Gaza genocide: How the policy of 'nowhere home' strips Palestinians of their identity

Israel's campaign of mass destruction across the territory aims to deny the conditions for homemaking - both materially and psychologically

The aftermath of an Israeli strike on a family home in Jabalia, Gaza, 23 May 2025 (Bashar Taleb/AFP)

The aftermath of an Israeli strike on a family home in Jabalia, Gaza, 23 May 2025 (Bashar Taleb/AFP)

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The following is adapted from a presentation to the Gaza Tribunal in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, earlier this year.

Home, Homi Bhabha said in The Location of Culture, is the site for history’s most "intricate invasions". That history of uncontrolled entry into, destruction of, and expulsion from home in Palestine extends over a much longer period than the current annihilation, and even longer ago than the Nakba.

Nonetheless, the intensity of home destruction in Gaza over the past 22 months, and the depth of human suffering associated with it, is massive and unparalleled. It prompted the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, to call it "domicide" - the deliberate, widespread and systematic destruction of home.

We have all seen the satellite imagery that shows more than 70 percent of Gaza’s infrastructure levelled. By August 2025, the number of homes destroyed in Gaza totalled more than 282,000, corresponding to around 78 percent of the total structures in the Strip. Israel’s calculated attacks on home have displaced almost everyone, generally multiple times.

While these statistics are so familiar by now that our response may be muted, it is crucial to collect and reflect on this data. That data also cannot be overlooked because it points to where and how international law is deficient - even complicit - and, more optimistically, where it could do better.

Home is tangled with systems of violence. It will be well known to many of you involved in the tribunal that home is an organising metaphor of settler-colonialism. According to Ariel Handel and Hagar Kotef, settler-colonialism is "the story of homes that are themselves tools of destruction - homes that have been constructed on the ruins of others’ homes". Settler-colonialism is a project of homemaking and home-unmaking, with the settlements that spawn and now threaten to swallow Gaza.

The unmaking of home is not just about physical homes; it is also about the very sense of home and spatial attachments. The severing of connection to a place that is called home is profoundly devastating and resonates in manifold ways.

We heard testimonies in which Gazans stressed the psychological and immaterial losses associated with the destruction of their home. One said that "losing a home means losing your mental stability". Another said they had "no horizon for hope as they have lost their home".

The centrality of home to the logics of occupation, apartheid and genocide, and home’s complex role both as a site of violence and control as well as agency and resistance, is important to understanding the mass destruction of home in Gaza. In the early months - when there were still homes standing - the Israeli army used maps carving up Gaza into numbered neighbourhoods to indicate which homes would be targeted and which homes Gazans should leave.

Weaponising home

Weaponising home, the maps transformed Gaza into the unhomely - an unfamiliar place of not-belonging, fear and alienation, far from the ideal of a safe and cosy home. As air strikes menaced street by street, home by home, we were reminded that home is contested ground. That far from being a neutral space, home is where struggles over the very nature of identity unfold.

Denied full agency or control over home, the conditions for home and for being at home in the world are radically altered. The pain of domicide extends not only to those whose homes have been destroyed, but also to those who cannot return home, and because everything needed to make home has been obliterated.

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Gaza has become, to borrow from Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a "nowhere home". And yet Gaza - Palestine - remains home. The concept of sumud captures this. Sumud means rootedness in land, a "stubborn standing", a steadfast refusal to leave home and homeland, and resistance and defiance through acts of homemaking, of hospitality and accommodation, and of dreaming of home.

Similarly, despite the destruction of home in Gaza, it must be part of our activism and our resistance to showcase the beauty, creativity and art, the culture and design riches of Gaza and Gazans.

I’ve said the word a lot, but what exactly does home mean? Home is much more than a place in which we live.

It is a complex, multidimensional concept which comprises an array of feelings and experiences. It is at once a material, affective and imaginative space. In its most expansive meaning, home is a sense of being and belonging in the world: to quote Shalhoub-Kevorkian again, it is "a psychological and epistemological space of yearning, and of radical thinking and belonging".

The process of making-home, of "homing", is one of "becoming", of carving out our own socio-spatial identity. This is of course why Palestinian homes have always been targets for destruction.

