By Priya Gupta
The intentional destruction of homes — by a government or private entity, during war or peacetime, on an individual or communal basis — is referred to as “domicide” by scholars and by Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing.
Domicide can constitute genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. It has been used in armed conflicts in Ukraine, Syria, Myanmar and now in Gaza, where Israel has destroyed more than 60 per cent of homes. The bombings of Gazan homes have also killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.
In the wake of Russia’s demolition of homes in Ukraine in 2022, Rajagopal argued that domicide goes beyond collateral damage and deserves stand-alone prohibition and punishment in international law.
Cutting homeland ties
Homes are more than physical dwellings or property. Widespread domicide extinguishes individual and collective identity, memory and ties to homeland.
The deep connection of homes in Gaza to Palestinian land, territory and nationhood renders Israel’s destruction of them a genocidal tactic. Israel’s long history of intentional and arbitrary destruction of Palestinian homes, and the subsequent displacement of Palestinians, have been accompanied by the legalized annexation of Palestinian land.
This history reveals a strategy of deliberately targeting homes to harm Palestinians as a national, racial and ethnic group.
The home is a crucial site of Palestinian group identity and national belonging.
In the words of social work scholar Nuha Dwaikat-Shaer: “Palestinians see the home as a symbol of existence and as a means that connects them to the land.” The UN Commission on Human Rights further makes note of the deep attachment of Palestinians to their homes and agricultural land, including olive and citrus trees.
Home is critical to Palestinians as a group
While the home is central to many communities, it holds a particular significance to the continued existence of Palestinians as a national group. The home is where identities, localities, social relations, cultures and nationhood are produced, as feminist historian Rosemary Sayigh has argued.
In a volume of studies into the 1948 Nakba — the mass dispossession and displacement of more than 750,000 Palestinians during the creation of Israel — by political scientist Ahmad Sa’di and anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod, ethnographic accounts document how the Palestinian home is a site of individual and collective memory passed on generationally. In the face of the ongoing erasure of Palestinian experiences, culture and places, that memory is also political.
Memories of the Nakba continue to infuse present-day Palestinian life. Subsequent displacements are being collectively experienced as a continuation of Nakba.
Under constant threat and attack by Israel, the security and meaning of the home have become central to Palestinian national existence and identity. As Palestinian legal scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian explains, the Palestinian home is “responsible for the preservation of psychological and social life and the prevention of social death.”
As a site of collective memory-making, the home is also essential to the preservation of Palestine as a national homeland with territorial sovereignty and the continuation of Palestinians as a distinct national group protected by the United Nations Genocide Convention.
Domicide as genocide
Under the 1948 Genocide Convention, when “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” acts causing serious bodily or mental harm or deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about a protected group’s physical destruction constitute genocide.
Both of these prohibited acts are implicated by the destruction of Palestinian homes in Gaza. As South Africa argued at the International Court of Justice in November 2023 — in reference to crimes committed by Hamas and militants from other armed groups on Oct. 7, 2023 and the continued holding of Israeli hostages — “no matter how outrageous or appalling an attack or provocation, genocide is never a permissible response.”
Domicide inflicts deep emotional trauma that is passed on to future generations. In Gaza, the tragic last public words of journalists, poets, academics, doctors and medical personnel, residents and international aid workers bear witness to Israel’s widespread destruction of homes, forcible displacement and the mental and physical suffering in the ensuing long journeys to the southern Gaza Strip.
Israel has displaced 75 per cent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people at a staggering pace.
Approximately 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza are concentrated under abominable conditions in Rafah, forced to sleep in the street and burn garbage to cook while being subjected to frequent bombings.
Domicide and mass displacement have also created conditions for greater suffering and loss of life due to inadequate shelter, disease, starvation and lack of medical care.
It has exacerbated the vulnerability of children, disabled people, the elderly, LGBTQ2A+ people and women, exposing them to severe physical and mental harm.
