I. Introduction

Architecture in Hebron, West Bank, presents such a complex array of colonial strategies that the following analysis covers only partially. Since the establishment of Israeli settlements, military presence has gradually intensified to protect the latter from the alleged threat that Palestinian communities represent. Palestinian individuals are therefore subjected to a violent military regime that impacts their bodies, through physical persecution by the IDF and algorithmic profiling; their communal spaces, destroyed through targeted demolition or fragmented by checkpoints and settler-exclusive infrastructure; and their homes, through intensive surveillance and military raids. Life as a Palestinian resident in Hebron is deprived of collectivity, civic participation, and social life. The attempt to neglect Palestinians is materialized in the establishment of two differential temporal regimes.  

However, despite the clear-cut separation into enclaves and archipelagos, Israelis and Palestinians still inhabit the same spaces. The lives of both communities are still inevitably and violently intertwined.  Despite the State of Israel’s justifications of such conditions based on a felt security threat posed by Islamist terrorism, a deeper look into how daily life unfolds in Palestinian communities in Hebron reveals a further settler colonial agenda. 
 

Building on the theoretical framework of security and military landscapes (Minghi, 1986; Pearson, 2012), and urban warfare (Coward, 2009), this paper aims to examine the goals and impact of military penetration into urbanity through the qualitative method of case study. 

Subsequent to the presentation of the literature’s framework applied to the case of Hebron, the following sections will disentangle the question of the blurred lines between military and civilian, war and peace, security and oppression: specifically, the differential mobility questions established by military checkpoints are highlighted, to further move into a reflection over the use of high-tech biometric surveillance systems as a disciplinary tool.  The work concludes with a critical reflection on the role of architecture in perpetrating violence and in finalizing a settler colonial project. 

​

II. Literature review

 

Minghi defines a security landscape as “the result of the necessity to defend a state (a territory) under certain political processes, ideas, and levels of technology over the passage of time within a very specific natural and cultural regional framework” (Minghi, 1986, p. 29). With the rise of new and asymmetrical forms of war, especially concerning terrorism, territory defense is no longer externalized in a definite battlefield, distant from civilian life, but is entrenched into society (Coward, 2009).

​

As urban infrastructure, essential to carrying out day-to-day activities, becomes a war target, the city emerges as a critical security arena (Coward, 2009).  There is no clear-cut distinction between civilians and combatants on either side; the whole social fabric acquires a dual role of needing protection and being an incubator of threats to the state. The enemy is no more at the opposite front of the battlefield but is hiding within society or actively participating in it. Security measures such as surveillance mechanisms, curfews, checkpoints, road gates, and fences are implemented to reduce the probability of an attack, in compliance with the Foucauldian security dispositif (Foucault, 2007). 

​

On a similar line, Pearson (2012) analyzes the impact of military presence on the environment and cultural meanings attributed to it, investigating how military activities shape 2 natural sites; the same association could be done for urban centers: looking into the changes brought by the permeation of cities by the defense apparatus highlights how military culture and practices crystallize into civilian life, even exacerbating social asymmetries. If the war is on the inside, within the city, the battlefield is omnipresent (Coward, 2009). The militarization of urbanity is not an externality of war but its central purpose. Militarism in cities serves the aim of protecting society from an identified threat, minimizing the risks of the latter unfolding.

​

However, the colonial dynamics in Hebron reveal a larger political agenda that aims at eliminating Palestinians as a social presence. Veracini (2020) identifies in Israel’s approach to the Occupied Territories the elements to distinguish colonialism from settler colonialism. The former is achieved through spatial division of the different social groups, of colonizers and colonized, within the same area; meanwhile, settler colonialism steps even further in working towards the naturalization of the colonizing agent into the territory, substituting the indigenous community and rewriting ecosocial relationships (Veracini, 2020). Constant military intrusion, increasing limitations of movement, and segregation are short-term solutions that create a temporary special state of things and impair the spontaneous development of urban areas, in their economic activities and social fabric. Walls, lines, and segregation do not solve the problem of ethnic/religious violence. Purifying a territory from diversity to reduce confrontation does not address questions of prejudice and distrust. It – purposely – strips cities of their potential to develop into spaces for peaceful encounter and redefinition of collectivities (Casaglia, 2020).

