IN NEARLY THREE years of Israeli bombardment, more than 80 percent of the structures in Gaza have sustained damage: homes, schools, hospitals, and at least 160 cultural sites. The Israeli military has extended Gaza’s Yellow Line—territory annexed by the IDF and indicated by cement blocks painted yellow—from 53 percent of Gaza’s land to 64 percent since the 2025 ceasefire. The Great Omari Mosque, likely the oldest mosque in Gaza, and the Church of Saint Porphyrius, considered to be the third oldest church in the world, are rubble. Of the twelve universities in Gaza City not a single one remains. Over 73,000 people have been killed. Not content with the damage they’ve wrought, the people who destroyed Gaza are already considering what to erect in its place. “We have done the demolition phase,” Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s finance minister, said last fall at a conference in Tel Aviv, “which is always the first phase of urban renewal. Now we need to build.”
Except Smotrich, in his eagerness, skipped a step, one that his allies in the Trump administration particula…
