Activities

• Forensic Architecture claims to use technology to “investigat[e] human rights violations including violence committed by states, police forces, militaries, and corporations.” Through slick graphic presentations, the NGO creates a facade of credibility (“CSI Effect”) to mask analyses that are consistently misleading, blatantly biased and based on unverifiable “evidence,” including from sources such as Al Haq (see below).
• Forensic Architecture consistently utilizes highly biased and politicized language, accusing Israel of “apartheid,” genocide,” “ethnic cleansing,” “collective punishment,” and “war crimes.”
• In October 2025, Forensic Architecture launched an interactive map claiming to depict the “evolution of Israel’s military strategy and its assault on Gaza over the last two years.” According to Forensic Architecture, “The world has witnessed two years of Israeli genocide: countless massacres, widespread displacement, engineered famine, and the annihilation of civic infrastructure….Yet it has failed in its strategic aim — the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from all of Gaza.”
• In October 2025, Forensic Architecture “contributed” to a documentary by the Hind Rajab Foundation on the death of Hind Rajab and her family, alleging to reveal “the identities of the Israeli battalion, company, and commanders responsible for their killings.”
  • The Hind Rajab Foundation (HRF) initiates legal proceedings seeking the arrest of Israelis who have served in the IDF. It has also provided material to the International Criminal Court (ICC), demanding arrest warrants for former US President Joe Biden, former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and former Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.
• In August 2025, Forensic Architecture, alongside the World Peace Foundation, published a report titled “The Architecture of Genocidal Starvation in Gaza,” alleging that “Israel is weaponizing aid distribution for its own strategic and political goals, carrying out starvation by design in Gaza.”
• In May 2025, on behalf of European Legal Support Center (ELSC), Forensic Architecture published an interactive digital platform titled “The Index of Repression” that “brings together and presents incidents of repression of Palestine solidarity, as collected, researched, and analysed by the European Legal Support Center (ELSC). The project seeks to support legal action, monitoring, reporting, and advocacy.”
• In December 2024, Forensic Architecture, in collaboration with Al-Haq and the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), conducted an investigation titled “Touring Stolen Land: How Airbnb Fuels Illegal Settlements in the Occupied West Bank.” The investigation alleged that “Israeli settlers exploit resources and infrastructure systematically denied to Palestinians, including by using accommodation platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com, to sustain their illegal presence on stolen Palestinian land.”
• In November 2024, Forensic Architecture submitted evidence to the UK Foreign Affairs Committee claiming, “It is our assessment that a total arms embargo on Israel is justified and necessary to halt the ongoing Israeli military campaign and to prevent war crimes committed with UK weapons. We believe it is the legal and moral responsibility of the UK to halt all arms exports to Israel and to demand of its allies to do the same. Ending arms sales to Israel is a crucial step towards securing a ceasefire.”
• In October 2024, Forensic Architecture launched a database titled “A Cartography of Genocide: Israel’s Conduct in Gaza Since October 2023.” According to Forensic Architecture, “The patterns we have observed concerning Israel’s military conduct in Gaza indicate a systematic and organised campaign to destroy life, conditions necessary for life, and life-sustaining infrastructure.”
• In May 2024, Forensic Architecture held a two-day symposium on “The Struggle for Palestine and the Architectures of Settler Colonialism,” to discuss “spatial, legal, psychic and cultural dimensions of Zionist settler colonialism, and the struggle against it, inside and outside Palestine as the site of persistent anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and anti-racist struggle.”
• In April 2024, Forensis (German branch of Forensic Architecture), European Legal Support Centre (ELSC), Law for Palestine, and the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy filed an urgent application against the German government to “stop the approval of war weapons exports to Israel.” 
  • In June 2024, the Administrative Court in Berlin rejected the case on the grounds that the plaintiffs in the various cases “had not made it credible that decisions on arms exports were actually pending and that the Federal Government would fail to recognize the legal framework to be observed in future arms exports to Israel.”
• In March 2024, Forensic Architecture published an investigation titled “No Traces of Life: Israel’s Ecocide in Gaza 2023-2024.” According to Forensic Architecture, “this destruction is a widespread and deliberate act of ecocide that has exacerbated the ongoing catastrophic famine in Gaza and is part of a wider pattern of deliberately depriving Palestinians of critical resources for survival.”