​

The differential mobility regimes and spatio-temporal realities imposed on the identified threats also indicate an ultimate political goal of neglecting resources to a specific part of society, to limit its proliferation and development. The territorialization of social injustice  goes hand in hand with the stigmatization of the same group, deprived of due services and infrastructure accessibility (Naumann & Fisher-Tahir, 2013).

​

The permanent state of uncertainty resulting from the closing of communities into enclaves (Petti, 2007) by way of military intervention impedes any form of civic participation, community building, and assembly. Towns are in a constant state of emergency, which does not allow foreseeing of any possibility of returning to normal life and reconstructing disrupted ties (Amit & Yiftachel, 2016).

 

Concerning the specific theoretical framework of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, Weizman identifies architecture as a fully fledged political tool to strangulate Palestinian presence (Weizman, 2007). It is a pervasive military tool that controls the city at all times and is ready to become more stringent if conflict erupts. This unavoidably modifies the pragmatic way of life (Weizman, 2007).

​

III. Hebron/Al-Khalil: a history of urban and social division

 

After years of violent confrontations over access to religious sites around Palestine, August 24, 1929, marked a crucial moment for the relationship between Arab and Jewish residents in Hebron. A group of Arab inhabitants attacked and killed more than sixty Jewish people in what is known to be the Hebron Massacre, resulting in the evacuation of all other survivors by hand of the British protectorate (Weitzel, 2022).

​

Nonetheless, with Israel's founding in 1948, Palestinian communities in Hebron were forced to flee, and a significant refugee crisis reshuffled the balance of forces within the area. The latter fell under the control of Jordan, and the Armistice Border allocated territory between Israelis and Palestinians, promoting the establishment of numerous Jewish settlements (Weitzel, 2022).

​

With the Six-Day War, Israel confirmed its grip over Hebron, expanding control even beyond the Border to cover the city completely; here, it has established a regime governed by military law under the Israeli Civil Administration, where commanders had full legislative, executive, and judicial powers (Weitzel, 2022; Amit & Yiftachel, 2016).

​

Israeli control led Jewish communities to illegally settle in the city, focusing specifically on regions close to holy sites, such as in the case of the Kiryat Arba settlement, next to Hebron’s most important religious building - the Tomb of the Patriarchs (for Hebraism) or Ibrahimi Mosque (for Islam). The increasing presence of Jewish communities in the Palestinian territories exacerbated tensions. It even led to uprisings by hand of both peoples, leading to more rigid – but always unilateral – repression and surveillance (Weitzel, 2022).

​

In 1997, within the framework of the Oslo agreements, Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization signed the Hebron Protocol: a bilateral treaty materially dividing the city into two parts, H1, under full internal control of the Palestinian Authority, and H2, governed by the Israeli Civil Administration.

​

H1 comprises 80% of the urban territory, while H2 covers the remaining historical centre, with the Ibrahimi Mosque, commercial core, and newly established Jewish settlements (Weitzel, 2022; Amit & Yiftachel, 2016).

​

In this region, there are more than thirty thousand Palestinians, and around seven hundred Israelis; IDF personnel and facilities are at all times active to shield settlers from the alleged Palestinian threat, fundamentally transforming Hebron’s urban spaces (Amit & Yiftachel, 2016).

​

The second intifada in 2000, furthermore, was instrumentalized to legitimize the construction of a dense network of checkpoints, road gates, roadblocks, and the 700-kilometer fence that encapsulates Palestinian villages into enclaves, so-called military zones (Amnesty International, 2023).

​

Hebron is therefore the ultimate example of the architectural and spatial configuration of Israel's colonial violence against Palestinians. The proximity of the two groups within the city instigates extreme security infrastructure, aiming at minimizing Palestinian presence and agency.

 

Despite security justifications provided to the International Court of Justice (2004), Israel’s implementation of a permanent, arbitrary military regime has far exceeded any permissible safety concern. The disproportionate impact of the considered measures is of such significance as to expose a deeper oppressive motive.

​

III.I Military landscapes

 

Breaking The Silence (2018) has gathered testimonies from former IDF soldiers, shedding light on the rationale behind security practices in H2. Soldiers are ordered to perform mock arrests and raids into civilian homes, especially involving individuals absent from databases. This serves the purpose of reminding Palestinians that the military “is there” (former IDF soldier, 2008-2010), that there is no place or moment in which they are not supervised and controlled; and there is no space or moment that the occupation does not reach.

