The Caterpillar machines have lingered in these lands for many decades. In August 1950, the region that would come to be termed the Gaza Strip was cut off from the broader Palestinian terrain by a trench excavated along the soil with a solitary plough pulled by a tractor. A historical photograph captures the moment, showing the tractor as a World War II-era Caterpillar, model D6, at the head of a convoy of military vehicles. Behind it came Israeli and Egyptian troops and observers from the United Nations who were monitoring the truce.
An Israeli soldier named Amnon Degieli described the scene. “A jeep with the two sector commanders, the Israeli and the Egyptian, led a convoy of vehicles. The officers held a map at a scale of 1:100,000 on which the border was sketched with a thick pencil line. On the ground the width of the pencil line was one hundred metres.” Entire homesteads and farms fell within it. Mordechai Galili, another soldier who, like Degieli, had grown up in a nearby kibbutz named Nirim, recounted the process for the settlement bulletin. He said Israeli and Egyptian troops “argued over every millimetre…the bargaining was like in a fish market. There were arguments over every tree.” In the scorching August heat, the “American major”—likely one of the Colombian UN officers stationed at the frontier—“took off his shirt to sunbathe.” The photograph reveals several soldiers lounging in what appears to be an abandoned field, while the task of partitioning Palestine was underway. The “American” dictated the terms. “A signal was given, and the tractor ploughs a straight line right through orchards, vineyards and wadis.” The ploughing persisted segment after segment. In one place, Galili notes, “the tractor climbs over a cactus fence and parts it with pleasure.”
Elsewhere, alarmed Palestinian farmers—witnessing the trench as it widened and began to sever them from their lands—surrounded the convoy. The Israelis taunted them: “Take a photograph of this place because you will not see it again.” A Palestinian man cried out that they would soon recover their land and told the settlers to return to where they came from. A desperate farmer implored the Egyptian officers to shift the line beyond his field. The Egyptians impatiently brushed him aside. Along another stretch, “an orchard of plum and apricot trees ended up on our side. The owners are on the other side of the line. In front of their eyes we fill our stomachs and pockets, and throw the fruit stone at them, ‘Eat some!’” The ploughing advanced from north to south, and the landscape grew dense with fields and orchards.
At another point, Palestinian farmers realized that the plough was about to bisect two neighboring villages. “The people in the villages of Abasan and Khiza‘a came out in force, screaming, shouting, and yelling.” Women and children gathered around the convoy. The demarcation operation was halted, and the Egyptian army guided the convoy away. On this occasion, the Palestinian farmers managed to push the line a bit farther from their lands.
This fleeting victory would be chronicled many years later by Salman Abu Sitta, who, on 14 May 1948—the day Israel proclaimed its state when he was ten years old—was expelled with his family from their agricultural village of Ma‘in Abu Sitta (al-Ma‘in), perched on a sandstone hill roughly three kilometres on the Israeli-controlled side of the plough line and overlooking Khan Younis, the coast, and beyond the horizon the Egyptian Sinai Desert. Abu Sitta has since become one of the most prolific chroniclers of the ongoing Palestinian Nakba and one of the strongest advocates for Palestinian return. In February 2025, Salman visited the offices of Forensic Architecture, the London-based research collective I oversee. Together we engaged in a careful digital reconstruction of al-Ma‘in—a village whose architecture, farming practices, and history are central to this project.
Ploughing was an act of double erasure, both of what existed and of the traces that any erasure had at all taken place.
The plough line did not constitute an internationally recognized border, yet it gave rise to two new, interdependent territorial units: the Gaza Strip as a settlement focus for roughly 200,000 refugees displaced from 247 villages and towns, in addition to the region’s original 80,000 inhabitants; and the Gaza Envelope, a frontier zone designed to confine them. The distinction between the two sides of the plough line was stark, Galili notes: “The Egyptian side is dark with Arabs and their herds while the Israeli side is empty.” Officially established only in the early 2000s, the term “Envelope” was used to justify state subsidies in the area and aptly describes the frontier zone of civilian and military facilities that began to arise as the Gaza Strip was formed, intended to enclose it and place it under a perpetual siege.
Nirim, the kibbutz from which the border–plough crews originated, rose on the ruins of al-Ma‘in. It fortified itself behind a fence and trench system shaped like a pentagon—a centuries-old military design. The settlers cleared away the ruins, and over the years erased most remaining traces of al-Ma‘in—save for one concrete building and a deep well that they repurposed. The method of erasure was cultivation. The settlers ploughed over every surface feature—buildings, the stone walls dividing plots of wheat and barley, vegetable gardens, pedestrian paths, roads for vehicles, storage depots, the two structures that housed the earliest regional school, and several burial grounds.
Ploughing represented a double erasure, erasing not only what existed but also the traces of that erasure. Before long the fields grew thick with fresh vegetation, covering the remnants of Ma‘in. This erasure functioned to transform the land beyond recognition and to push Palestinian villagers toward the coastal zone with nothing to return to. The task of Nirim, along with other settlements and military bases around the newly formed Gaza Strip, was to police the frontier against Palestinian refugees—like members of the Abu Sitta family—who sought to return to their lands to reclaim possessions, harvest crops, or challenge the occupiers. The settlers were ordered to shoot-to-kill anyone—armed or unarmed, male or female—who crossed the plough line. Nirim, together with the kibbutz communities of Nir Oz, Magen, and Ein HaShlosha, also built on Abu Sitta’s land, would be among the hardest hit on October 7, 2023.