Doctors have described the horrors of Gazan children losing limbs and being operated on without supplies or anesthesia and losing their entire families — now referred to by the acronym WCNSF (wounded child, no surviving family).
The dehumanizing statements by senior Israeli officials about Palestinians along with the staggering violence in Gaza — sometimes graphically celebrated by Israeli soldiers — suggests an intention to bring about the total or partial destruction of Palestinian life.
Recognizing domicide in Gaza
The illegality of disproportionate destruction of civilian property and dwellings is currently recognized under international law. However, the significance of the destruction of the home warrants further attention. Whether through its existing role in international crimes or additionally as a separate crime, the atrocities in Gaza highlight the need to recognize domicide as deliberately furthering the destruction of a group.
When Israel attacks Palestinian homes in Gaza, it is doing more than destroying property — it is demonstrating a genocidal intention to destroy Palestinians as a group.
Given the widespread current destruction, the indications of an intent to destroy Palestinians as a group and the International Court of Justice’s ruling on the plausibility of genocide in Gaza, there are compelling reasons to assess Israel’s destruction of Palestinian homes as genocide.
Associate Professor of Law at McGill University.
The Conversation arose out of deep-seated concerns for the fading quality of our public discourse and recognition of the vital role that academic experts could play in the public arena. Information has always been essential to democracy. It’s a societal good, like clean water. But many now find it difficult to put their trust in the media and experts who have spent years researching a topic. Instead, they listen to those who have the loudest voices. Those uninformed views are amplified by social media networks that reward those who spark outrage instead of insight or thoughtful discussion. The Conversation seeks to be part of the solution to this problem, to raise up the voices of true experts and to make their knowledge available to everyone. The Conversation publishes nightly at 9 p.m. on FlaglerLive.
ASF says
Does the incessant rocket fire into Israel by Hamas and the Islamic JIhad and other Iranian-backed affiliates in Lebanon and Syria constitute Genocide?
Oh, well…I guess it depends on “the context.”
Pierre Tristam says
The death toll may, just may have something to do with it, but of course, who’s counting?
ASF says
Common sense dictates that Hamas and other “Palestinian resistence forces” exploiting the Palestinian civilian populace as Human Shields and “Pallywood” props may have something to do with those death tolls being what they are and climbing ever higher. But some people just choose to overlook that fact..which pretty much ensures that that particular terrorist Modus Operandi will continue.
Pogo says
@Priya Gupta
President Trump will put an end to this; may well put an end to everything. Keep up the good work.
Not for nothing, on the way to the next Stone Age:
https://www.google.com/search?q=death+by+stoning
hippy says
“The intentional destruction of homes — by a government or private entity, during war or peacetime, on an individual or communal basis — is referred to as “domicide” by scholars and by Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing.”
Sounds just like what Hamas has been doing to Israel for decades with their rockets and yet no mention of it in the article, or perhaps I missed it. Or perhaps FL is publishing that article next? I look forward to reading it. After all FL would not want to be perceived as biased. We all know that is not the truth.
Until the rest of the world, stops supporting Hamas, that includes this author and FL by it’s omission of the whole truth of what is going on this does not end. Until the people living in Gaza stop allowing Hamas to operate from behind their skirts this will not end. Until the Muslim world stops supporting Hamas, this does not end.
Pierre Tristam says
hippi fabrications again. Even with Hamas rockets’ tally. Hey, hippi, if you can cite one apartment building that Hamas has ever leveled—just one, a single one, a tiny itsy bitsy one—in Israel in all these years, please inform us. But it doesn’t exist. Not one. That’s why you won’t read about it—not here, not anywhere. But 60 percent of Gaza, where upwards of 2 million people live, has been intentionally leveled, Dresdened, and almost as many people massacred as in Dresden. Cynical equivalencies fancied out of Fox’s Goebbelsygunk propaganda machine don’t cut it here.
