A response to Eyal Weizman’s “All they will find is sand” – Verena Buser and Avraham Russell Shalev
- The Cartography of a Slander
In his recent analysis, “All they will find is sand,” Eyal Weizman uses the tools of forensic architecture to map Gaza’s physical landscape’s destruction. With great pathos, he argues that the “ungrounding” of Gaza—the systematic demolition of its buildings, the churning of its soil, and the erasure of its archives—constitutes a genocidal campaign to render the territory uninhabitable. For Weizman, the “sand” left behind is not merely the debris of war but the intentional end product of a Zionist settler-colonial project that seeks the total displacement of the Palestinian people.
However, Weizman’s analysis suffers from a profound methodological blind spot. By focusing exclusively on the “above,” he overlooks the most significant military factor of the conflict: the “below.” In his lengthy essay, Weizman never mentions Hamas’ formidable military network deeply embedded underneath and throughout Gaza’s city life. This omission is not merely a technical oversight; it is the foundation of a “genocide canard” that replaces military necessity with a pathologized version of state intent.
For Weizman, this itself is the stock pattern of “Zionist settler-colonialism” – the constant drive to expand the state’s borders, necessitating ever greater displacement of Palestinians. Weizman puts the cart before the horse – Zionism is genocidal and expansionist, therefore Israel’s military actions are genocidal and expansionist. His article is based on the problematic research of a project called “Cartography of Genocide: Israel’s Conduct in Gaza since October 2023” by Forensic Architecture. This is a London-based investigative agency led by Eyal Weizman that uses architectural methods to investigate human rights violations, state violence and environmental crimes.
- The “Two Gazas”: Above and Below
Weizman’s argument rests on a meticulous, almost reverent, cataloging of Gaza’s “built environment.” Through Forensic Architecture’s lens, he presents Gaza as composed of schools, universities, bakeries, and heritage sites—what he terms the “ground” of Palestinian life. For Weizman, the destruction of these structures is not a byproduct of combat but a deliberate “spatial violence” intended to erase the physical possibility of Palestinian existence. By mapping the ruins of the Islamic University or Gaza City’s archives, he constructs a narrative of “urbicide,” in which the removal of every pillar and foundation is read as a step toward the “final displacement” of the population.
In nearly 5,000 words, it is telling that Weizman mentions Hamas a total of four times – twice to mention Hamas attacking Israeli “settlements” (within the pre-1967 Israel) on October 7th, and twice to describe them as Gaza’s current governing group. Nowhere does Weizman note the 500-600 kilometers of tunnels that Hamas dug throughout Gaza, connecting military bases, weapons depots, and facilities. The reader comes away with no understanding of Israel’s demolition project besides an insatiable desire to kill and expel Palestinians.
That alone should raise red flags as to Weizman’s fidelity to facts and their honest interpretation. Gaza’s tunnel system is one of the most intricate and extensive in the history of modern warfare, due in large part to Gaza’s soft sandstone topography. Gaza’s underground allows Hamas to shelter, regroup and attack Israeli soldiers. Small groups of terrorists are able to stealthily emerge from hidden shafts to ambush or fire at Israel. The only way to dismantle this challenge is through slow and painstaking operations, tunnel by tunnel. Hamas’s tunnel network has been called the “Viet Cong times 10” and is far more extensive than the improvised tunnels used by the Islamic State in Mosul and Raqqa. These tunnels are lined with prefabricated reinforced concrete, making them resilient even to heavy ordnance. Some are deep enough (up to 80 meters) and wide enough to accommodate small vehicles or rocket launchers.
Hamas succeeded in turning Gaza into a 360-degree battleground, using Gaza’s dense urban environment to fight guerrilla warfare. A New York Times investigative report from July 2024 stated:
They hide under residential neighborhoods, storing their weapons in miles of tunnels and in houses, mosques, sofas – even a child’s bedroom – blurring the boundary between civilians and combatants. They emerge from hiding in plainclothes, sometimes wearing sandals or tracksuits before firing on Israeli troops, attaching mines to their vehicles, or firing rockets from launchers in civilian areas… Using civilian homes and infrastructure – including medical facilities, U.N. offices and mosques – to conceal fighters, tunnel entrances, booby-traps and ammunition stores.
The most cynical expression of the “Below” compromising the “Above” is Hamas’s systemic exploitation of Gaza’s medical infrastructure. Weizman views hospitals like al-Shifa as sacred civilian nodes, and their destruction can only be explained by a genocidal desire to end life. Yet the forensic evidence reveals that these sites function as the vital organs of Hamas’s military body.
