Evils (Verso, 2017), Forensis (Sternberg Press, 2014), Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (Zone Books, 2017). In 2020 he received a MBE for services to architecture. Forensic Architecture is the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, a Peabody Award for interactive media, the European Cultural Foundation Award for Culture and the RIBA Charles Jencks Award.

NOTES

1 FA, A Spatial Analysis, p. 510.

2 Humeyra Pamuk and Mike Stone, 'Exclusive: US Has Sent Israel Thousands of 2,00o-Pound Bombs since Oct. 7', Reuters, 29 June 2024, reuters.com/world/us-has-sent-israel-thousands-2000-pound-bombs-since-oct-7-2024-06-28/. During the war's first year, the United States supplied Israel with 14,000 MK-84 bombs, each weighing 2,000 pounds, which can be adapted into ground-penetrating bombs.

3 FA, A Spatial Analysis, pp. 723, 799.

4 We later found that in the first year after October 2023 three-quarters of schools, more than 80 per cent of university, government and religious buildings, and almost all cultural heritage sites, were destroyed. FA, A Spatial Analysis, p. 507.

5 Yuval Abraham, '"A Mass Assassination Factory": Inside Israel's Calculated Bombing of Gaza', +972 Magazine, 30 November 2023, 972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/; Shaked Cohen, "This is How Intelligence Corps Exposed Hundreds of Kilometres of Hamas' Metro', IDF, 27 May 2021; Edo Ben Porar, 'Chief of Staff Kokhavi to Senior Command Staff: My Father Used to Say "I Am Not a Religious Person But I Fear God", Channel 7, 13 September 2022, inn.co.il/news/577293 (in Hebrew).

6 In response to international criticism of the 2008-09 bombing invasion of Gaza, the Israeli army publicised the extent to which military experts in the laws of war, referred to as 'legal advisers, were involved in overseeing and signing off pre-planned aerial strikes. These war lawyers, often trained in the best law schools in Europe, the US and Israel, try to find ways to use the law to further military objectives. Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils, op. cit.; Craig Jones, The War Lawyers: The United States, Israel, and Juridical Warfare (Oxford University Press, 2020).

7 Brigadier General Y. S., The Human Machine Team: How to Create Synergy Between Human and Artificial Intelligence That Will Revolutionize Our World (independently published, 2021), p. 17; Harry Davies and Bethan McKernan, 'Top Israeli Spy Chief Exposes His True Identity in Online Security Lapse, Guardian, 5 April 2024, theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/os/ top-israeli-spy-chief-exposes-his-true-identity-in-online-security-lapse.

8 Nahum Barnea, "The Wars of Herzl Halevi, Ynetnews, 20 March 2025, ynet.co.il/yedioth/article/yokra14303894 (in Hebrew).

9 Abraham, "A Mass Assasination Factory'' op. cit.

10 Barnea, op. cit.

11 Júlia Nueno Guitart, "The Target Factory', Verso blog, 30 September 2024, versobooks.com/blogs/news/the-target-factory. The term is borrowed from her as yet unpublished PhD manuscript. See also Francesca Albanese, 'Anatomy of a Genocide: Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territory Occupied since 1967, A/HRC/ss/73 (United Nations, 2024), see un.org/unispal/document/anatomy-of-a-genocide-report-of-the-special-rapporteur-on-the-situation-of-human-rights-in-the-palestinian-territory-occupied-since-1967-to-human-rights-council-advance-unedited-version-a-hrc-ss/ The 25 October 2023 attack on the al-Taj tower in Gaza City, while occupied by civilians, killed 1o1 people, including forty-four children, and injured hundreds. The Israeli army justified the attack by saying it was aiming at a Hamas tunnel passing under the building.