ISBN: 9780745344577

Paperback: 120 pages
Publisher: Pluto Press, 2024
Language: English

The engineered perimeter around the occupied Gaza Strip is formed by a sophisticated system of fences, forts and surveillance technologies. With each Israeli incursion, a military no-go area, or a ‘buffer zone’, is established along Gaza’s ‘borders’, extending deep into Palestinian communities and farmlands in Gaza. These practices reproduce Israel’s eco-colonial imaginary, further compounding the Gaza Strip’s isolation from the rest of Palestine.

Since 2014, the bulldozing of Palestinian lands by the Israeli occupation forces has been complemented by unannounced aerial spraying of military herbicides, extending the reach of Israeli violence into the realm of chemical warfare. Today, the spraying has destroyed entire swaths of arable land in Gaza, forcibly changing a once-lush Palestinian landscape, and providing the Israeli army with better visibility to fire at Palestinian targets with lethal force from a distance.

This book is a vivid document of this latest stage of Israeli warfare, including original maps, images and visualisations which deepen our understanding of its environmental and human impact. It collects new documents, original archival materials, stills of drone footage, first-hand testimonies of farmers, organisers and protesters, and documents affected vegetation in Gaza as ‘silent witnesses’ to Israeli settler-colonial violence.

Shourideh C. Molavi is a writer and scholar in political science and urban studies. She is the dedicated Palestine-Israel researcher at Forensic Architecture, an independent research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, and teaches in the Department of Urban Studies at the University of Basel in Switzerland. She is the author of Stateless Citizenship: The Palestinian-Arab Citizens of Israel.