ASF says
Are you kidding me? Hamas rockets have leveled homes and apartments in Israel–the Iron Dome is not infallible. In fact, in the beginning of this war, Hamas fired a rocket into Israel that hit a children’s hospital center in Israel, taking out an entire wing and sending doctors, nurses and apteints scurrying for safety to bomb shleters (which, at east, the Israelis care ebnough to supply to their people.).
Hamas rockets have been known to misfire, explode in their own backyards and level Palestinian homes. Infamously, an Islamic Jihad rocket leveled the parking lot of a Palestinian hosptial and that story was hyped to the heavens as being a case where “an Israeli airstrike” hit a Palestinian hospital directly and killed “500-700” Palestinian civilians. Pretty much the opposite turned out to be the truth. But after that false “Israeli airstrike leveling a hospital, boo-hoo” story broke and was immediately accepted as the Gospel truth by most media outlets upon receipt from the Gazan Health Ministry, synagogues in different parts of the world were set ablaze and Jews attacked on the streets.
Propaganda kills and words matter.
Hippy says
The list goes on for decades….. I could go on but none will meet your “leveled” criteria. And of course Pierre you do not address the real issue here Hamas and it’s supported. That I would enjoy hearing your thoughts from one raised in the region. It’s not going to stop until the world, including the people of Gaza, and you start indicating where the problem is so this all can stop.
https://www.aljazeera.com/program/newsfeed/2023/10/27/explosion-seen-as-hamas-rocket-hits-tel-aviv-apartment-block
https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-770168
https://www.israelhayom.com/2023/10/25/barrage-on-tel-aviv-suburbs-causes-damage-to-buildings-at-least-1-casualty/
https://www.breitbart.com/middle-east/2023/10/26/photos-palestinian-rocket-hits-apartment-building-near-tel-aviv/
https://www.jewishnews.co.uk/israeli-man-killed-and-eight-injured-after-rocket-fired-from-gaza-hits-apartment-block/
Pierre Tristam says
I never disputed Hamas’s bombardments. What your links indicate is what I said: you cannot point to a single instance of a razing, let alone an intentional razing, of a building. Not to downplay bombardments, casualties and damage, but again: those pale compared to Israeli terrorism, genocide and the obliteration of an entire enclave. To make any comparison is craven. And no, ASF, I’m not kidding, but surely you must have need of the appropriate facial prosthetics because keeping a straight face as you write cannot possibly be easy unaided. But I commend your valiance.
hippy says
Nor have you ever publicly on this page condemned them Pierre. That’s the problem. That’s why the problem and why this will never end. Same with all the so called “media”. You perpetuate the problem.
I dare you write an editorial condemning Hamas, it’s continued decree of the death to all Israelis and the elimination of Israel. I dare you.
And so “a little” terrorism is ok just not “allot”. Gotcha…. as long as it fits your narrative.
Again, I dare you Pierre, write an editorial condemning Hamas an it’s supporters. I promise you will not get struck by lightning.
Pierre Tristam says
Not to fall into your ever-cynical deflections that yet again immorally make one condemnation valid only under the gavel of another (not that your blinders would ever allow you to see clearly on Israel), but you must’ve missed it when I wrote that “no one would minimize Hamas’s atrocities of Oct. 7–and not just Oct. 7, but Hamas as an entity, as representative of so much that is wrong and regressive with nihilistic, death-cult Islamism. That list is not short.” Or when I wrote that “There is nothing legitimate about Hamas. It is a regressive, unelected, despotic, death-cult-drenched terrorist organization that, like Khmers with green rather than red turbans, massacres its own in the name of the unattainable and denies Israel’s right to exist.” Or when I wrote that “describing ‘from the river to the sea’ as [Tlaib] does would be like someone describing ‘lebensraum,’ the infamous Nazi ideology of seeking ‘living space,’ as an aspirational call for elbow-room coexistence a little past the Rhine on one side and the Oder on the other. No one is fooled.” Or when I wrote that “Israel accurately brands the slaughter of Oct. 7 as the worst against Jews since the Holocaust. There is nothing–no history, no “Palestinian struggle,” no rationale–that can justify it. It was a terrorist attack, a massacre, a crime against humanity.” Or when I wrote variations on those themes innumerable times in these spaces, as if we need to do that before having permission to say something critical of Israel. But anyway. Your blinders aside, and just as I knew you could not provide a single example of a razed building on Israeli soil, you could not provide a single sentence of your own hand about Israeli atrocities, as I have provided you of Hamas’s. I know that because I also know you cannot, and will not, possibly make any argument, under any guise, by any reasoning, that can somehow place Israel in this conflict (or in the intifadas, or in the Lebanon wars) on a higher moral plane than those it massacres. Just as the United States lost all moral standing post 9/11, Israel lost its own within days of Oct. 7. Dare on. But beware lies and disinformation, like your comment above: that sort of crap doesn’t cut it here.
