Fitful Infrastructures: Dwelling with Infrastructural Elimination in Gaza

Abstract

Since 7 October 2023, Gaza has been subjected to unprecedented Israeli genocidal violence that has erased its life-supporting infrastructure. To understand how Gazans navigated these catastrophic conditions—or what we call “infrastructural elimination”—by inventing ephemeral practices using scarce materials at hand, the paper examines “fitful infrastructures”. We scrutinise the material formation of three infrastructural practices: constructing makeshift toilets for tents, water collection and management practices, and improvised methods of generating electricity. Fitful infrastructure, we argue, (i) comprehends infrastructure through what its absence and elimination incapacitates, (ii) centres the material practices of the bombed rather than the logic of bombing in thinking the forced reformation of everyday dwelling/survival, and importantly (iii) highlights, without glorification, fragile and volatile infrastructures as material manifestations of life irreducible to aims of the settler colonial state to eliminate conditions that support it.