The Legal Characterization of Urbicide: A Case Study of the Gaza Strip after October 7th,2023 رسالة ماجستير

Abstract

The concept of urbicide, which originated in the 1960s in the U.S., gained traction in academic circles in the 1990s when it was used to describe the Bosnian war and other armed struggles in the post-Cold War era.1 Urbicide is generally defined as a peculiar form of purposive violence where urbanity is the strategic object of violence. Scholars have offered varied interpretations of urbicide, with Martin Coward proposing that it is the destruction of buildings as a condition for the possibility of heterogeneous existence. This approach looks beyond the phase of military confrontation and extends to periods of peace, viewing the destructive phase of war as part of an overall organization of urban spatiality that continues after the war through surgical demolitions and strategic reconstructions. The ultimate goal of urbicide is the replacement of heterogeneity with homogeneity, reflecting its genealogical connections to scholarship on contested cities and ethno nationalistic conflict2 . In Gaza, the Israeli occupation views the territory as a wild and dangerous space, with the objective of population subjugation rather than conquest or homogenization. Their approach to the Strip aligns with a neo-colonial understanding of urbicide, which involves strategies of destroying specific social and physical aspects of urban settlement to maximize the capacity of occupying forces to survey, surround, and control occupied lands and populations3 . In Gaza, the spatial reconfiguration by the victors translates into permanent spatial disabling through repeated

1 Fregonese, S. (2020). War and the city: Urban geopolitics in Lebanon. I.B. Tauris, Bloomsbury. 2 Coward, M. (2009). Urbicide is the politics of urban destruction. New York: Routledge. 3 Mbembe, A. (2008). Necropolitics. In S. Morton, & S. Bygrave (Eds.), Foucault in an Age of terror. Essays on Biopolitics and the Defence of Society (pp. 152–182). London: Palgrave Macmillan. V maiming, enacted between periods of active conflict and the denial of physical rehabilitation4 . This peculiarity of Gaza's urbicide is based on the structural relationship between its two constitutive moments: siege and destructive attack. In other cases, destruction has been followed by reconstruction, and a military attack without a state of siege does not necessarily turn into necropolitical space annihilation. The researcher argues that the systematic destruction of the Gaza Strip goes beyond what is usually described as collateral damage and should instead be understood as a deliberate policy of urbicide that materially prepares the ground for genocide. By targeting key supports of Palestinian society, including infrastructure, cultural heritage, and healthcare, this destruction undermines the right to remain and contributes to forced displacement by making daily life unlivable. Although urbicide is not defined as a separate offence in formal international legal instruments, this study argues that the acts commonly described by that term can be prosecuted under the Rome Statute as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide. Even under current geopolitical limits, triggering International Criminal Court (ICC) jurisdiction and applying Universal Jurisdiction remain necessary steps to ensure that individuals can be held criminally accountable. The researcher argues that treating the deliberate destruction of the urban fabric as a sui generis crime is necessary to strengthen international criminal law and to safeguard universal humanitarian standards