The utter destruction of Gaza is hard to fathom, the numbers too extreme to comprehend. With more bombs dropped than the equivalent of six Hiroshimas, schools, universities, administrative buildings, homes, hospitals, religious buildings and infrastructure lie in ruins. At the time of writing, over 57,000 people have been killed, most of them civilians. Of these, 7 out of 10 were women or children. Many tens of thousands more have been injured, and hundreds of thousands are scraping by in makeshift tents, desperate for food as a result of the famine created by the destruction of crops and Israel’s blocking of aid. Hundreds of Palestinians, including children, have been shot dead attempting to collect food from aid distribution centers. “There is no life in Gaza,” Neveen Nofal wrote to me from the north of the strip. “Every day we see death before our eyes.”
On top of these well-documented acts of violence, I would like to add another destruction inflicted on the people of Gaza: the loss of their history — not the heritage of their long archaeological and historical record that exists under the ground and in museums, but the history yet to be written, the archives that historians rely on to reconstruct life in the past. What we are witnessing is what could be called historicide: the attempted elimination of the possibility of future historical work. Just as the past 20 months of bombardment constitute a continuation of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, the destruction of history can be seen in a historical arc reaching back to Israel’s creation.
A Roman pot or piece of Phoenician jewelry might be more glamorous than filing cabinets full of administrative papers, but the latter record the basic facts needed to understand a society. How many people went to university? What was the health of people in Gaza like, and how did this change during times of bombardment? What did pupils learn at school, and how did this change with successive ruling powers, from Israeli military rule to the Palestinian Authority and, finally, under Hamas? Who owned the land, and how equal was the distribution? The answers to these questions all build toward understanding the lives and society of the inhabitants of Gaza. And now, these seemingly dry but foundational facts are gone, buried under the rubble of the buildings that have also buried so many bodies.
It is hard to list the number of “cides” that have been inflicted on Gaza. Eighteen months into this totalizing campaign against the small strip of land, opposition to the use of the word “genocide” is fading away: The facts have proven too resistant to deny. The number of indiscriminate deaths directly caused by the military and the intent behind them form just one part of this label: Israel’s targeting of hospitals, emergency response teams and medical personnel adds to the loss of life, as does the famine inflicted by the refusal to let aid and supplies enter, and the destruction of the machinery needed to rescue people from under collapsed buildings.
Early on, researchers and United Nations officials pointed out the “scholasticide” happening in Gaza: the killing of teachers and the systematic obliteration of the infrastructure of education. In April 2024, U.N. experts issued a statement noting that over 80% of schools had been damaged or destroyed, including U.N. schools where people were sheltering. “These attacks are not isolated incidents,” they wrote. “They present a systematic pattern of violence aimed at dismantling the very foundation of Palestinian society.” More recently, in March 2025, the scholar and cultural critic Henry A. Giroux wrote in an academic paper: “The deliberate destruction of Gaza’s educational and cultural infrastructure is part of a broader effort to annihilate Palestinian history and identity, a process defined as ‘scholasticide.’” Ibrahim Rabaia and Lourdes Habash, both academics at Birzeit University, recently published an article describing the relentless attacks on institutes of higher education as “educide.”
“Domicide,” or the destruction of homes, is seen in the fact that 92% of domestic spaces have been damaged or destroyed, according to the U.N. “Domicide causes deep suffering to targeted communities through the killing or displacement of people, the destruction of their memory and the targeting of their sense of dignity and identity,” wrote Ammar Azzouz, a research fellow at the University of Oxford and the author of “Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home.” “The obliteration of architecture is not simply collateral damage. It is the deliberate attempt to destroy a people, to kill their memory and rewrite history.”
“Ecocide” is a side effect of every modern war. Chemicals used for rocket propulsion remain in water systems for decades, immense amounts of dust and chemicals such as asbestos are released when buildings are destroyed, and agricultural lands, including orchards, are routinely degraded by violence. But, once again, the numbers over the past 20 months have been extreme, suggesting that the environmental harm is less an unintended consequence than a deliberate one. As of March 2024, according to Forensic Architecture, a research group led by Eyal Weizman based at Goldsmiths University in London, approximately 40% of the land in Gaza previously used for food production had been destroyed, on top of the extensive destruction caused by decades of occupation, involving spraying herbicides to create buffer zones, depriving farmers of access to land and bulldozing orchards. Lesley Joseph, an environmental engineer and environmental justice scholar at the University of South Carolina, wrote to me: “In my professional opinion … the situation in Gaza is clearly an ecocide.” In the abstract to a forthcoming academic article, he wrote: “In its ongoing war on the besieged enclave, Israel has caused catastrophic environmental harm, resulting in widespread contamination of the water supply, millions of tons of waste and debris from decimated homes and structures, and the spread of waterborne and respiratory diseases.” Once again, much of the destruction has been shown to be intentional, increasing the chances of long-term starvation and the uninhabitability of the area.
“Historicide,” then, fits a far broader pattern of making Palestine untenable as a state, and beyond the physical destruction it also severs Palestinians’ connections — with their land, to each other and with their collective history. There is much more at stake than museums and archives.
