By Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins
You don’t need to kill people with conventional weapons, or even right away, to try to destroy them as a group. This has been painfully obvious over the past nine months of Israel’s brutal assault on Gaza. It is something that projects like what the Costs of War and anthropologists of the environment and of infrastructure in militarized contexts have argued. It is reflected in the recent issuing of arrest warrants for Israeli government officials by the International Criminal Court. And it appears in indictments by that court and by the International Court of Justice accusing Israel of starving civilians and depriving them of medical care and dignity. Less obvious for those focused on the carnage or concerned with whether or not Israel’s violence in Gaza since October legally constitutes a genocide are what the material conditions of Gaza’s infrastructures can teach us about Israel/Palestine writ large. This essay is an attempt to compile information about the status of Gaza’s infrastructures that is scattered, undigested, and already out-of-date across piecemeal sources, as is often the case in war because the people gathering it are also the people being killed. And through compilation it proposes a way to think about the piles and piles of rubble. The lessons here are not new; but in times of genocide, the truth bears repeating.
Israel has destroyed every type of physical infrastructure serving Palestinian life in Gaza. A March report published by the EU, World Bank, and UN estimated that the damages wrought on Gaza in the first four months of the war amounted to $18.5 billion as a result of 60-70 percent of all infrastructures being damaged or destroyed. In June the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) estimated that “the destruction of buildings, roads, and other infrastructure has generated over 39 million tons of debris, some of which is contaminated with unexploded ordnance, asbestos, and other hazardous substances.” The report added that “human remains are buried in this vast quantity of building debris.” In July UNRWA estimated that it will take 15 years to clear the rubble. And a UN Conference on Trade and Development estimates that it could take up to 70 years to restore GDP levels in Gaza to their 2022 levels, which were themselves direly low. Israel has constricted Gaza’s economy since at least 1991 when it blockaded the territory after 24 years of occupation.
But while the scale and rapidity of Gaza’s destruction is shocking and unprecedented, not only in Palestinian history but in recent global history, the logic that guides this destruction extends across the territories that Israel controls—in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, and Israel—as do the outcomes of these policies. Three logics that are most evident in Israeli policies toward the infrastructures that serve Palestinians are: 1) preventing Palestinian control over land, 2) destruction, and 3) the production of dependence. The currently deteriorating state of Gaza’s physical infrastructures allows us to see all three logics at play, as well as how they interact to generate outcomes that affect livability for Palestinians and therefore their ability to live as Palestinians where they are. But we cannot forget that these logics and outcomes have been at play since at least the Nakba of 1948.
THE STATE OF GAZA’S INFRASTRUCTURE
Let’s start with Gaza’s infrastructure today. Gaza’s infrastructure is in a state of flux. One component of that state is, of course, destruction and deprivation. No electricity flows to Gaza’s electric grid. On October 7th Israel shut off the ten power lines that once sent 120 megawatts to the grid. On October 11th Gaza’s only power plant ran out of fuel. As of January, Israel had destroyed 61.5 percent of Gaza’s power grid. Before the Fall of 2023 Palestinians in Gaza had developed a relatively extensive system of solar systems, especially on rooftops. Over 50 percent of businesses and homes in Gaza used solar energy in March 2023, though solar systems also required some energy from the grid. Israel has destroyed many of Gaza’s solar systems, especially by bombing buildings. Electricity shortages severely impair what few hospital operations are still possible (all of Gaza’s hospitals have been either damaged or destroyed) and water and sanitation systems. Shortages make food preservation and preparation difficult, and they increase the likelihood of diseases and infections. The use of firewood and other forms of burning for food preparation as an alternative to electricity increases the risk of respiratory illnesses.
As of January, Israel had already damaged or destroyed two thirds of Gaza’s water infrastructures and assets. These include desalination plants in northern and central Gaza, 162 water wells, and two of the three connections with Mekorot, Israel’s water company. Israel had destroyed half of the six wastewater treatment plants in Gaza, including a German-funded treatment plant that had opened in April 2023. As of April, there was one shower per 3,600 people and one toilet per 850 people for over one million Palestinians crammed into Rafah, with humanitarian agencies warning that the humanitarian standard is one toilet for 20 people. Sewage-contaminated water has led to diarrhea, which has already affected one third of children under the age of five as of Spring 2024. Diarrhea accelerates dehydration and malnutrition. Diarrhea also increases the need for facilities like toilets and showers. Their absence increases the spread of bacteria that cause diarrhea and generates indignities for those experiencing it.
