Differential heritage authorisation in Gaza: Forensic Architecture as a counter-authorising practice

This article examines Forensic Architecture’s Living Archaeology in Gaza, which extends existing approaches to documenting heritage destruction in conflict by assembling digital modelling, smartphone footage, locally circulated social media, and evidence of military violence. The article adopts a critical reformulation of AHD grounded in CDA and Critical Realism. Selective regimes of heritage authorisation, reproduced through state institutions, conservation practices, tourism infrastructures, and public heritage narratives, preserve and promote some archaeological sites while leaving others subject to weak protection and militarised vulnerability. It further argues that FA’s reconstructions challenge this asymmetry by bringing archaeological remains, ordinary Palestinian life and contemporary destruction into the same visual and evidentiary field. Selected coastal sites such as Caesarea and Apollonia-Arsuf are rendered legible as proper heritage through institutional promotion, tourism infrastructure, and state-backed visibility. Anthedon/al-Shati, by contrast, has been formally recognised through Anthedon Harbour’s inclusion on the State of Palestine’s UNESCO World Heritage Tentative List since 2012. However, this recognition has not translated into comparable operative protection and the site remains exposed to de-heritagising conditions. The article concludes that heritage in conflict should be studied through the uneven infrastructures that determine which pasts are made durable and which are left vulnerable to disappearance.