Article II(c) of UN’s Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines genocide to include “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction.”
The immense loss of civilian life including women, children, medical workers, journalists, and countless other non-combatants is devastating in its own right. But there’s another dimension that Article II(c) draws attention to: the destruction of the very conditions that allow a people to continue living as a society. Homes, hospitals, schools, universities, bakeries, power plants, water systems, sanitation infrastructure, farmland—even the spaces where memories are made and communities take root have been reduced to rubble.
One line from what I was reading has stayed with me: genocide isn’t only the destruction of a people, but also of the built environment that allows a people to exist. That really resonated. A city is more than concrete. It’s where childhood memories are made, families are raised, traditions are passed down, and people develop a sense of belonging.
Looking at Gaza, I believe the destruction has gone beyond defeating an armed group. Entire neighborhoods have been erased, and the territory itself has increasingly been rendered uninhabitable. When homes, schools, hospitals, farmland, water systems, and the basic infrastructure of daily life are systematically destroyed, displacement stops looking temporary and begins to reshape the future of who can remain on the land at all.
What struck me most in these essays was the idea that dispossession isn’t only physical it’s psychological. A people’s relationship with their land isn’t just about property. It’s about identity, memory, ancestry, and the feeling of knowing where you belong. Imagine every street you knew, every olive tree your grandparents planted, every school you attended, every mosque or church you prayed in, every market, every hospital, every landmark that anchored your memories simply gone reduced to sand. It’s not just buildings that disappear. It’s the geography of memory itself.
That’s the part I think casualty statistics can never capture. Even if reconstruction happens decades from now, you can’t rebuild childhood. You can’t reconstruct the neighborhoods that shaped generations, the sense of place, or the continuity between the past and the future. Erasing a landscape also erases the stories attached to it.