​

Soldiers also talked about military training taking place in Palestinian neighborhoods, including civilian homes, roofs, and streets; urban warfare exercises aimed beyond mere training, they produce a persistent state of conflict that limits, if not annuls, any attempt at normal life (Breaking The Silence, 2008-2010).

​

Along the lines of this permanent state of warfare, the following sections will examine more systematically the different technologies implemented to create (in)security and operate on and at the cost of Palestinian lives; the first of the following sections will focus on the impact of checkpoints from the perspective of mobility, looking into how such military infrastructure develops an entirly distinct and diluted temporal regime. The second section looks at how “smart city” (IDF, 2020, cited in Goodfriend, 2022) upgrades to security have dehumanized Palestinian bodies, rendering Israeli occupation an oppressive game.

​

III.I.I Mobility Restrictions and Checkpoints

 

Since the second intifada in 2000, Palestinian social activity has been fragmented by military screening at checkpoints. The latter also relies solely on Palestinian biometric data, using facial technology recognition, and recording biometric information without the subject’s consent (Amnesty International, 2023; Goodfriend, 2023).

​

Within the militarized area covering H2, there are between nineteen (Amnesty International, 2023) and twenty-two (Al Jazeera, 2023) checkpoints, gradually developed into multisensor military intelligence systems, upgraded with anomaly detection.

​

Surveillance cameras are even used to record inside houses through doors and windows. The home is eroded of its intimate and safe elements due to being located in what is a fully-fledged military zone. Constant surveillance puts in place a system of insecurity that exposes Palestinians to arbitrary interrogations and detention, managed by the IDF (Amnesty International, 2023; Al Jazeera, 2023).

​

Intensive penetration by military personnel and infrastructure is not a result of necessity, but a proper political strategy to enclose and isolate Palestinians, to disrupt communities and collective spaces, and ensure that occupation is present at all times, reminding them of their condition and the risks they incur in case of resistance (Breaking The Silence, 2018; Goodfriend, 2023).

​

Palestinians are also exclusively subjected to a permit regime, which was declared contrary to international law in 2004 (ICJ, 2004). The Civil Administration issues permits in order to regulate access to healthcare, travel, trade, food, education, natural resources, and civilian infrastructure. These are difficult to obtain and cannot, in any case, ensure accessibility, which remains dependent on the soldiers’ will (Amnesty International, 2023; Petti, 2008).

​

As proof of different temporal mobility regimes, Petti (2008) has attempted to reach the city of Nablus starting from the historical centre of Hebron as a Palestinian, and from the Kiryat Arba settlement to the one of Kedumim as an Israeli. Theoretically, the physical distance to be travelled is the same, yet the experiment displays opposite realities and relations to space. On the one hand, Israelis have full access to the so-called bypass roads system - a highway network that connects the archipelagoes of settlements in the West Bank, punctuated by permanent and temporary military checkpoints. Enjoying full freedom of movement and a highly efficient infrastructure, the journey time is one hour.

​

As a Palestinian, on the other hand, access to bypass roads is restricted; the network can be accessed only through shared taxis and designated buses, whose circulation, nonetheless, is limited to specific sections. Consequently, people are forced to change transportation several times across the journey, even turning to walking for certain routes, to circumvent checkpoints and prohibited roads through rural pathways. Finally, once arrived at the Nablus entrance checkpoint, Petti reported a five-hour journey. The author has been able to enter the city only thanks to his European passport, while Palestinians were forced to turn around.

​

This differentiation is formally justified by the IDF based on security concerns (Amnesty International, 2023). The military applies a purely Foucauldian security dispositif (Foucault, 2007) to ensure control over Palestinians: to protect settlers and to favor military action, Palestinian movements are fragmented and delayed (Parizot, 2009). This allegedly reduces the risk of political opposition and terrorist sentiments circulating among Palestinian villages, and provides a strategic advantage to the soldiers (Petti, 2008).

​

Going beyond this narrative, it appears evident that Palestinian life is dependent upon the military. Their reality is not possible nor imaginable if not within the scope of a constant battlespace (Coward, 2009). Their life cannot continue without facing the consequences of being considered a threat. Yet this is not the same for settlers, creating a distinct perception of space depending on the actor navigating it (Parizot, 2009); it additionally crystallizes social asymmetries, legitimizing one’s occupation while compressing another’s existence until it becomes unbearable.