• In March 2024, Forensic Architecture, alongside Al-Haq and Al Mezan, published an investigation on “Humanitarian Violence in Gaza.” According to the investigation, “At the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Israel has cited its use of ‘humanitarian measures’ to defend itself against the charge of genocide. Our research reveals these measures, far from protecting Palestinian civilians, serve rather to support Israel’s genocidal campaign by systematically forcing civilians into unliveable areas, where they inevitably come under renewed attack, only to be displaced yet again. Israel’s abuse of ‘humanitarian measures’ has not only continued but escalated.”
• In December 2023, a lecture at RWTH Aachen University by Forensic Architecture’s branch based in Germany, Forensis, was canceled. According to Forensic Architecture and Forensis head Eyal Weizman, the reason given was that the NGO is an “antisemitic organisation for our human rights work in Palestine.”
• In December 2023, on the 75th anniversary of the Genocide Convention, Forensic Architecture tweeted, “It is not without grim irony that on this anniversary, a genocide characterised by horrific human, environmental, urban, cultural and social destruction is playing out across Gaza in real time, alongside the targeting of other Palestinians around the country.”
• In October and November 2023, Forensic Architecture, together with PFLP-linked NGO Al-Haq, sought to debunk investigations – including by the New York Times and various intelligence agencies – showing that an Islamic Jihad rocket caused the explosion near the Al-Ahli Hospital in Gaza. The NGOs accused Israel of “disinformation” and claimed that “Israel has yet to provide any conclusive evidence to support the claim that the source of the deadly blast at al-Ahli hospital was a PIJ or Hamas rocket.” Forensic Architecture and Al-Haq simply ignored the videos, images, and intelligence materials demonstrating that an Islamic Jihad rocket had “misfired” (i.e. detonated in Gaza instead of Israel) and hit the hospital parking lot.
  • In February 2024, Forensic Architecture published its “findings,” claiming, “While what happened at al-Ahli remains inconclusive, it is clear that in the aftermath of the explosion, the Israeli military launched an aggressive disinformation campaign. As it stands, Israel has yet to provide any conclusive visual evidence to support the claim that the source of the deadly blast at al-Ahli hospital was a Hamas or PIJ rocket.
  • In September 2025, Forensic Architecture published an additional study based on testimony by Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah claiming this incident was when it “stopped being a war, and became a genocide.”
• In 2022, Forensic Architecture and Al-Haq (designated as a terror linked NGO by Israel, based on ties to the PFLP) launched the “Forensic Architecture Investigation Unit” to “monitor[] and document[] violations against Palestinians for the purposes of legal accountability and public advocacy.”
• In September 2022, Forensic Architecture condemned the Israeli designation of six Palestinian NGOs, including Al-Haq, as terrorist organizations. According to Forensic Architecture, “@alhaq_org and other Palestinian orgs are facing a range of physical and digital attacks aimed at preventing them from documenting Israeli apartheid. Working with FAI Unit at @alhaq_org, we resist these attempts by exposing the violence committed.”
• In May 2022, Forensic Architecture supported a submission from Addameer field researcher and lawyer Salah Hamouri urging the ICC to “prioritize this investigation, with adequate resources and meaningful victim participation, with a view to moving towards the issuance of arrest warrants against those who bear the greatest responsibility for the long-running war crimes and crimes against humanity committed against Palestinian civilians …“
  • Hamouri was arrested in 2005 for “attempting to assassinate Ovadia Yosef…and for his involvement with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.”
• In February 2021, Forensic Architecture, together with Al-Haq, alleged that Israeli forces acted unlawfully in shooting Ahmed Erekat when he rammed his car into a soldier at a checkpoint on the outskirts of Jerusalem in June 2020. The NGOs did not offer new or concrete evidence, and did not know and could not incorporate the assessments of the Israeli forces on the ground. (Read NGO Monitor’s report “EU-Funded, ICC-Linked Al-Haq and Forensic Architecture on the Ahmad Erekat Shooting.”)
• In December 2020, Forensic Architecture signed a letter calling on the German Bundestag to revoke its joint resolution defining BDS campaigns against Israel as antisemitic.
• In July 2018, Forensic Architecture participated in a conference with Zochrot discussing the “indigenous presence of the Palestinian Bedouins as permanent residents of this land along with tracing the cycles of depopulation and destruction carried out by the Israeli government.”
• In September 2015, Forensic Architecture was “invited by the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court to deliver a closed presentation of its findings on the 2014 war in Gaza.”