The integration of al-Shifa into Hamas’s operational grid is not a recent development but a long-standing, grim reality. As far back as the 2009 conflict, the IDF documented the closure of entire hospital wings to house operational headquarters. This “dual-purpose” nature of the facility was an open secret; Dave Harden, former USAID mission director, noted that during his tenure in 2014, it was “broadly understood” that the hospital served as a command base—a fact corroborated by journalists and UN staff who personally observed armed fighters within its walls.
The human cost of this architectural abuse is evident in the testimonies of those held captive in this “medical” labyrinth. Released hostages such as Maya Regev and Emily Damari have described being dragged into hospitals not for healing but for torture and coerced surgeries performed without anesthesia. Damari’s account of a surgeon introducing himself as “Dr. Hamas” at al-Shifa is a chilling testament to Hamas’ cynical abuse of even hospitals to inflict death.
When the IDF conducted targeted operations at al-Shifa in early 2024—apprehending nearly 500 terrorists and neutralizing senior internal security officials such as Faiq al-Mabhouh—they were not attacking an innocent civilian target. They were neutralizing a military stronghold that had used the “Above” (the hospital) as a legal and physical shield for the “Below” (the command hub). Similarly, IDF operations at Kamal Adwan hospital led to the capture of over 240 captured Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorists—some of whom participated in the October 7 massacre. By omitting this systematic abuse, Weizman has the reader believe that Israel is motivated solely by a desire to destroy the conditions of life in Gaza.
Weizman’s narrative of “cultural genocide” relies heavily on the image of destroyed schools as symbols of an erased future. Yet the forensic record of the Gaza conflict shows that these sites were strategically integrated into Hamas’s defensive web. The destruction of these buildings is not an attack on education; it is the inevitable result of a military strategy that seeks to transform protected civilian sanctuaries into operational command centers.
The exploitation of these sites is so pervasive that it has forced a rare rift between Gaza’s civilian population and its governing militants. As reported by The New York Times, displaced Gazans—well aware that a Hamas presence invites immediate IDF strikes—have sometimes attempted to physically block armed operatives from entering school shelters. Gazan-American writer and peace activist Ahmed Alkhatib posted for example about al-Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis on 10 November 2025: “…This hospital, like all of Gaza’s medical facilities, has become a police, intelligence, prison, and torture center run by Hamas to ensure it maintains its grip on the people of Gaza.” Even anti-Israel NGOs have admitted the deliberate abuse of civilian infrastructure . But ideology can blind its activists to reality.
The scale of this tactical embedding is extensive. From the start of the conflict through early 2025, the IDF conducted strikes on dozens of school compounds—such as the Al-Taba’een, Al-Jaouni, and Nuseirat facilities—targeting command-and-control centers embedded within them. In many cases, these strikes were followed by the release of the names of eliminated combatants, including those who participated in the October 7th massacres.
- Ignoring the Realities of War
Weizman invokes a selective reading of the Genocide Convention while performing a rhetorical sleight of hand, replacing intent with outcome. Genocide is so heinous a crime that it requires a special intent to destroy a national, ethnic, religious, or racial group. As the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia said in the Jelisic case, ‘it is in fact the mens rea which gives genocide its specialty and distinguishes it from an ordinary crime and other crimes against international humanitarian law’. Of course, Israel has no intention of destroying the Gazans, so Weizman is forced to sidestep the issue. Instead, his “smoking gun” is the widespread infrastructure destruction in Gaza and deliberately ignores critical, empirical sources for his article.
Military experts recognize that urban warfare is catastrophic, and Gaza is among the most difficult urban theaters of conflict in history. According to the UK’s Ministry of Defense, “the urban environment will be one of the most challenging areas to operate in.” In Urban Warfare in the Twenty-first Century, Professor Anthony King of the University of Warwick writes that “today, urban warfare has coalesced into grueling micro-sieges, which extend from street level—and below—to the airspace high above the city—as combatants fight for individual buildings, streets, and districts.” Prior to the Gaza war, the US-led battle against the Islamic State in Mosul (2016-2017) was considered the heaviest urban combat since the Second World War. It led to the near-total destruction of the city’s western half and rendered over 80% of the city uninhabitable. Similarly, the US-backed operation in Raqqa, Syria (2017), left the city characterized as “unfit for human habitation,” with approximately 80% of its structures damaged or destroyed owing to extremely heavy bombardment.
