For those who survive the destruction of their home, the pain and grief often endure. Some people who are forcibly displaced wait in exile to return to the places from which they were uprooted, to homes that are now ruins. History shows us that some people wait a lifetime. Meanwhile, many of those who remain in war-torn cities grieve for their beloved ones who were killed at home and lie beneath the collapsed buildings, unable to be buried in dignity.
The destruction of people’s homes is not simply the destruction of a physical structure. The effect is far greater than the immediate damage. For the destroyers – whether they destroy in the name of gods or the “war on terror” – 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.
This is what we are seeing in Gaza, with the Guardian’s investigation today showing the full scale of the mass destruction of buildings in the territory. It is less than four months since Israel responded to the Hamas attack on 7 October by launching its war, in which an estimated 25,000 Palestinians have been killed, and tens of thousands of structures and buildings have been destroyed. Thousands of homes have been turned into rubble – but the IDF has also destroyed vital cultural institutions such as the Great Omari Mosque, and targeted the central archive of the Gaza municipality. By December 2023, the UN assessed that nearly 40,000 buildings had been destroyed or severely damaged by Israel.
In scholarly work, this deliberate process of destruction is known as “domicide” – a term that describes the systematic and deliberate killing of home. It is taken from the word domus, which means “home” in Latin. 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. Those who destroy often talk about the “precision” of their attacks and their attempts to avoid civilian infrastructure. But in reality, many of these wars are an attempt to humiliate a population and collectively break them.
Why are civilians’ homes systematically destroyed? Why would a soldier wreck a small shop – someone’s livelihood – and laugh at their own antics while being filmed? Why does a bakery get bombed when people are starving? Why a church? A hospital? Why are graveyards destroyed? Because destruction is not just an attempt to destroy history – it is also the destruction of the future.
Through the mass destruction of the material culture of targeted communities, destroyers and occupiers send a clear message to the victims: you have no place on this land. Around the world, certain communities are given labels to dehumanise them. They are described as illegal, unmodern, uncivilised. They are considered disposable and ordered to move by the oppressor.
Scholars say there are two types of domicide. There is everyday domicide that might take place in times of “peace”, such as the destruction of mosques in China or the demolition of Muslim homes and shops in India. And then there is extreme domicide, which is more intense and includes the mass destruction of homes and cultural institutions. In Ukraine, for instance, Unesco verified that 30 museums, 19 monuments, 13 libraries and 126 religious sites have been damaged since February 2022. This is only part of what Russia has destroyed since its invasion.
Satellite images emerge during and after every destruction, showing us a zoomed-out view. But from a distance, we cannot see the faces of the survivors or hear their grieving voices. A thousand buildings destroyed, they report. Ten thousand. A hundred thousand buildings. Hundreds of thousands of buildings. The news continues. How to make sense of mass destruction? Wars become abstract, faceless – turned into pure statistics.
As I witness the destruction of Gaza from afar, I remember my own city, Homs, in Syria. I ache every time I see an image from Gaza because I know the grief, nostalgia, estrangement and suffering that will emerge when the world’s gaze shifts to another war yet to come. Since 2011, more than half of the neighbourhoods in Homs have been damaged to the point of being uninhabitable, or abandoned, while more than 14 million people have been displaced from their homes in Syria. During my research on Syria, many have told me that the years after the war are a war in themselves: a struggle to survive the aftermath of domicide, to live in a collapsed economy, amid collapsed infrastructure and a broken city. Where will the people of Gaza return to when their homes are completely destroyed?
Gaza, Aleppo, Homs, Mariupol, Mosul – these are more than just bywords for death and destruction. They are places that contain the lives of the millions of people who remain there. They are the places the diaspora keep in their hearts, unable to return while they grieve from afar.
And that is why reconstruction must also take its place in our lexicon. Someday, each city will be free from the occupiers, from oppression, from the years of misery. Each city will be reconstructed by its people and their friends. They will pick up the pieces of their broken cities and broken lives. We need a different kind of tomorrow, a tomorrow free from occupation, and with justice at the heart of the rebuild our cities.
Ammar Azzouz is a research fellow at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Domicide: Architecture, War and the Destruction of Home in Syria
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