“Without our libraries and universities, how will we tell the story of Gaza?” Mezna Qato, an academic at the University of Cambridge, asked in The New Statesman in August 2024. Her article detailed the destruction that had happened by then, pointing out that “nearly every library, archive, and cultural centre or institution in Gaza has been destroyed or severely damaged.” The U.N. reported earlier in the year that the Central Archives of Gaza, containing 150 years’ worth of documentation, had been entirely destroyed, along with every ministerial archive of official records, from registrations of charitable endowments to student data. The Great Omari Mosque, built in the 14th century, was destroyed, along with its collection of Islamic manuscripts.
Personal archives are immensely important to historians — and also, of course, to individuals and their descendants, their family memories passed down over the years in letters, diaries and objects. Much of this will also have been lost beneath the collapsed buildings, but with less public knowledge of what was there to begin with. “Our house was bombed and everything we owned was gone,” Nofal told me, from her tent in the north of Gaza. It will be well-nigh impossible to reconstruct the lives of those Palestinian families that have been completely wiped out since the violence began.
The personal and social overlap in shared spaces, such as places of worship and cemeteries. The Palestinian writer, scholar and librarian Mosab Abu Toha wrote on Facebook that he could not find his grandparents’ graves, because Israel had bombed the cemetery. The testimony of those gravestones has been eliminated, the bombs simultaneously depriving thousands of people of their connections to their ancestry and their ability to pass these connections on to future generations.
Yet there’s a twist in the tale. There is still information held about inhabitants of Gaza, stolen or collected and stored by the Israeli authorities. Thus the work of future historians about Gaza since the creation of Israel stands to be shaped solely by the occupying state, and not the inhabitants — a feature of archives familiar to anyone working on colonial history. Such powers need to assert control, and controlling the information available enables control of the narrative in the present and the future. Israel has been working on this since its inception.
“We need to remember that Palestinians have been telling their history against the grain of Israeli colonial theft, looting and destruction of their archives since at least the 1948 Nakba,” Nadi Abusaada, a professor at the American University of Beirut and curator of the permanent exhibition of the Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, in the West Bank, wrote to me. “It is not the first time that Israel systematically seeks to erase Palestinians’ access to their own history.”
According to Shay Hazkani, a historian at the University of Maryland, tens of thousands of documents were taken as spoils from Palestinian institutions and individuals in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1982. They are held in disparate places: the Israel State Archives, the Israel Defense Forces Archive, the Mossad archive and the Shin Bet security service’s archive. (The Shin Bet, he wrote, “according to one person’s account, burned some of this material back in the 1960s.”) Only some of these are accessible to researchers; many are not even catalogued. Those that do have a presence in the official (Israeli) record are mostly still unavailable to read. This is tantalizing to anyone with a passing interest in the region, let alone historians, as documents we know about include the correspondence of Palestinian leadership prior to 1948, both internally and with outside organizations such as the Arab League, as well as deeply personal documentation.
“One file, about a man named Wadia Iskander Azzam, includes his entire life: the land registry document for his home in Safed, his marriage certificate, the business cards he collected during his lifetime, his personal diary and a few poems he wrote — an entire world of documents about a person whose world was destroyed in 1948,” Hazkani detailed.
This systematic looting wasn’t just of documents. “Thousands of books and hundreds of libraries and archives were looted in 1948,” Abusaada wrote to me. And it doesn’t stop with books. “Since 1967, many archeological sites have been systematically looted by Israelis, including state officials like Moshe Dayan.” Recently, videos have circulated of looting happening in Gaza, albeit seemingly less systematic: soldiers picking over the rubble of the museum, for example.
But the bigger picture of an intentional erasure remains, with several prongs of attack: people, buildings, land — and history. “It’s not unfortunate. We must not allow the belligerent state to get away with saying this is an accident, collateral damage. … It’s part and parcel of a destruction of peoplehood — a people destroyed, fragmented, eviscerated — it’s the elimination, really, of a people,” Qato said to me over the phone.
“It is about breaking the continuity in Palestinians’ narrative of their own history,” echoed Abusaada in an email to me. “This is something we still face when it comes to our pre-1948 history, much of which has been taken away from us. We have to stitch it together from the very little fragments that remain of it.”
The biggest erasure of all is of whole villages, signaling the intent of Israel’s project to reclaim the history as well as the land. There were over 400 destroyed or depopulated in 1948, as reported in depth by Walid Khalidi. Their names are erased from Israeli maps, though they live on, not only in maps going back centuries but also in street names in refugee camps all over the Arab world. Palestinians hold on to these names, along with keys to their long-demolished homes and anything they could carry with them in 1948. This impulse to preserve in the face of erasure is still strong; perhaps it even increases in proportion to the destruction.
Even when so many are dying, Gazans are working to protect the fragments they can, supported by colleagues in the West Bank and the international community. This is a feature of many conflict zones. “I am always moved by how, in extremely difficult circumstances, people still want to do something to protect their heritage,” Dr. Sandra Bialystok, director of communications and partnerships at the International Alliance for the Protection of Heritage (ALIPH) told me. ALIPH is present in many conflict zones to protect heritage, issuing grants, often within 48 hours, to experts on the ground to do what they can.
