Since October 2023, Forensic Architecture (FA) has been working with Palestinian colleagues and international collaborators to respond to the constantly evolving situation on the ground in Gaza, investigating individual incidents, challenging disinformation, and tracing patterns within the Israeli military’s conduct over time. The exhibited projects offer a representative view of this multiscalar approach, with a focus on one of the key categories of violence observed: the destruction of Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure.

Medical practitioners have been among the only foreign nationals permitted by the Israeli government to enter Gaza since October 2023, making them crucial witnesses to the unfolding atrocities. ‘When it stopped being a war’ presents the testimony of one such practitioner, British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sittah, who was working at Gaza’s al-Ahli Hospital on 17 October when a deadly blast tore through the courtyard, killing hundreds. To Dr Abu-Sittah, this event represented a critical test of Israel’s impunity: the moment ‘it stopped being a war and became a genocide’.

The high death toll at al-Ahli was in part due to the large number of displaced families sheltering in and around what they understood to be a legally protected site. Two featured projects address the Israeli weaponisation of evacuation orders, the repeated displacements they facilitated, and the opaque and inconsistent systems through which these orders were delivered to a civilian population, causing panic and making compliance an impossibility.

FA’s development of a database and interactive platform referred to as A Cartography of Genocide offered a vehicle for understanding the relationship between individual incidents like the al-Ahli blast and wider Israeli strategies for dismantling the fundamental conditions of life in Gaza. Through the collection, verification, and analysis of thousands of incidents, FA has been able to visualise the compounding effects of different types of seemingly unrelated atrocities.

Israel’s false criminalisation of medical staff and their sites of operation has made both seeking and providing medical care in Gaza a liability, and set the stage for the subsequent targeting of all categories of infrastructure, from the urban to the agricultural. The selected works demonstrate the way in which the systematic assault on Palestinian medics and healthcare infrastructure by the Israeli military represents not only a violation but a grotesque inversion of the Hippocratic Oath, primum non nocere or ‘first, do no harm’.

This exhibition is presented as part of the project Framing Problems, produced by Biennale Tecnologia and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo as part of the 2026 Biennale Tecnologia in Turin.