Home's complex role, both as a site of violence and control as well as agency and resistance, is important to understanding the mass destruction of home in Gaza

For Palestinians, home is a place, a powerful idea and an organising force. It is homeland, memory and identity. As Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Sarah Ihmoud write, the Palestinian home is "saturated" with individual and collective, cultural and political meanings. Home is a place where history and memory are transmitted, preserving and continuing cultural and national identity and the idea of a Palestinian homeland.

The homeland may be an artificial construction - mobilised, for example, in discourses of nationalist exclusion and violence - but the concept of homeland remains critical for understanding territorial claims, modes of ethno-national, spatial control, and how space is "planned, settled and transformed", including the smaller space of home.

Feminists have shown us that home is problematic. But it is difficult to exorcise the positive valences of home - most of us look forward to going home, and we invite others to make themselves at home. Nonetheless, the ideal or idealised home that is safe, exclusive, bounded and static in time is far from the reality of home, which is contingent and provisional.

It is better to think of home as a place of contest, negotiation and shifting boundaries; of thresholding, bordering and histories of becoming and of estrangement; and a dynamic process of re-articulation: of making, unmaking and remaking.

Despite the unprecedented level of home destruction taking place in Gaza, international law has been unable to stop it. In fact, international law has little to say about home: what home means and what it is to lose a home in violent conflict.

No protection

Home is not explicitly protected in international law. Home can be derived from or implied in particular provisions, such as the rights to housing, property and privacy. We see something like "homeland" in the recognition of indigenous peoples’ distinctive spiritual connection to land. The laws of war prohibit targeting "civilian property" and "civilian objects", which we can take to mean home.

Yet home is far from a derived experience. Home is real life. Home is embodied and emplaced. Home is multiple - most of us would say that home is in different places - and mobile; we carry it with us across place and time: home is present, past (nostalgia) and future (utopia). As Sara Ahmed writes, home is storytelling, colonialism, racial discrimination, class relations and the politics of gender.

And so it is that home, as a central aspect of liberation praxis, has remained invisible in modern international law, with its patriarchal conceptions of struggles for justice, self-determination and statehood, and its roots in colonial order.

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But this does not mean that international law is inactive in the space of home. I argue that it is already present at home, shaping and defining the contours and conditions of home in myriad ways. In other words, international law does homemaking - and unmaking - work.

It is, for example, the international laws of war that provide for, and sustain, the legal architecture of occupation. Even if that occupation has been condemned by the International Court of Justice (ICJ), in essence, that international legal framework opens the door to enter into and control Palestinian homes.

There are also more subtle - metaphorical and philosophical - equivalences between home and international law that diagram its home unmaking work in Palestine. The nation-state is frequently analogised with home.

Claims to statehood, sovereignty, territory and self-determination are often grounded (physically and imaginatively) in the language of home and homeland. Home is the ultimate sovereign space - a place of exclusive belonging and universal order. We hear in international law’s promise of statehood and self-determination the longing to be "at home" somewhere in the world.

And so it is that the repeated, repressive denial of Palestinian statehood and self-determination, and the refusal to recognise and create space for a Palestinian homeland, is channelled through and given official form by international legal processes, institutions and actors as they go about their homemaking work.

Finally and more explicitly on this point, Israel has deployed international law over the past 22 months to facilitate the unmaking of home in Gaza by calling on the laws of war to justify and authorise a shift in the classification of Gaza’s homes from protected places to military targets.

This makes international law complicit in home destruction while also drawing it in to a narrative about Palestinians as a people without a home, without connection to a "soil of significance", which of course is a dehumanising narrative Israel has been constructing and reconstructing for decades.

A precursor to genocide

With no direct protection for home, nor prohibition of its destruction in international law - and notwithstanding international law’s complicity (intentional or otherwise) in the unmaking of home in Gaza - recently there have been calls for domicide to be made a crime under international law.

Some might argue that criminalising domicide is unnecessary because home destruction falls within existing categories of international crime, such as war crimes. It might also be said that home destruction is comparable to a crime against humanity, where (as often happens) it results in forced transfer, apartheid or other inhumane acts.

Home destruction may also precipitate genocide. In the ICJ’s January 2024 order recognising Palestinians’ right to be protected from genocide, the court mentioned "home" eight times in a short, 29-page document, underlining the link between the destruction of home and genocide.

Despite the unprecedented level of home destruction taking place in Gaza, international law has been unable to stop it

That link, unfortunately, is not without historical precedent. In Myanmar and Rwanda, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, genocide and domicide were "tightly entwined".

