Israel Demands Evacuation, Destroys Civilian Architecture, Driving Mass Displacement in Gaza

Jacobin argues that Israel’s strategy in Gaza and the West Bank has been to demand the “evacuation” of the population and destroy civilian architecture to make it impossible for residents to return, describing the goal as creating “facts on the ground” and preparing the way for annexation.

The outlet says that since Israel’s latest assault on Lebanon began this March 2, more than 1.3 million people have been displaced, including more than three hundred thousand children, and it cites UNICEF for recording at least nineteen thousand girls and boys forced from their homes every single day in the first weeks of the assault.

Al-Jazeera Net

Jacobin also links Gaza’s campaign to displacement as “the point,” saying that by May 2024 more than 90 percent of Gaza’s population, around 1.9 million people, had been displaced at least once, and that many had been displaced ten times or more.

It further claims that Israel boasted of its evacuation orders as evidence of humanitarian conduct, while Forensic Architecture found the evacuation system produced “mass displacement and forced transfer,” with Palestinians “being bombed, shot at, executed, arrested and tortured” along corridors Israel designated as safe.

The piece adds that it says Israel’s military campaign in Gaza produced near-total displacement after the October 7, 2023, attacks, and it states that by early 2024 Israel had dropped more than twenty-five thousand tons of explosives on Gaza, the equivalent of two nuclear bombs, as the United Nations confirmed.

BBC Verify, via BBC, reports that several human-rights lawyers consulted by BBC Verify have suggested Israel’s campaign of controlled demolitions in Gaza could constitute a war crime.

Eitan Diamond, a senior legal expert at the Diakonia International Centre for Humanitarian Law in Jerusalem, told BBC Verify that “International humanitarian law forbids the deliberate destruction of civilian property during an armed conflict,” except under strict conditions of “absolute military operational necessity.”

Al-Jazeera Net

BBC also quotes Professor Janina Dill, co-director of the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law & Armed Conflict, saying an occupying power must administer a region “in the interest of the population,” which she said is “incompatible with a military approach that simply makes the territory uninhabitable and leaves nothing standing.”

In contrast, Professor Eitan Shamir, director of the BESA Center for Strategic Studies in Israel and a former official in the Strategic Affairs Ministry, defended the Israeli army’s campaign by saying that many demolished buildings were already in ruins and posed a risk to returning civilians, especially “during the winter rains, when they are more likely to collapse.”

Shamir also told BBC Verify that “The area is a combat zone,” adding that even after Israeli forces cleared a building, “terrorists often return to place bombs there or to hide to shoot at them.”

Al-Jazeera Net frames Gaza’s built-environment destruction as an occupation that has altered neighborhoods, streets, and landmarks so residents “can no longer recognize” what they knew.

It quotes Gaza Municipality and a Gaza City spokesman, saying the occupation has wiped out many cities and residential neighborhoods and housing blocks through demolition and blasting operations, and it attributes to Husni Mahna an “Israeli plan to change the face of Gaza City, especially in the old and archaeological areas.”

The report includes a direct account from Palestinian resident Abu Husam Murtaja, who returned to Al-Zaytoun after months of displacement and said: “When we came from Khan Younis and came here with the aim of staying in our home, hoping to find a room, a chamber, a house, we were shocked: there is no house, no room, no street.”

Al-Jazeera Net also quotes urban planning specialist Hamouda Al-Dhedhar, who says the Israeli occupation at the start of the war deliberately destroyed the entire urban environment of the old town of Gaza City and that this destruction was carried out “by wiping out the Shujaiya and Tal al-Tuffah neighborhoods and the eastern parts of Al-Zaytoun entirely.”

The article concludes with figures it attributes to the “Israeli genocide war on the Gaza Strip, since October 2023,” saying it has left about 73,000 martyrs and more than 173,000 wounded, and it adds that despite the ceasefire, Israel continues operations that since October 2025 have led to the martyrdom of 951 Palestinians and the injury of 2,984 others, while an ongoing blockade prevents essential aid to more than two million Palestinians living in catastrophic conditions.