How Israel’s urbicide in Gaza provides evidence of genocidal intent

Half of Gaza's buildings, including hospitals and homes, and hundreds of sites of cultural and religious significance, have been damaged or destroyed since Israel's war on Gaza began in October 2023.

This, said South African Ambassador Vusimuzi Madonsela, adds to evidence of Israel’s acts of genocide against Palestine.

Speaking at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in South Africa’s legal case against Israel on May 16, Madonsela said the severity of the war in Gaza had almost "knocked Gaza off the map".

Satellite imagery analysis reveals that around 50 percent of the total structures in Gaza and approximately 62 percent of all homes have been damaged or destroyed.

The systematic destruction of Gazan libraries, archives, mosques, churches, and other cultural institutions or artefacts “must be seen as an effort to eradicate any basis for Palestinian statehood and nationhood,” Dr Marko Attila Hoare, an Associate Professor of History who currently leads Bosnian Genocide research project at Sarajevo School of Science and Technology, tells TRT World.

The catastrophic damage has left more than a million Palestinians without homes and nearly 2.3 million residents displaced, facing acute shortages of food, clean water, and medical services.

But the ongoing war has also threatened another sense of belonging for Palestinians in Gaza.

Erasing Gaza’s history

Targeted shelling and airstrikes on sites of religious and cultural significance has disfigured Gaza, undermining the ancient connection Palestinians have with their land, history, and identity, experts say.

Among the destroyed sites are the Great Omari Mosque, the largest and oldest mosque in Gaza, believed to stand on the site of an ancient Philistine temple, and the fifth-century Byzantine church of Jabalia, dating back to 444 CE. This church, one of the most important in the Levant, had recently undergone a three-year restoration of its mosaic floors before being reduced to rubble.

This obliteration of Gaza’s built environment and cultural heritage of Palestinians is what the legal team cited as evidence in South Africa’s case to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), arguing that Israel is committing acts of genocide and other war crimes.

The lawsuit, first heard in January, stated that “Israel has damaged and destroyed numerous centres of Palestinian learning and culture,” including museums, libraries, archives, universities, and religious and archaeological sites.

The international outcry over Israel’s devastating onslaught, which has levelled Gaza’s ancient multi-civilisational heritage and collective history, has invoked several derivations of the word "genocide."

Killing all hope of survival

The deliberate targeting of landmarks of cultural and historical significance is nothing new and has been used as a method of warfare in past conflicts.

The widespread destruction of urban environments and civilian infrastructure, is considered an extension of genocide, a term referred to as "urbicide”.

“Raphael Lemkin, who originally coined the term 'genocide' in 1944, strongly believed that the concept should encompass the destruction of the cultural (historical, religious, etc.) heritage of the victim group,” Dr Hoare explained.

Literally translated as “massacring a city” from Latin – urbs, meaning “city”, and occido, meaning “to massacre” –, the concept of urbicide, although first coined in the 1960s, gained prominence during the Bosnian War in the early 1990s, particularly in reference to the siege of Sarajevo.

During the four-year siege of Sarajevo, which resulted in the killings of over 11,000 people, predominantly Bosniak Muslims, including 1,600 children, Bosnian-Serb forces led by General Ratko Mladić deliberately targeted civilian areas and key institutions with shelling and sniping.

This onslaught destroyed almost all of the city's cultural, religious, and residential buildings, as well as its infrastructure.

The destruction of Sarajevo’s significant monuments such as the National Library and the Oriental Studies Institute not only inflicted physical damage but also significantly damaged the city's cultural identity and historical heritage. This deliberate destruction sparked international condemnation, with accusations that the Bosnian-Serbs were attempting to "erase Bosnia’s history”.

The initial indictments at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) against figures like Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, as well as the ‘Bosnian Indictment’ against Slobodan Milosevic, accused them of the “intentional and wanton destruction of religious and cultural buildings, including mosques, churches, and libraries”.

Expert evidence presented at ICTY trials demonstrated that the destruction of cultural and religious property was intentional and played a crucial role in proving the crime of genocide.

Dr Hoare says, “Milosevic's Serbia did not aim to exterminate all Bosniaks or Albanians in the manner of the Nazi Holocaust or the Rwandan genocide, but to kill one part of them while expelling the rest, to 'cleanse' the territory to annex (Bosnia) or integrate it fully (Kosovo) into Serbia”.

This strategy included the destruction of cultural heritage to undermine the victim groups' identity, he adds.

Intent to destroy

Hoare explains that the Bosnian genocide was largely driven by the intent to destroy Bosnian statehood and prevent the emergence of an independent Bosnia. He draws a parallel between Netanyahu's Israel and Milosevic's Serbia, suggesting that both employ similar genocidal strategies aimed at creating a 'Greater' state through massacres and expulsions.

Israel intends to "kill one part and expel the rest,” making life untenable for Palestinians in their homeland, Dr Hoare says, and this process includes the destruction of Gaza’s urban infrastructure and cultural heritage.

Law for Palestine, a human rights organisation, has submitted substantial evidence to the International Criminal Court (ICC), the world’s top war crime court, making a compelling case for Israel’s genocidal intent against Palestinians in Gaza.

Along with the extensive rhetoric and policy analysis of Israeli leaders, the 200-page report has also highlighted systematic targeting and destruction of Palestinian culture, heritage, and education systems, alongside ecocidal and domicidal policies and practices in Gaza as additionally proving genocidal intent.

Mirrored war crimes

Hariz Halilovich, Professor of Global Studies at Australia’s RMIT University, draws parallels between the strategies used by General Ratko Mladic in Bosnia and the tactics employed by Israeli forces in Gaza.

He explains that Mladic’s strategy involved "stretching sanity by deliberately carpet bombing every infrastructure building, homes, museums, mosques, churches, and libraries to kill any hope, any idea of survival by the people he targeted”.

This strategy, Halilovich asserts, is mirrored in Gaza, where there is "a complete disregard for any civilian infrastructure, complete disregard for protected buildings such as hospitals, schools, sacred objects, as all that has been destroyed.” This, he adds, constitutes a war crime.

Israel’s defence

While legal experts and scholars have pointed to statements by top Israeli officials, such as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant, for whom the ICC sought arrest warrants on May 22, as evidence of genocidal intent, Efraim Inbar, President of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, repeats the Israeli state’s talking points.

Refusing to view the situation rationally and calling Israel’s actions genocidal, Inbar tells TRT World that Israel’s conduct “is the logical way to deal with the strategy of Hamas”, calling the country’s reckless military doctrine a purely “defensive” measure.

Ignoring the mass casualties inflicted upon Palestinians, including women and children, Inbar insists that Israel takes measures to minimise harm to the civilian population in Gaza. Echoing the Israeli military’s propaganda, he said the Israeli army makes prior announcements about their potentially violent entry into civilian areas.

“So if all the civilians would have indeed moved and taken care of their lives, there would be no casualties,” he claims, while the facts on the ground are completely the opposite.