Israel has destroyed or damaged the infrastructures that provide Palestinians in Gaza with food, including most bakeries and food shops, farmland, over half of tree crops and greenhouses. Recent Israeli bombings of farmland, already heavily contaminated by Israel’s “herbicidal warfare” in Gaza since 2014, is now also contaminated by explosive weapons. What olive groves remained could not be harvested during the Fall harvesting season because of constant Israeli bombardment. Greenhouses left standing became inaccessible for the same reason. Destroying food infrastructures increases food price inflation. It has rendered most of the population dependent on humanitarian food aid, it has led to widespread famine, and it has made it difficult for the well over 85,000 injured Palestinians to heal from their injuries.
Imagine trying to heal from an amputation with mice crawling in your tent. Over 1.7 million of Gaza’s Palestinians now live not only in temporary shelters (at least three quarters of housing stock has been damaged or destroyed), but also amidst heaps of waste. Israel has destroyed at least five of Gaza’s six disposal facilities as well as its medical waste treatment facilities and the administrative building, maintenance workshop, and storage rooms of the Joint Service Council for Solid Waste management. Israel has also destroyed the containers that hold garbage and the vehicles that move it. Waste pileups have been exacerbated by fuel shortages, the fact that Israel has made it unsafe for Palestinians to move through space, as well as the killing, injuring, and displacement of staff. The lack of solid waste infrastructures has increased rates of disease and infection, inviting animals and insects into proximity with people. And it pollutes Gaza’s air, water, and soil. Waste burning has become one way for Palestinians to mitigate waste pileups that choke their air and fill the last remaining spaces in which they can live. This too heightens the likelihood of respiratory illnesses as it releases airborne dioxins. You have broken ribs from your bombed house falling on top of you and the smoke makes you cough despite your best efforts not to.
The destruction of Gaza’s infrastructures paves the way for visions of new construction as well as new construction itself. By January Israel had destroyed or damaged two thirds of all roads and 92 percent of primary roads along with numerous vehicles, impeding mobility, access to relief aid and services, and family reunification. Meanwhile Israel constructs roads for its own purposes. Between October and March, it completed construction of a road bisecting northern Gaza east to west. The new road has been nicknamed the “Netzarim Corridor” after the Jewish-only Netzarim settlement, which was removed from Gaza in 2005, and has been given the official highway number “749” to integrate it into the national Israeli highway system. Construction of the militarized road brought destruction of at least 750 Palestinian buildings, including a university, for 500 yards on either side of it, and allows Israeli troops to be deployed throughout Gaza quickly and easily.
The road meets the newly constructed unloading point for an American floating pier whose construction caused the destruction of another 250 buildings. Destruction seemed to necessitate construction of the pier, which ostensibly brings aid into Gaza while the U.S. government funds the Israeli military assaults that make the aid necessary. Israel has constructed the so-called “Netzarim Base” at the same pier where, at night, bright white flood lights are visible for miles around. Israel has built two more roads in the south, one for access to Khan Younis and the other for access to Rafah. New Israeli roads in Gaza allow Israel greater control (and Palestinians less control) over the territory and assert Israel’s plans for a long-term presence there. In bisecting the strip into northern and southern parts, Highway 749 obstructs not only the flow of essential aid to those remaining and living under conditions of famine in the north, but also the return north of over 75 percent of the Palestinians in Gaza who have been displaced south of Wadi Gaza since October.
Destruction of housing infrastructures has weaponized homes, exposing Palestinians to the elements, eliminating privacy and dignity, and increasing the risk of disease and infection. As of May, 179,000 of 470,000 housing units were left standing in Gaza. Destruction has followed Palestinians to their temporary shelters, including UN schools, hospitals, and tents. Israel had destroyed 50 UNRWA shelters set up for up to 1.9 million displaced people as of May and the world witnessed the horrific Rafah “tent massacre” that killed over 40 people under burning tarps that same month. Even intact tents are hazardous shelters. Heavy rains flood them, forcing people to sleep in the mud or standing water. The hot summer sun turns tents into ovens, making it hard to breathe.