These are important legal and historical comparisons. They also provide an opening for the conversation that I think we first need to have about home, in which home is conceptualised in the richer sense that I have described, and a conversation about why it is that we might think about home through its absence or erasure. It is the latter where domicide comes in. The value of domicide is that it draws attention to the political nature of the homespace and the complexity of home destruction.

Domicide can be defined as "the deliberate destruction of home by human agency in the pursuit of specific goals, which causes suffering to the victims".

Like home, domicide is a multifaceted phenomenon with diverse temporalities, affective registers and modalities of loss. Domicide is home destruction that occurs again and again, often spanning different locations and incorporating different intents and methods. It is operationalised through the self-destruction of homes, denial of residency rights and rights of return, restriction of access to natural resources, discriminatory zoning and planning restrictions and deviant "urbanisation" programmes.

Domicidal processes, activities and operations may or may not result in the physical destruction of home. The point is that they render home uninhabitable and deny the conditions for homemaking - both materially and psychologically.

Perpetual upheaval

Domicide keeps a community "in a state of continual upheaval", prohibited from resettling and making home in new places, living in a "constant uncertainty" and without a sense of permanence.

This conceptualisation marks a shift from domicide as a singular event or a "one-off" to a process that is neither linear, instant or finite, but one which unfolds and repeats. The repetition underscores the intentional and systematic element of domicide and the logic of violent erasure that drives it.

Any legal approach to domicide will also need to make space for the emotional and affective dimensions of home destruction. This includes the destruction of collective memory and of connection to place and people, the loss of ontological security and belonging, and the psychological trauma that comes with losing home and the uncertainty of making another home.

War on Gaza: Our memories of home will never die

Criminalising domicide under international law would not stop the destruction of home, though it may deter it. And to the extent that international law refuses to act on domicide, this could be interpreted as turning a blind eye, tacit authorisation, or as I have suggested, complicity.

Whether or not domicide is ever criminalised, the concept alone provides an organising tool for decolonial and anti-imperial resistance in Palestine and elsewhere. Ignoring harms to home is not only unjust, it is also convenient for states and other actors for whom home destruction serves strategic ends.

When home and its destruction is viewed through the richer, more complex lens that I have talked about, domicide becomes about more than legal accountability for perpetrators and redress for victims, while these remain important.

Domicide is about seeing the violence done through and to home in support of settler-colonialism, ethnic oppression, apartheid or genocide, and other acts that undermine the ability of people to make-home.

It is about acknowledging the yearning for home and homeland and the violence done in the name of that yearning, often strategically by states and other groups and frequently by deploying law, including international law, as a tool to facilitate and legitimise it.

I visited the War Childhood Museum here in Sarajevo before we began the tribunal. During the siege of Sarajevo, 65 percent of the city’s homes were destroyed. Sarajevo is a "city that does not forget", and indeed, many of the artefacts in the museum elicit home as a vessel of memories, of sustenance for identity, and as a site of resistance to dispossession and dehumanisation.

Who profits?

As a final note, we should also be looking at domicide in Palestine through larger geopolitical and geolegal lenses. International law is just one among many other participants in what I call the "global regime of unhoming". This comprises all the institutions, systems, structures, arrangements and logics that determine whether Palestinians can (and cannot) make a home in the world and where.

A larger view of domicide needs to consider the political economy of homemaking and unmaking: who profits, for example, from plans to rebuild Gaza? When international organisations say it will take millions of dollars and many years to rebuild, what is their agenda and do these statements not dangerously ease the way for expulsion from Gaza and permanent displacement?

Home in Gaza today is far from ordinary, but let us hope it will return to that

To me, this is all part of the global regime of unhoming, which fuels a "politics of belonging" that has, for too long, divided the world into "us" and "them" - we, who are at-home, and them, Palestinians, who are made to feel not-at-home.

International law’s participation in unhoming does not mean that we have to abandon it or disengage from it. But we should examine its place in assemblages of power that are connected with home destruction and consider how its homemaking (and home-unmaking) work can be redirected towards more just and less violent outcomes; how we might transform and reimagine what international law is doing in the space of home.

Home is a special place. But it also is, and should be, an ordinary place, full of ordinary, everyday things and practices. Home in Gaza today is far from ordinary, but let us hope it will return to that.

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.

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