​

III.I.II Gamefied surveillance

 

Since 2020, facial recognition technology has been installed at every checkpoint in Hebron and in surveillance cameras present in critical areas (such as the proximity of the Ibrahimi Mosque). The information gathered without the consent of the subjects is stored in a database called Wolf Pack (Amnesty International, 2023).

​

Here, Palestinian data is stored, including information about family members, licences, permits, warrants, criminal records, addresses, and photos.

​

When Israeli soldiers encounter a Palestinian, the “war room” is contacted to provide access to the database. The subject is held until soldiers decide how to behave in that specific case (Amnesty International, 2023). 

​

Since 2021, facial recognition has also been available to soldiers’ smartphones. Soldiers can scan faces and gather all the information stored in the database without going through communications with the war room. This can be done by downloading the Blue Wolf app, a mobile phone-adapted facial recognition mechanism with a ranking function according to the number of individuals identified and registered. Military units at the top of the chart are awarded prizes and bonuses (Amnesty International, 2023; Goodfriend, 2023). Although not officially confirmed by the Defense Forces, media reports and a video tutorial explaining how to use it have confirmed its diffusion (Amnesty International, 2023).

​

Moreover, Red Wolf is the complementary database that photographs Palestinians passing through checkpoints; Pictures are then compared with the data on Wolf Pack, ultimately completing it (Amnesty International, 2023). Lastly, White Wolf is an additional mobile phone app for settlers to check permits and documents of Palestinian workers (Al Jazeera, 2023).

​

When navigating this security infrastructure, Palestinians are required to wait for their information to be checked by a machine-learning algorithm before accessing basic day-to-day services such as healthcare, food markets, workplaces, etc. (Amnesty International, 2023). Both military personnel and Israeli civilians exercise this control. This is additional evidence as to why the security narrative behind ethnic division cannot stand. The asymmetric distribution of access to basic services and urban activities, not simply limited by the military staff but even enforced by the other ethnic group in the context of division, works to reiterate a discursive stigmatization (Naumann & Fisher-Tahir, 2013) upon Palestinian inhabitants.

​

The clear bias that the security apparatus conveys confirms that security is established for settlers at the cost of Palestinians. The invasiveness of these mechanisms dehumanizes Palestinians and reduces them to being threats (Amnesty International, 2023). The all-seeing gaze of cameras pointed inwards, towards and inside homes, suggests that the latter are there specifically to protect Israelis from Palestinians and not to dissipate friction, as official records claim. “It seems like we are living in the streets”, explains a Palestinian resident to Al Jazeera (2023).

​

Hebron has gradually transformed into a military surveillance laboratory (Al Jazeera English, 2023; Weizman, 2007), where high-tech equipment is tested without ethical or human rights considerations. Palestinians, accordingly, have no say or agency in their daily lives. There is no safe place where bodies are not checked, identities registered, and movements followed. There are no homes that can be called as such if surveillance has no limits.

​

IV. Concluding remarks on architecture as a war proxy

 

When communities are divided and segregated, identity is built upon separation from the other, which materially manifests in how urbanity is organized; spaces and buildings pertaining to the other become the unwanted other, hence, agency upon their construction, demolition, restriction and surveillance becomes a political tool of oppression (Handel, Ram, Mustafa, Monterescu, 2024). Space can also be shaped according to the security dispositif, to ensure constant leverage over the community.

​

When civilian, communal spaces such as mosques or markets are penetrated by military infrastructure, constellated by checkpoints and surveillance camera circuits, they lose their social meanings and functions, while keeping their materiality. When a space stops being a community endeavor and becomes militarised, social ties are also lost (Handel, Ram, Mustafa, Monterescu, 2024).

​

When conflict turns into a constitutive part of life, when it enters the city, a culture of war and occupation blurs the line between a state of peace and a state of conflict; this makes war endless and borderless (Coward, 2009). To reconnect peoples to land, in a quest for identity, short-term solutions aim at establishing one group in opposition to the other, fueling discourses of otherness based on national and religious claims.

​

In the context of colonial occupation, military presence and urban fortifications have been historically used to materialize domination in indigenous spaces. The fear of otherness gives rise to an architecture of division that fragments spaces and undermines the sense of belonging to a spatially bounded community (Handel, Ram, Mustafa, Monterescu, 2024; Lambert, 2012).