In Gaza, the work was challenging, not only because of the level of violence. “The fact that you’re dealing with a relatively small, completely closed-off area, made it a lot more complicated,” Dr. Elke Selter, director of programs at ALIPH, told me. “It is extremely difficult for any aid workers to enter, even more so for the cultural sector. So you’re limited to the people who are there. They are limited to the materials that are available, and where do you evacuate [the objects] to?” The only option was to take the objects they could rescue from museums and other collections — in total, 2,500 and counting — to an undisclosed location in another part of Gaza.
Despite the conditions, “it was done to amazingly high standards,” Selter said, with real-time backup from colleagues in Jerusalem and at the Palestinian Museum, via WhatsApp. Those on the ground in Gaza would send photos or videos to experts, who would then provide advice on transport and storage.
These histories clearly matter to individuals on the ground, “not only for fulfilling mere curiosities regarding the past,” Abusaada wrote. “But also because it allows you to place yourself on the arc of history and to project your aspirations unto the future. It is this continuity that Palestinians are disallowed. Palestinians are condemned to live in a constant present, denied access to their own past and to the possibility of thinking about an alternative future.” There is another, more immediate issue with the destruction of the archive, and that’s the impossibility of governing without data to inform decisions or planning — just one more aspect of making life untenable on the strip.
Knowledge, however, is not so easily destroyed or contained, particularly now; it traverses the world in ever more various ways. The manuscript collection in the Great Omari Mosque was destroyed, but it had already been digitized by the British Library, in a project that finished in 2023. Voice notes, photographs, videos and testimonies are sent out of Gaza on a daily basis, via messaging apps, social media platforms and broadcasts. Such digital evidence is easy to share and store, meaning the notion of an archive has been dramatically enlarged. Anyone can store information shared online.
“This genocide is at a moment when the young are constantly screen shotting, sharing memes,” Qato said. “That act of documentation is something that young people are familiar with in their personal lives. It is easy, and it is powerful to do.” There have been initiatives from the start to store social media posts in a variety of ways, many of which will be vital in reconstructing life as well as war in the future.
Many Gazans have left the area, both recently and also as a result of the many waves of violence preceding this one. Some take small mementos with them: family papers or their official records, proving their ties to the land or other people. Valuable evidence can come to light in the informal stashing away of objects and texts, rather than the formal spaces of government buildings and museums, which have a greater tendency to be destroyed in transitions of power.
All historians and archaeologists know how accidental preservation of evidence can be; the habit of the Mesopotamians to use discarded clay tablets as wall fillings means we have the scribbled homework and business records no one meant to be saved for posterity. The garbage dumps known as middens are prime sources of evidence throughout history and prehistory. Other objects are kept in storerooms or homes, unknown and unrecognized, until stumbled across by an expert. Just recently, film footage of British Mandate Palestine has surfaced in the National Archives of Scotland, by filmmaker Theo Panagopoulos, who took some of it and made it into the beautiful short documentary “The Flowers Stand Silently, Witnessing,” released last year.
So an accidental and piecemeal archive is being built in and about Palestine, but, as Qato said, “What then happens with it all is a different question. … Thus far we have been incapable, seemingly, to mobilize the world or to hold anyone accountable.” The exhaustion of repetition was a theme throughout all my interviews; reports and articles published throughout 2024 and 2025 were distinguishable by the numbers alone — the stories were the same. In Qato’s New Statesman article, quoted above, she argued we should listen to Palestinians — that’s where the archive is. Almost a year on, she tells me, “People can hear us but they’re just not listening. What do we do when we have nothing else to say? The repetition is exhausting. It’s debilitating.”
But after a pause, she says that it is still necessary. “In repeating ourselves, we may not get much in terms of justice, but it becomes an archive that evokes us as a collective. That’s crucial.”
The competing emotions of horror at the scale of loss versus commitment to the future were mirrored in many of my conversations. Abusaada is working constantly at the Palestinian Museum, despite his understanding that “much of the damage is beyond repair — I am talking here not only about the physical and tangible damage, but the damage inflicted upon a whole society where entire families are erased off the official registry.”
Rami Aman from Gaza, now living in Cairo, said over WhatsApp: “For me it’s about the mind, the brain. Right now, being Palestinian, is so hard, all the time.” He told me to speak to his friend in Gaza, Leila Luqa, who has been living in a refugee camp near Khan Younis for a year. “It’s hard to realize the extent of losses when it’s everything,” she wrote to me on WhatsApp. She continued in a voice note: “Mostly I can’t speak because I feel like it makes no difference. But then I think, no, we have to keep trying, and I hope — really, I hope — it will make a difference.”
This hope in the face of the range and extent of the ongoing forms of destruction — the “cides” — is driving on efforts to document, rescue and record. Whether and when these archives can be used to tell the history of Gaza, and hold people to account, are other questions. “I think it will take generations before we are truly able to grasp the extent of the physical, social and psychological damage inflicted by Israel on the people of Gaza,” Abusaada wrote to me. But there are people laying the groundwork for this understanding. In the end, it is impossible to completely destroy or control history.
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