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“The Occupation [Army] has changed the Strip’s topography beyond recognition,” wrote Palestinian poet Omar Moussa near the end of November 2023. By that point, thousands of ground-penetrating bombs had fractured the subsoil with seismic force comparable to small earthquakes. They carved out craters deep enough to swallow whole buildings. Giant armored bulldozers—now the Caterpillar D9 model—plunged their blades into the earth and drove forward, flipping fields and shaving off orchards. A Palestinian farmer sent a voice memo to Forensic Architecture describing the family plot, which included a vegetable garden and one of the region’s last olive, pomegranate, and citrus trees: “It is now the same as it was before, desert. I wouldn’t be able to recognize it.”
After the farms came the outer neighborhoods of villages, towns, and refugee camps. Videos posted by soldiers showed bulldozers toppling line after line of homes, slicing through roadways, and allowing raw sewage to spill from broken pipes onto the exposed soil. The machines proceeded to transform Gaza’s Coca‑Cola factory into a landscape of glittering glass. They stopped at nothing, cutting through archaeological sites and cemeteries. “Our task is to flatten Gaza,” one unit operating the bulldozers boasted online. “Palestinians will have nowhere to return to,” declared another Israeli officer, “all they will find is scorched earth. No houses, no agriculture, nothing.” Further west toward the shore, a soldier marveled at the vista opened before them: “a momentary view, pure and profound, of clean nature.” “If we survive this war,” an associate of Omar Moussa asked, “where will we meet?”
Ungrounding, unlike other forms of destruction, leaves surfaces still legible to the eye in conventional wars—plots, roads, fields, paths. Even after buildings collapse, one can often discern where they once stood and infer the social fabric that held neighborhoods together. When conflicts end, the footprints of structures can be extruded from the ground. Ungrounding, by contrast, seeks to remove a society from its place and erase any traces of its former existence. It is an earth-shaping violence, terra-forming. Ungrounding is not merely a consequence of military action; it is its explicit aim. It annihilates the conditions that sustain life and yields an empty slate—a tabula rasa. The stark, monochrome desert of overturned soil stands as the material signature of an ongoing genocide.
Ungrounding is not a by-product of military confrontation but rather its aim. It destroys all conditions that sustain life and produces an empty slate, a tabula rasa.
Soil is composed of numerous components. Each grain of sand has a lineage—shells, coral, rocks and minerals. In the same way, the ungrounded soil of Gaza after October 2023 became a mosaic of fragments from every element that had once made urban life: shattered concrete, plaster, plastic, glass, decayed plants, and sand. Since October 2023, Gaza was not only transformed into a demolition zone but also converted into a construction site. The bulldozers carved a new militarized master plan through the pulverized debris, as if sketching a finger trace on a dusty windshield. In this design, piles of rubble became the fundamental architectural units, the walls that underpinned every type of building. The bulldozers moved through the rubble to create roads that split Gaza into isolated sections.
Along these routes, the machinery stacked mounds to enclose fortified compounds, military outposts, and detention centers where Palestinians were interrogated and tortured. The relatively flat terrain of the Gaza Strip was gradually turned into a jagged landscape of artificial dunes that moved with the army’s advance. The army transformed the ground into a malleable, ever-shifting medium. Earthwaves rose, fell back, and settled as the army’s priorities changed. The earth’s turmoil swallowed people from view. It is estimated that around 11,000 Palestinians are missing, many buried in deep craters or buried beneath towering heaps of rubble, swallowed by the earth without a proper grave. Even markers that once marked grave sites have been erased by the earth’s churn. Often, in Forensic Architecture’s work, we try to locate video locations using visible urban cues, but as the genocide unfolded, available markers disappeared, leaving the video contexts as indistinct, shifting landscapes of rubble dunes that made locating them extremely challenging.
Much of the ungrounding occurred in areas the army labeled a “buffer zone” along Gaza’s fencing. Over the past two years, this buffer zone expanded to encompass nearly the entire Strip. This ungrounded region is off-limits for Palestinians to return to. The army described it as shetah hashmada—an “annihilation zone” where anyone present could be shot on sight. Within the buffer zone, no plant or structure remained. The aim was to deprive people of any place to hide and to expose them to fire from ground-based snipers or from armed quadcopter drones patrolling the dune-like landscape. The relentless destruction forced Palestinians into crowded pockets of land on coastal sand dunes. The army referred to these areas as “humanitarian zones,” though they bear little resemblance to humanitarian spaces, and are better understood as concentration areas or camps. Tents rose on the dunes and along the seashore.
When the people who had been displaced ran out of sand to inhabit, tents sprang up among the ruins, on piers that reached into the sea, on roads, and near piles of refuse. Scattered across the dunes, Gaza’s surviving population persisted in a stark subsistence existence, plagued by constant hunger and thirst beneath the constant hum of killer drones and bomber jets. Israel sought to confine Palestinians to these islands, forcing them to leave or die, and the chokepoints for exit were sealed. The October 2025 ceasefire did not end the military onslaught but froze the situation on the ground, leaving Israel in control of an ungrounded buffer zone that stretched across roughly 58 percent of the Strip, with Palestinians crowded into the shattered urban centers and tent camps along the coastline.
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From Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide by Eyal Weizman, published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Eyal Weizman. Featured image courtesy Palestinian News & Information Agency (Wafa) in contract with APAimages (via)
