Ungrounding: The Architecture of Genocide

From an acclaimed architect and investigator, a devastating, meticulous accounting of Israel's destruction of Gaza and crimes against its people

Eyal Weizman is one of the world's leading experts on the relationship between violence, conflict, and the built and natural environment. As director of the organization Forensic Architecture, he and his team of interdisciplinary researchers have spent decades investigating and documenting acts of war and human rights violations around the world, including extensive work in Weizman's native Israel and Palestine. Since 2023, the group's efforts have focused on producing evidence for the International Court of Justice's case against Israel.

In this revelatory new project, Weizman draws on that original and extraordinarily comprehensive research to bring us on an eye-opening journey through the "deep cartography" of the area extending from Gaza's subterranean tunnels through to its militarized topography, settlements, and barriers. He catalogs, in unflinching and exacting detail, the Israeli campaigns of violence and displacement that have reshaped the region in an effort to make Gaza and its surrounding areas unlivable for the Palestinian people. Taking us through the broader geographical and historical context, from the Nakba in 1948 to the present day, Ungrounding establishes that architectural and territorial analysis is key to understanding the relationship between colonizer and colonized -- and how Israel's actions have escalated into violence so extreme and so far-reaching as to, Weizman argues, meet the definition of genocide.

Deeply informative and profoundly affecting in its scope and precision, Ungrounding is an essential document of atrocity in our time.

Author: Eyal Weizman
Publisher: Penguin Press
Published: 07/14/2026
Pages: 416
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.40lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.40w x 1.60d
ISBN: 9780593835029


Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 05/25/2026
Kirkus Reviews 07/15/2026

About the Author
Eyal Weizman is the founder and director of Forensic Architecture and Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, where, in 2005, he founded the Centre for Research Architecture. In 2007, with Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti, he established the architectural collective DAAR in Beit Sahour, Palestine. He is the author of numerous books, including Hollow Land, The Least of all Possible Evils, Investigative Aesthetics, The Conflict Shoreline and Forensic Architecture. He is the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award known as the "Alternative Nobel Prize," a Peabody Award, the European Cultural Foundation Award, and numerous other awards in human rights, investigative journalism, art, and architecture. In 2019, he was elected Life Fellow of the British Academy.