Contribution short abstract

The weaponization of the Wadi Gaza River, evidence of genocide and ecocide, reveals hydro-hegemonic infrastructures that dominate water flow and sever Palestine’s geography. In the midst of Israel’s expansionist genocide, this project is more urgent and politically relevant than ever.

Contribution long abstract

This iterative study investigates the cartographic disappearance of the Wadi Gaza river, undertaking a political mapping of engineered deathscapes and ecocide along the course of the riverbed. It opens towards a spatial imaginary of counter-cartography where the impounded and diverted flow of the river no longer stops at the besieged border of the so-called Gaza Strip. While the extent of data voids and gaps are deliberate manifestations of distorted militarized imaging of the landscape, rainfall calls the phantom river back to life as floodwaters break through concealed terrains of a sinister network of hydro-hegemonic infrastructures. Yet, infrastructure is designed to fail as disconnected electricity flows shock the immobilized river into another condition of stagnation. Between the gaps of the border-fence, infrastructure is weaponized to be cut and fragmented as a deliberate strategy of withdrawal occurs that engineers an unlivable and abandoned terrain. Cartographic authority conditions the reappearance of the exiled river in a terrain of genocide. The starved riverbed is circulated on maps of a new geography of settler-coloniality, seen on fleeting images on mobile phones or as pamphlets that rain from an occupied sky.

Even in obstructed movement, the river manifests as a temporal agent, capable of producing a condition of flood that ruptures static futures of catastrophe towards an unyielding progression of refusal and return. Within obsessive exercises that map the disappeared river's potential movements, material overflows through and between the cartographic gaps: in videos, images, and song, as a spatial testimony of insurgency that resists cartography.