- Dirk Moses’ Flawed Framework
Weizman’s “bait-and-switch” on this point is no mistake but reflects A. Dirk Moses’ “permanent security” framework, which Weizman cites approvingly. For Moses, “permanent security is the unattainable goal of absolute safety that necessarily results in civilian casualties by its paranoid tendency to indiscriminate violence.” When applied to Israel, Palestinians are seen as a “permanent threat” to be neutralized or displaced. Moses writes rhetorically in The Problems of Genocide, ‘Does it matter to civilian victims whether violence is carried out with genocidal or military intentions?’. He thus elevates the concept of ‘permanent security’, which he attributes to the modern state, to the status of the ‘crime of crimes’, rather than to engage in serious academic scholarship. He empties the term “genocide” of any recognizable content, redefined as the mass killing of civilians (intentionally or not) in the pursuit of security. In this context, genocide is just one of the means by which Western states seek to achieve permanent security, alongside war crimes and crimes against humanity. Weizman and Moses both have been claiming genocide in Gaza for the past two years, all the while ignoring Hamas’s and Islamic Jihad’s existence and accusing Israel of deliberately targeting civilians. The framework of “permanent security” inverts the very serious security threats that Israeli facts. In fact, the greater the danger that Israel faces from its neighbours, the greater the indictment of Israel’s supposed genocidal bloodlust.
Both Weizman and Moses are inspired by postcolonial approaches to the Holocaust as a “colonial genocide” which deliberately downplay antisemitism as the root cause of the genocide of Jews in Europe, to North Africa and the Middle East. As such, it is not surprising that they apply analogies and comparisons to the German genocide in today´s Namibia of the Herero and Nama people. Weizman who is convinced that there were “three genocides” under German responsibility – for German Southwest Africa, the Holocaust and now Gaza. Claiming the genocide in Gaza as the third in this series is, on the one hand, a consequence of the entry of post-colonial theory into Holocaust research, which often insinuates a continuity between the genocide in present-day Namibia and the Holocaust without empirical evidence. The social scientist Ingo Elbe rightly describes this type of ideological view as a “progressive attack” on historical memory
The “three genocides” theory is a consequence of the “victim of the victims” thesis promoted by Edward Said, according to which the Palestinians are the victims of Europe’s victims, ie Jews. In effect, this theory is a soft-core version of Holocaust revisionism and inversion. For anti-Israel propagandists, insinuating that the Jews are the new Nazis is too great a temptation to be avoided.
Forensic Architecture’s German branch, Forensis, was also at the forefront of claims of state violence in the aftermath of ‘Naqba Day’ in Berlin in 2025. This claim has no basis in reality, despite Forensic Architecture’s frequent references to ‘state suppression’ of solidarity with Palestinians in Germany. This forms part of their one-sided agenda, which involves distorting facts and selectively interpreting reality for political gain. Extremism expert Rebecca Schönenbach has critiqued this approach: “The more often a narrative is repeated, the more firmly it becomes entrenched in the public consciousness as the truth. Unlike propaganda, which is repeated countless times, corrections to the claims made in Hamas-controlled ‘reporting’ from the Gaza Strip are unable to set the record straight. “
Weizman frequently appears alongside Francesca Albanese, the antisemitic UN Special Rapporteur who uses the language of human rights to promote the violent destruction of the Jewish state. Tellingly, she saw the June 2024 Israeli hostage rescue operation. as ‘proof’ of genocide because civilians were killed during the Israeli military operation. Hamas had held Noa Argamani and the two men hostage in the densely populated Jabalia area. Furthermore, she frequently spouts antisemitic conspiracy theories. She claimed that forest fires in Los Angeles were connected to the conflict in Gaza: ‘On our small planet, all injustices are interconnected’, and she retweeted the statement: ‘The fires raging today in Palestine and Los Angeles are symptoms of the same disease: a system that prioritises conquest over preservation, profit over people and expansion over existence.’
Albanese recently toured Germany. In Cologne, she faced criminal charges for her remarks, while in Berlin she spoke to a heated audience about allegedly rape-trained dogs targeting Palestinians.
Ultimately, Weizman’s analysis reveals itself to be less a rigorous forensic investigation and more a meticulously constructed “cartography of slander”. By prioritizing political theater over a complete accounting of the “above” and “below,” Weizman abandons intellectual honesty, producing a distorted body of work that functions as a “genocide canard” rather than an honest pursuit of truth.
