Paris, France

Led by Tunisian architect Mohamed Sahby Gorgi, the Union of International Architects (UIA) has elevated the voices of hundreds of thousands of architects from Europe, Asia, Australia, and North and South America to condemn the systemized murder, slaughter, and destruction of the Palestinian people living in Gaza and the West Bank during one of the world’s most deplorable and tragic incidents of genocide in recent history.

In its resolution, the UIA earnestly condemns Israel’s genocide against the people of Palestine.

Directed by the indicted war criminal Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has purposely carpet-bombed Gaza during a three-year war, destroying countless schools, hospitals, churches, mosques, libraries, universities, civic and institutional buildings, and 95 percent of apartments and houses, as well as ancient cultural and historic landmarks with U.S. produced and sponsored bombs, rockets, missiles, tanks, and other weapons in an effort to ethnically cleanse and erase any trace of the Palestinian people.

The casualty landmarks include the Great Omari Mosque, one of the most important and ancient mosques in historical Palestine; the Church of Saint Porphyrius, thought to be the third oldest church in the entire world; a 2,000-year-old Roman cemetery in northern Gaza excavated only several years ago; and the Rafah Museum, a space in southern Gaza which was dedicated to teaching about the territory’s long and multi-layered heritage—until it was hammered by airstrikes early on in the conflict.

And there have also been tremendous losses to the region’s ancient and globally significant cultural heritage. 

The region was a hub for commerce and culture under Egyptian, Greek, Roman and Byzantine rule. It remained influential for centuries thereafter.

As of January 2026, Israel has destroyed 815 mosques,195 heritage sites, and 19 cemeteries, as well as 300 schools, 26 hospitals, waters, sanitation, electricity infrastructure over the course of the Gaza genocide. 

The wiping out the cultural heritage of the Palestinian people is one of the many war crimes South Africa, now joined by Spain, Columbia, Egypt, Turkiye, Mexico, Iceland, Namibia, The Netherlands, and Ireland, stated in its lawsuit before the International Court of Justice.

Mr. Netanyahu also has targeted and carried out vicious assignations and murders of Palestinian poets, artists, literary figures, journalists, university professors, and doctors and medical workers during this relentless three-year war.

Entire urban portions of Gaza have been bombed by U.S. supplied munitions and illegal, white phosphorus weapons, poisoning people, environments, lands, and agricultural areas and reducing Gaza into 500,000 metric tons of catastrophic rubble, toxins, and unexploded ordinance that, according to estimates supplied by the United Nations, will take decades to remove, or not until the year 2050.

For decades, Israel’s apartheid state of Gaza has been described as the world’s largest open air concentration camp.

UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres now calls Gaza a “graveyard.”

To date, estimates have been verified that nearly 100,000 innocent Palestinian men, women, and children have been tortured, slaughtered, and killed with another 100,000 people severely wounded sustaining great emotional and physical trauma. 

Thousands more dead remain buried under collapsed buildings.

Specifically, the UIA adopted a resolution with the following measures enacted in its denunciation:

• Condemn the genocide committed by Israel in Gaza;

 • An end to starvation by allowing the entry of food and medicine and ensuring the fair and safe distribution to citizens;

 • Condemn the destruction of Palestine’s built heritage;

 • An appeal to architects worldwide to refrain from any participation in the illegal colonization of Palestine;

 • An immediate ceasefire and cessation of hostilities, (which, to date, Israel has violated over 1,000 times and killed over 726 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and 1,138 in the West Bank since Trump’s so called “Ceasefire” deal of October 2025);

 • An international assessment of the destruction, including the UIA’s moral and expert support, through its working bodies, at every stage: damage assessment, technical expertise, and reconstruction; and

 • The improvement of living conditions in Gaza and the restoration of dignity to the Palestinian people.

“This is a simultaneous damning and a heroic stand taken by the UIA, an international organization that represents the world body of thousands of architects across the globe,” states architecture journalist and critic Christian Narkiewicz-Laine.

“It reaffirms architecture’s imperative obligation to advance human rights and a firm intolerance of any kind of genocide and the environmental catastrophe caused by wars of annihilation.”

“Israel’s condemnation reaffirms architecture’s steadfastness to the righteous cause of humanity and to the health and well-being of the public to which architects first and foremost serve.”

“The environmental consequences of Israel’s genocide is nothing but Mr. Netanyahu’s urban nightmare of war ravaged buildings, debris fields, and collapsed infrastructure the likes of which summon images of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined together with the horrific images of human atrocities, murderous killings, and the forced starvation of the most vulnerable victims of this war—the ordinary innocent civilians and defenseless children.”

“And this should be and must be condemned to the fullest,” Narkiewicz-Laine emphasized.

“Gaza is a moral abyss into which the entire state of Israel has drowned itself.”