Postscript: of course it’s not enough for Israel to starve Gaza to death. Massacring food aid workers is next, like murdering journalists to ensure that as little news of the slaughter gets out.
ASF says
Your predictably histrionic “Anti-Zionist” rhetoric tries very hard to paint a picture of Israel as being “Snidely Whiplash” rubbing his hands together in genocidal glee while deliberately and with forethought targeting aid workers and Palestinian civilians, purely for kicks and giggles. No such attention is paid to the openly Human Rights abusing crimes of the “Pakestinian Resistance Forces” and no equivalent attention has been paid to the deaths that have resulted from the poor palnning and execution of “aid drops” conducted in Gaza by the US, the UN and the EU, by land, sea and air. The vast differences in how those standards and judgements are applied smack of overt prejudicial bias.
Israel has been partnering with the World Central Kitchen and other NGOs–even hostile ones– for some time now, quietly and without fanfare. They receive no credit for doing so. But the most vicious of condemnations and genocidal accusations are levied upon Israel when anything dares go awry. And, in war-time, things go awry all the time.
We have Hamas to thank for this war. They continue to not only shoot rockets into Israel and commit terror attacks with alarming frequency, they are also stubbornly refusing to account for the status of the hostages they continue to hold–if those hostages are even still alive. In particular, that last war crime seems to be something that other nations and pseudo-progressive forces would rather not deal with in anything other than a passively muling fashion.
Ray W. says
I assume, after the multiple missile strikes on World Central Kitchen vehicles moving aid workers, after WCK organizers cleared the movement with IDF authorities that you, ASF, will retract that particular claim from this comment and never mention it again as proof of Israeli cooperation in Gazan aid efforts.
Both sides in this barbarism Israel calls a war are complicit in the manifold efforts to bring death to age-old opponents. This is not just one unified side fighting another unified side. There are thousands upon thousands of indigenous people in the Holy Land who are plotting murder, if given the moment, with each person using his or her own hatreds or fears or both for justification. Religious extremism is a plague upon the world. Neither side suffers from a shortage of murderous religious extremists. Nationalism is a plague upon the world. Neither side suffers from a shortage of nationalists. Racists are a plague upon the world. Neither side suffers from a shortage of racists.
No one can ever win this fight, as it has laid waste to an entire land for millennia. Palestine, with doubt, could long have been home to a veritable paradise, had its occupants ever learned to live without killing each other, but each insists on more and more continuous killing, without end. Commenter after commenter blames one side or the other for causing something, anything, this or that, though the selected starting events no longer have meaning; it is just a cacophony now. No one can ever know who or what started this ancient tribal feud.
No one can ever provide any argument that will conclusively establish who is exclusively right and who is exclusively wrong, yet the entire world is subjected to the effort anyway.
There have never been only two choices; it has never been an issue of exclusively right and exclusively wrong. There have always been many more choices than two. Israel is right, but barely less than exclusively right. Israel is wrong, but barely less than exclusively wrong. Israel is mostly right. Israel is mostly wrong. Israel is equally right and equally wrong. Israel was right on October 7, 2023. Israel has been wrong every day since. Israel has been wrong some days since October 7th and right other days. Some Israelis have been wrong all along (murderous religious extremist Israeli settlers have existed since the day Israel was formed in 1948; before that they were known as murderous religious extremist Zionist settlers. Replace the term Israeli and insert the term Gazan into most of the above-listed possibilities. The point will not change.