• In July 2015, alongside Amnesty International, Forensic Architecture launched an online “Gaza Platform,” to “map[] Israeli attacks in Gaza” during the 2014 Gaza conflict. The Platform repeats the baseless and distorted accusations of Al Mezan and Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), does not employ credible research methodology, and reflects Forensic Architecture’s and Amnesty’s lack of military and legal expertise.

Staff

• Eyal Weizman
  • Weizman, director of Forensic Architecture, is formerly a board member of B’Tselem.
  • In September 2025, Weizman participated in the Gaza Tribunal, a mock judicial body without any legal authority, alleging “ethnic cleansing and cultural erasure through architecture and urban planning.”
  • In February 2020, Eyal Weizman was denied entry into the United States after being classified as a “security threat” by Homeland Security.
  • Weizman has referred to himself as a “supporter of the BDS movement.”
  • Weizman spoke at a November 2023 demonstration in Berlin against the Gaza War, claiming that “we are living in a time of genocide…a genocide against the Palestinian people that we’ve seen escalated in recent weeks. A genocide that has began in 1948.”
  • In November 2022, Weizman accused Israel of “spatial apartheid.”
  • In December 2021, Weizman claimed in an interview that “The domination of Palestinians, in Israel and the occupied territories, is some kind of a lab in which new technologies and new weapons are being designed and exported worldwide…Palestinians in the occupied territories are surveilled as they’re moving between their home, the workplace and that has provided an enormous laboratory for Israel to develop these technologies that are…later marketed and tested in action and become products on a global market.”
  • In January 2021, Weizman was a signatory on a letter to the UK Secretary of State for Education calling to “reject the IHRA document,” referring to the definition as “inherently flawed.”
    • The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition of antisemitism, adopted by nearly 30 countries and counting, represents the international consensus definition of antisemitism, as well as how to distinguish between legitimate criticism of Israel and antisemitism. An example of the latter includes denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination, e.g., by claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor.
  • In July 2017, Weizman coined the term “vertical apartheid,” alleging that Israel’s “evolving vertical system of domination has in the past 15 years hardened into a geographically unique structure.”
  • In September 2014, Weizman falsely claimed in an interview with The Guardian that the tiled red roofs common to Jewish homes in the West Bank are actually “mandatory red roofs so that on flyovers the Israeli army know not to target them.” Following complaints, The Guardian amended the original article to remove this assertion.
  • In January 2009, Weizman signed a petition calling for the UN Security Council and the EU to impose sanctions on Israel.
• Ryvka Barnard
  • Barnard, a member of Forensic Architecture’s Advisory Board, serves as the Deputy Director of the UK Palestine Solidarity Campaign. She previously served as Senior Campaigner on Militarism and Security at War on Want.
  • In March 2025, Barnard published an article titled “Only a mass boycott of Israeli goods can halt the Gaza genocide.” According to Barnard, “We need to be clear-eyed about the gravity and urgency of this moment, and to escalate with new actions and tactics that help to build the mass movement against Israel’s apartheid. We can do this especially, through boycott and divestment actions that put pressure on companies that are profiting from genocide.”
  • In April 2022, Barnard wrote an article titled “Boycotting Apartheid Is a Moral Duty.”
  • In July 2018, Barnard supported the Irish “Control of Economic Activity (Occupied territories)” bill, which would make it illegal for Irish citizens and residents to import or sell “settlement goods” or to provide or attempt to provide “settlement services.” According to Barnard, “We welcome the news that the Irish Senate has voted to take concrete steps towards justice and accountability by voting to ban trade in goods pillaged from or produced in illegal settlements…War on Want calls on the UK government to stop rewarding human rights abuse and land grabs and to suspend all trade with Israel until it abides by international law.”
• Daniel Machover
  • Machover,  a member of Forensic Architecture’s Advisory Board, has been involved in numerous attempts to arrest Israeli officials through false allegations of war crimes.
    • Machover was involved in obtaining a warrant from a British court to arrest Tzipi Livni, then Foreign Minister of Israel, when she visited the UK.
    • In 2005, Machover and the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) submitted alleged evidence files of “war crimes” to the Anti-Terrorist and War Crimes Unit of the London Metropolitan police regarding former IDF Southern Command Chief Maj. Gen. (res.) Doron Almog.In response, the UK issued an arrest warrant, which was subsequently canceled following his departure of England.
  • In 2016, Machover was a signatory on a statement “Defending the Right to Support BDS for Palestinian Rights.”