Clearing Gaza’s housing has prompted various non-Palestinian actors into real estate speculation and plans to replace the Palestinians of Gaza with Jews. Discussions around the “reconstruction” and “rebuilding” of Gaza have been underway in Israel, North America, the UAE, and Europe. American and European donors have been meeting to discuss remaking Gaza as a commercial hub. Harey Zahav, a notorious real estate developer of West Bank settlements, circulated an ad on social media in December 2023 that read “A house on the beach is not a dream!” accompanied by an image of beach house blueprints overlaying a cleared road in front of bombed out Gaza buildings. High profile real estate events advertising Palestinian land parcels for Jews have taken place in New York, New Jersey, and Baltimore, including the “Great Israeli Real Estate Event” in New Jersey in March 2024. Jared Kusnher, Donald Trump’s son in law, made a public statement in February calling Gaza’s waterfront property “very valuable.”
THREE LOGICS FOR A ONE STATE REALITY
While the tactics, intensities, scales, and rates of infrastructural destruction, and flux, are unprecedented in Gaza, their logics and outcomes extend across Israeli policies that have organized Palestinian life since at least 1948, when the Israeli state was established through the expulsion of 700,000-800,000 Palestinians from their homes and lands. Those Palestinians who managed not to be displaced to neighboring Arab countries now live in what several scholars have called a “one state reality” – Israel structures most aspects of their lives whether they live in Gaza, the West Bank, Jerusalem, or what many in Israel, which has never officially declared its borders, treat as “Israel proper.”
One logic organizing Palestinians’ experiences across this “one state reality” is the prevention of Palestinians’ control over land. And without control over land, control over infrastructure is impossible. Israeli policies preventing Palestinian control over land extend across judicial and other modes of governance and have included the Jewish Nation-State Law (Israel), the Israel Lands Law (Israel), the Absentee Property Law (Israel), the creation of Areas A, B, and C through the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s (West Bank), the construction of Jewish-only settlements (throughout), the construction and policing of the Apartheid Wall (West Bank, Israel), the construction of separate road systems for Israelis and Palestinians and the policing of Palestinian movement on roads (throughout), pollution of agricultural lands (throughout), construction of military bases and green zones (West Bank, Gaza), the establishment and expansion of permit systems for individual movement and for infrastructure construction (throughout), violence and the threat of violence (throughout), use of toxic chemicals to create unusable areas of land (Gaza), and establishment of military watchtowers (Gaza, West Bank).
Another organizing logic we see most clearly from Gaza’s infrastructures today is of course outright destruction. This is not new. Israel demolishes, and has demolished, Palestinian infrastructures throughout the territories it controls for as long as it has been making itself into a state. The most well-documented type of destruction is home demolition. Zionist forces depopulated and destroyed 500 villages between 1947 and 1948, which amounted to about 52,000 homes. The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) estimates that before October 2023, Israel had demolished another 56,500 homes in the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem since occupying them in 1967. This number excluded the thousands of homes that Israel had bombed during the wars it has been waging on Gaza since its siege of 2006. Israel makes it difficult to gather statistics on the number of homes it has demolished inside the Green Line (in “Israel proper”) since the Nakba began, but ICAHD estimates that additional thousands of Palestinian homes have been demolished there as well. In 2020 alone, and with a deadly pandemic raging, home demolitions spiked in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, leaving 1000 Palestinians unhoused, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem. Israel also prevents the maintenance and rehabilitation of infrastructures, such as wastewater treatment plants and sewage networks. This leads to them operating under capacity or becoming defunct. Israel pollutes or allows the pollution of farmland and grazing areas, including by settlers who weaponize pollution in order to harass and expel Palestinian communities. Even in times of supposed “peace,” in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, Israel periodically bombs, bulldozes, or fills with liquid cement Palestinian infrastructures such as homes, mosques, and cisterns holding water for drinking, washing, and irrigation. The bombings we have been witnessing in Gaza and the West Bank in the past year are one instance of a practice that is three quarters of a century old.