Let us all get this out of the way. I will never be mostly right, much less completely right, on this issue. The best I can hope for is to offer some small perspective to FlaglerLive readers, yet I know that perspective means nothing to certain commenters.
There is a reason the ancient Greeks preserved the plays that described the unending violence that flows from a society based on laws of the debt of blood vengeance. There is a reason those same plays were also preserved by non-Greeks for the next 2500 years. There is a central message in the three plays of Agamemnon. A system based on laws that require repayment of debts of blood vengeance yields never-ending slaughter. You can dress up all of Palestine in fine clothing and you will still have an ugly vengeful region. Only when both Israelis and Palestinians abandon their hatreds and vengeances will there ever be peace.
Ray W. says
Actually, ASF, you really can apologize on your own. Israel has apologized. Yet, you cannot, unless others apologize for their wrongs to your satisfaction. You place irrational conditions precedent on your apologies. This way, you will never have to apologize.
There is a reason I oppose you on this issue. Your thought processes on this issue are deeply flawed. You choose artificial dates to justify your condemnations. The Palestinian-Israeli horrors did not start on October 7th; they started thousands of years ago.
Murderous Jewish religious extremist settlers did not start killing innocent Palestinian farmers in the West Bank on or after October 7th; they have murdered for the last 75 years. Before that, they were best called murderous Zionist religious extremists. Before Zionism was introduced as an idea by Ashkenazi leaders, they were best called murderous Jewish religious extremists, all the way back to Roman times.
You engage in binary thinking. Israel was attacked; it must respond, without any limits, under your thinking. Whatever the response, it is right, and it will always be right. I assert that Israeli and Palestinian forces are both right and wrong at the same time. You think that October 7th was unique. I assert that it has repeatedly happened for some 2000 years, without appreciable end; there are only pauses in the horror. The only true difference is the scale of the horrors committed by both sides. I deplore all the horror, no matter who commits it, and condemn both sides for furthering the horror. You pick and choose, always to the benefit of one side.
Tell all FlaglerLive readers over and over again just how right you are. I am sure they will all agree that endless strife and violence based on mutual desires for blood vengeance is best and will sustain Israel in the future. Justice has no place in your world, yet you call slaughter just.
You are the problem. You have always been the problem. To you, there is justifiable horror and unjustifiable horror. Learn. Tell the whole truth. Abandon partial truths. Become a less bad person.
hippy says
Pierre you are the one with blinders on. A little one liner comment within an article (rant) to show your so called “disdain” for Hamas does nothing but make you feel like you care and maybe helps you sleep at night. My dare is for you to write one of your wonderful editorials completely about Hamas and it’s supporters. You publish them about the atrocities Israel is doing but can’t do that about Hamas and it’s supporters. \
None of this stops until the people of Gaza, and the rest of the world starts speaking the truth about Hamas and their supporters and Hamas and their supporters stops using Palestinians as fodder. Whether I support Israel or not, that is fact.
Another question for you. If Hamas’s supporters provided them with rockets capable of flattening an apartment building, do you truly believe that Hamas would not use them? And you know why their supporters don’t provide them. Those supporters want Hamas to do what their doing, behind the skirts of the Palestinians so Palestinians die and people like you can show their moral outrage. Make it stop and save Palestine lives by calling them out their bullshit. It’s terrible that Palestinians are being killed but it is not going to stop until the world stops playing the game…..
ASF says
Ray W.: In fact, officials from the WCK have already admitted that there was “a breakdown in communications” as regards this particular convoy and that that problem prevailed the entire time as events unfolded.
I will apologize when other nations and governments–including the United States–hold themselves to the same standards and accord themselves anywhere near similarly punishing judgements as they do to Israel. So far, they haven’t.