​

The military architecture examined in the previous section is nonconclusive evidence of how divided communities are undeniably impaired in conducting their daily life, and residents are dehumanized to become objects of a risk-management plan. Palestinians in Hebron have repeatedly argued a sense of imprisonment in their land, where fragmentation of collective spaces contributes to a loss of familiarity with it. The colonial violence by the State of Israel, hence, happens both on bodies and on architecture.

​

The imprisonment of Palestinians and the freedom of movement of settlers indicate a social hierarchy in the attempt to legitimize settler colonial ambitions. The alienation of communal spaces, stripped of their symbolic meanings, erases altogether the very idea of community in its shared memory, culture, and link to the land. Cultural cleansing (Handel, Ram, Mustafa, Monterescu, 2024) annuls Palestine and the Palestinian people in their identitarian and symbolic legacy, making the occupation permanent. Accordingly, colonialism turns into settler colonialism, and the occupying power is violently naturalized into the space.

​​​

References

​

Al Jazeera English (2023). Israel’s automated occupation | The Listening Post. YouTube. 
Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1RNj8FXKqY. 

Amnesty International (2023). Automated Apartheid: How facial recognition fragments, 
segregates and controls Palestinians in the OPT.   

Ariel Handel, Mori Ram, Hadeel Mustafa, Daniel Monterescu (2024). The politics of time: 
Political entropy, settler colonialism and urban ruination in Hebron / Al-Khalil, Palestine. 
Political Geography.  

Breaking The Silence (2018). Occupying Hebron: Soldiers' Testimonies from Hebron 
2011-2017. 

Breaking the Silence (2025). Breaking the Silence › Video Testimony › you can slap him. 
Available at: https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/videos/77511. 

Breaking the Silence (2025). Breaking the Silence › Video Testimony › To create a sense of 
being chased. Available at: https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/testimonies/videos/67413?sg=1. 
​​​​​​​​​

Casaglia, A. (2020). Nicosia beyond partition: complex geographies of the divided city. Milano: Edizioni Unicopli, Febbraio.

​

Coward, M. (2009). Network-Centric Violence, Critical Infrastructure and the Urbanization of Security. Security Dialogue, 40(4-5), pp.399–418. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1177/0967010609342879. 

​

Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Springer.

​

Goodfriend, S. (2022). How the Occupation Fuels Tel Aviv’s Booming AI Sector, Foreign Policy, February 21. Available at: https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/21/palestine-israel-ai-surveillance-tech-hebron-occupation-privacy/?utm_source

​

Goodfriend, S. (2023). ‘Algorithmic State Violence: Automated Surveillance and Palestinian Dispossession in Hebron’s Old City’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 55(3), pp. 461–478. doi:10.1017/S0020743823000879.

​

Ilan Amit, O. Yiftachel (2017). Urban Colonialism and Buffer Zones: Gray Spaces in Hebron and Nicosia.

​

International Court of Justice (2004). Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

​

Lambert, L. (2012). Weaponized architecture: The impossibility of innocence. dpr-barcelona.

​

M. D. Weitzel (2022). Access Denied: Temporal Mobility Regimes in Hebron.

 

Minghi, J. (1986). Israel’s Security Landscapes: The Impact of Military Considerations on Land Uses. The Professional Geographer.

​

Naumann, M. and Fischer-Tahir, A. (2012) Introduction: Peripheralization as the Social Production of Spatial Dependencies and Injustice. In (Eds.) Peripheralization. The Making of Spatial Dependencies and Social Injustice. Springer.

​

Parizot, C. (2009). Spazi contigui, tempi differenti. Palestina anno zero.

​

Pearson, C. (2012). Researching Militarized Landscapes: A Literature Review on War and the Militarization the Environment. Landscape Research, 37(1), pp.115–133. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2011.570974.

​

Petti, A. (2008). Asimmetrie spaziali. La rete stradale in Palestina-Israele. Israele come paradigma.

​

Veracini, L. (2013) ‘The Other Shift: Settler Colonialism, Israel, and the Occupation’, Journal of Palestine Studies, 42(2), pp. 26–42. doi: 10.1525/jps.2013.42.2.26.

​

​Weizman, E. (2007). Hollow land: Israel’s architecture of occupation. Verso Books.

​