A third logic that prevails across Israeli-controlled territories is the production of Palestinian dependence not only, but also, in relation to infrastructure. Policies that promote Palestinian dependency (and obstruct self-determination) include suppression of Palestinian economic life and what Harvard economist Sara Roy has called “de-development.” Palestinians across Israel-controlled territories live in an “occupied economy” that lacks its own currency and is almost entirely reliant on foreign aid. To build any capital-intensive, large-scale infrastructure in the West Bank and Gaza, for example, Palestinians must accept the terms and conditions imposed by foreign donors who determine everything from the types of infrastructures that Palestinians can attempt to construct, budgets, locations, and the purpose of the infrastructure. When water and sanitation infrastructures, solid waste disposal facilities, electric grids, roads, and housing, have relied upon foreign donor funding, that funding has come not only with technical requirements determined by those funders (e.g. a landfill must be built instead of an incinerator), but also overtly political requirements. The latter have included that infrastructures serving Palestinians must comply with Israeli visions for the future of the territories it controls (e.g. a Palestinian landfill must accept settler trash so as to support settlements’ sustainability) as well as the incoherent and insulting requirement that Palestinians who receive international funding reject their own political parties, which the U.S. and European Union have dubbed “terrorist groups.” The Palestinian Authority and local Palestinian NGOs periodically reject the latter requirement, even when rejection has come at the expense of funding for critical projects.
By depriving Palestinians of infrastructures, Israeli policies have forced Palestinian communities to purchase many services from the Israeli state and private companies. For example, Palestinians across the territories, including in Gaza, must purchase a large proportion of their water from Mekorot, Israel’s national water company. The electricity that powers most operations for Palestinians’ everyday needs comes from the Israeli Electricity Company. That is why Israel could turn off its entire electricity supply to Gaza with the proverbial flip of a switch on October 7th. Israeli restrictions on Palestinian industries and agriculture locally have made Palestinians dependent on imports from abroad and from Israel to the West Bank and Gaza. This has made nonviolent forms of protest like boycotts of Israeli goods especially difficult for those most affected by Israel’s occupation and has produced a perverse kind of aura around Israeli commodities. Israeli restrictions on healthcare infrastructures, including on pharmaceuticals, building materials, and waste removal systems in the West Bank and Gaza similarly put those Palestinians lucky enough to be able to obtain Israeli permits to cross into “Israel proper” in the position to seek healthcare for serious medical conditions from within the Israeli medical system.
UNLIVING and PREEMPTING PALESTINE
Taking Gaza’s infrastructures as a lens through which to look at Israel/Palestine writ large shows us that Israel is preempting Palestinian life in Palestine by making Palestine, as Palestine, less and less livable. What are the more fine-grained outcomes of the three logics that extend across the “one state reality” in which Palestinians live and that result in Palestine’s unlivability?
Gaza has made expulsion the most obvious outcome. Expulsion can be rapid as 150,000 people being displaced in a few days, as has repeatedly occurred in Gaza, or it can be slower and less visible to outside observers. Such was the case during the period during which I lived and conducted fieldwork in the West Bank, the ten years that immediately followed the end of the spectacular Israeli violence and destruction that had characterized the second intifada, or uprising, (2000-2006). During that decade Israel collaborated with the U.S. and European governments to install a neoliberal Palestinian Authority leadership in the West Bank (failing to do the same in Gaza, where the elected Hamas government remained in power). The Fatah-led PA that was installed in the West Bank promised to serve their shared interests by maintaining the status quo. (In July 2024 it came to light that the U.S., Israel, and the United Arab Emirates were working to do something similar by installing exiled former Fatah leader and multimillionaire Mohammed Dahlan to administer post-war Gaza). West Bank Palestinian cities became “bubbles,” taking on the superficial appearance of normalcy in part through a spate of capital-intensive infrastructure and housing projects. Palestine scholars called attention to these moves to normalize settler colonial occupation while Palestine fell out of world headlines. Meanwhile Israeli controls, military attacks, settler violence and land expropriations made life in villages less and less bearable. Palestinians continued to be displaced among other things from rural areas to cities. As they have been compelled to do for decades, many rural West Bank Palestinians migrated to other countries for work while others had little choice but to become working renters in increasingly compressed Palestinian cities where debt-based life and economic strangulation intensified.