The US and other nations have mistakenly killed civilians and aid workers in the midst of armed conflicts but they are not slammed the way that Israel is for it, nor are they constantly and minutely examined under the same unforgiving microscope.
TREEMAN says
…..and the CCP propaganda (DISINFORMATION) continues with Flaglerlive, MSNBC, CNN, PBS,&NPR!
Kennan says
We are over thinking this. A genocide is a genocide. In front of our Naked Eyes. Terrorism said many times before is a tactic not a war. Calling this war is the most disingenuous, blind, obtuse, and ignorant thing you can call it.
It’s funny. I find ourselves trying to illuminate the obvious. Netanyahu in the IDF go after a few thousand Hamas members that did Heynis things on October 7, but calling it a war, gives them what they think is the kind of backing and support to kill every Arab civilian in sight.
Here are the facts.
40,000 killed that we know of. That’s just above ground. 2 million displaced. 285 healthcare facilities destroyed. 28 hospitals. 65 clinics. 192 ambulances.
Israel created “ kill zones” in Gaza. Anyone crosses into them they are shot. Israeli army says 9000 terrorists have been killed since Gaza war began. Defense officials and soldiers, however, tell Israeli newspaper Haaretz that these are often civilians, whose only crime was to cross an invisible line, drawn by the IDF.
The Washington Post reports that the Biden administration in recent days quietly authorize the transfer of billions of dollars in bombs and fighter jets to Israel. Why on earth would you do such a thing when you profess to want to keep civilian casualties to a minimum? The answer is you don’t. I got news for you. Netanyahu is running the show. Netanyahu is running American Geo political decisions in the Middle East. Our tax dollars are being used indiscriminately to indiscriminately kill tens of thousands that will soon be in the hundreds of thousands, of Palestinian, civilians, women, and children too.
Here’s another fun fact. Why has the IDF killed so many journalists and UN workers? Well, if you’re a Benjamin Netanyahu, killing journalists, 143 to be exact, makes it a lot harder to report on all the genocide going on. Smart tactic if you are a right wing, extremist leader, like Netanyahu, along with your corrupt IDF and government. A wonderfully brilliant tactic.
I know it hurts, but the United States of America is the sole money pusher for the fourth right. That would be Israel if you’re wondering.
I see so many well-meaning reporters, trying to report on this situation, accurately thoughtfully, and collectively in order to put facts in the hands of many that don’t want facts, because they do not serve the narrative to which they want it to.
You cannot continue to talk about October 7 and continue to ignore everything that happened after that. You would be a complete idiot if you thought that Netanyahu gave him about his Israeli hostages. The indiscriminate bombing has not only killed thousands upon thousands upon thousands of Palestinians, it has also killed hostages as well. Hamas albeit a bad player in this situation, put forth a cease-fire agreement, and was willing to give up hostages to Netanyahu, and he rejected it. Why did he reject it? Because as you know, he never wanted a two state solution. And neither does the United States.
The United States and Israel are presently involved in the greatest bait and switch attempt in the 21st-century. And all in front of the worlds lying eyes.
hippy says
I call BS
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/27/world/middleeast/biden-israel-hamas-cease-fire.html
Until people stop playing the game of Hamas and their supporters this never ends. Hamas and their supporters do not give to shits about the Palestinians and their deaths to grab headlines. Until the world stops playing the game Palestinians will continue to be die. Until the world realizes that this BS never stops.
Kennan says
Nobody supports Hamas! Stop conflating Hamas with Palestinians. We could have gone in with special forces as well as IDF and done it the right way. would it take longer? YES, but it wouldnt have turned it into a GENOCIDE, which is exactly what it is. You don’t fight a tactic with a design that calls it a war which green lights Netanyahu and his desire to kill every civilian in sight, including hostages. i lived in the middle east and know it well. Dad an expert on the middle east and it’s history. a Syrian by birth. I’m so sick and tired of so many people reading this all wrong to satisfy their own false narrative.