The prevention of control over land, destruction, and dependence that we see in Israeli impediments to infrastructures supporting Palestinian life risk forms of social erasure and fragmentation as communities are geographically dispersed and impoverished. People experience the everyday of deprivation in the form of tremendous time, energy, and resource expenditures to navigate problems like inadequate water supply, food, electricity, and transport options as their energies, resources, and time are forcibly re-oriented away from things that reach beyond the bare necessities of survival. That Palestinians are among the most highly educated groups in the Middle East and that Palestine is a center of cultural and knowledge production is a testament to generations having committed themselves to expending whatever effort it takes to reject being forced to focus solely on the reproduction of the means of survival.
Just as hard to see for people outside of Palestine is the fact that Palestinians’ lack of control over land, the destruction of their infrastructures, and their forced dependence on Israel and international donors have meant that they have rarely had the opportunity to choose the infrastructures that will serve them. When large-scale infrastructures are built—such as the sanitary landfills I researched or Gulf-funded housing projects like the first planned Palestinian city called Rawabi on which anthropologist Kareem Rabie wrote an ethnography—they are not the material embodiments of a free, democratic, and self-determined polity. They are its opposite. Denial of self-determination in the building (and maintenance) of infrastructures obstructs the building and maintenance of a lasting commons.
Palestinians’ impoverishment through destruction, dependency, and prevention of control over land contributes to the racialization and dehumanization we have witnessed at astonishing scales in Israel but also in North America and Europe, where mainstream media and politicians value Palestinian life below the life of a Jew. We know from decades of work by scholars in the social sciences and the humanities, including by anthropologists, that when communities are associated with decrepit, collapsed, or deficient infrastructures those lucky enough not to experience such infrastructural neglect criminalize those same communities and blame them for their misfortune. The people, institutions, and modes of governance that cause that lack in the first place fade into the background. The “broken windows theory” that emerged in the 1980s promoted brutal police violence against communities of color living in de- and under-resourced American cities is one case in point. Four decades later, anthropologist Marisa Solomon draws from her work on neighborhoods of still-gentrifying Brooklyn and Virginia to argue that “gentrification makes trash a discursive and material index of degeneration, mobilizing projects to ‘clean’ and ‘better’ neighborhoods and people.” All we need to understand Israel/Palestine here is to replace “gentrification” with “settler colonialism” and add “trashed infrastructures” —that is, rubble— to the trash that both results from, and encourages, violent intervention. Logics that devalue Palestinian life equate Palestinians with the rubble around them. In doing so they fuel visions of the Jewish replacement of Palestinians across Israeli-controlled territories as its own kind of “cleanup.” Gaza since October 2023 is only the most recent and most obvious example of how lands where Palestinians have forged their lives become targets for replacement.
As Palestinian life is impeded and curtailed through the destruction and preemption of infrastructures, outcomes further include the production, perpetuation, and intensification of inequalities between Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. This is one of the origins of the apartheid analogy for understanding Israel/Palestine. But depriving Palestinians of infrastructures also creates and intensifies inequalities among Palestinian communities that experience differences in provisioning in different areas and for people occupying different class positions. This version of the “divide and conquer” tactics that have long been available to empires, colonial powers, and modern states has generated painful divisions among Palestinian communities both within Israel/Palestine and among Palestinians in the shatat (i.e. Palestinians living in the Diaspora or in exile since the Nakba).
Yet Palestinians, both in Israel/Palestine and in the shatat, have continually fought to highlight and overcome the forms of discrimination that could divide them. The most recent efforts swelled with the Unity Intifada (also known as the third Palestinian uprising or the Dignity and Hope Intifada) that was triggered by Israel’s attempts in 2021 to expel several Jerusalem families and Israel’s subsequent launch of an 11-day assault on Gaza. That assault killed hundreds of Palestinians, injured thousands, and caused widespread destruction of infrastructures. It also saw one of the greatest mobilizations of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship that had occurred in decades. That Unity Intifada is being charged with new energy through the global solidarity that caught fire after October and that many of us have experienced firsthand on our campuses. And it is that intifada’s consciousness of the longer durée and the broader geographical reach of U.S.-backed Israeli policy that we must bring to our efforts to support the building of (the infrastructures) of a just future for all
Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins is an associate professor of Anthropology at Bard College