Photograph by Stuart Franklin / Magnum Photos
We are witnessing a global war on the sanctity of home. And the climate movement is finding the language to name it.
Earlier this month, Greta Thunberg boarded the Madleen, one of several ships attempting to deliver aid to Gaza. The flotilla carried essential supplies: baby formula, medical kits, water filters. But its purpose was also symbolic—to challenge Israel’s ongoing blockade of Gaza and assert a simple truth: Palestinians deserve the right to survive, and to remain.
The Israeli government responded with force. The boat was intercepted earlier this week; its passengers detained. Among them were climate activists, medical workers, and elected officials from around the world. Greta Thunberg, who was among the flotilla’s 12-person crew, described her decision to board with sharp moral clarity: “I am so much more scared of the world’s silence and passivity in [the] face of genocide than anything that could happen to us on this boat.”
For years, Thunberg was framed as the face of a global youth climate movement—visible, urgent, but largely focused on emissions and intergenerational discussions. Her decision to board the flotilla, however, marked an important shift: from symbolic protest against climate change to a grounded political commitment rooted in justice. Climate action, signalled Thunberg, isn’t just about our future. It’s about who is being disappeared right now.
When the Madleen was intercepted en route to Gaza, human rights attorney Huwaida Arraf called it a clear violation of international law. “These volunteers are not subject to Israeli jurisdiction and cannot be criminalised for delivering aid or challenging an illegal blockade,” she said. “Their detention is arbitrary, unlawful, and must end immediately.” But the incident was not simply about legal overreach. It revealed something deeper, more harrowing. In Gaza, aid itself has become adversarial. What’s being undermined isn’t only life, but the conditions that allow it to continue.
Across Gaza, what’s being destroyed is not just infrastructure. The scale and intent of the destruction points to a deeper strategy that aims to displace the Gaza strip’s population and ensure that what was once home can never be reclaimed. That kind of violence has a name: domicide.
In legal terms, domicide refers to the deliberate destruction of home by human agency in pursuit of specific goals. It is a framework that centers not just the loss of physical shelter, but the loss of cultural continuity, collective memory, and the spatial foundations of identity. The United Nations Special Rapporteur on adequate housing has described it as a form of mass displacement that, depending on intent and scale, may constitute a crime against humanity.
In the weeks and months after October 7th, when Hamas gunmen broke into Israel and launched a surprise attack that killed 1,200 people, the international legal community turned its attention to the question of genocide in Gaza, especially after South Africa brought a case before the International Court of Justice—the United Nations’ highest legal authority—accusing Israel’s military response of violating the Genocide Convention. That case is vital.
“Where genocide seeks the destruction of a people, domicide describes the destruction of the spaces that allow a people to exist. It names a violence that is both physical and psychological: the erasure of a landscape that holds belonging and the capacity for return.”
Aditi Mayer, writer
But while the legal world debates whether the destruction in Gaza meets the formal definition of genocide, the framework of domicide—less litigated, but no less urgent—has gained traction.
Because even as legal experts argue over intent, Palestinians on the ground are watching their homes, hospitals, universities, places of worship, farmland, and graveyards vanish under bombardment. This isn’t hypothetical. Analysis by the United Nations Satellite Centre confirms that about two thirds, or 66% of Gaza’s buildings have been damaged or destroyed. According to the UN, about90% of the population has been displaced. Senior UN officials warn that Gaza has become “uninhabitable.” That term, once used in climate reports, is now being used to describe a human-made military assault.
Where genocide seeks the destruction of a people, domicide describes the destruction of the spaces that allow a people to exist. It names a violence that is both physical and psychological: the erasure of a landscape that holds belonging and the capacity for return.
If domicide in Gaza is marked by bombardment, in Los Angeles it’s militarized raids by United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers that target communities already bearing the brunt of climate change.
In January 2025, wildfires scorched hillsides across Los Angeles County. The Palisades and Eaton Canyon fires destroyed more than 18,000 structures and displaced nearly 200,000 people. But the danger didn’t end with the flames. In affected neighborhoods, residents began reporting respiratory issues and headaches. Independent soil tests found elevated levels of lead and arsenic, especially in areas already burdened by decades of environmental racism. Even so, months later, the city has yet to implement a coordinated remediation plan.
Then, this past week, came the ICE raids.
In the same week that the Madleen was seized on its way to Gaza, armored federal agents stormed homes across Los Angeles’ working-class immigrant neighborhoods, including Paramount where over 82% of the population is Hispanic. Reports quickly emerged of unmarked vans, barricaded buildings, and families separated without warning. According to ICE, 44 people were arrested on a single job site last Friday, and another 77 people were arrested on the same day in the greater LA area.
The escalation of immigration arrests by targeting workplaces is a direct result of President Trump’s racist anti-immigration policies, which also include banning citizens from 12 mostly Muslim countries from entering the U.S. People took to the streets to call for an end to the raids in largely peaceful protests—and in response, Trump deployed 2,000 National Guard and 700 Marines, risking further confrontation between protesters and military personnel, in a move Democrats have decried as “crazy, unreliable leadership.” Protests have since spread to cities across the U.S., including New York, Boston, Houston and Philadelphia.
Just as the flotilla sought to breach a physical blockade to deliver care, LA’s communities are rising up to meet a different kind of siege. Volunteer patrols tracked ICE movements in real time. Immigration hotlines lit up. Mutual aid networks spread alerts across WhatsApp and Signal. What links these two moments is not just timing, but a shared anatomy: both are attempts to meet violence with care; both are being treated as threats; and in both cases, the same question arises—who gets to remain, and on whose terms?
We know how to recognize home destroyed by force—by war, by fire, by raids. But what about home that disappears slowly, without spectacle?
That was the question at the heart of a landmark advisory opinion sought by a coalition of Pacific Island nations, which turned to the International Court of Justice for clarity on whether states have legal duties to tackle climate change and whether neglecting them violates the rights of present and future generations. Though the case had been catalyzed years earlier by a group of law students and young activists, the formal request was submitted just months before South Africa’s genocide application against Israel and underscores a growing demand: that the international community be held accountable not only for acts of war, but also for acts of neglect that render Earth inhospitable.
“The slow violence of climate change and the fast violence of war share a common outcome: the loss of home.”
Aditi Mayer, writer
The Pacific Islands’ push for climate accountability and South Africa’s genocide application against Israel arrived at the court within months of one another. On the surface, they addressed different crises, but taken together, they reveal a deeper throughline. Both invoked international law to recognize that the slow violence of climate change and the fast violence of war share a common outcome: the loss of home.
We live in a world increasingly shaped by displacement, by flood, by fire, by force. But when we identify that loss as domicide, we reframe it as intent. The genocide in Gaza, the violence in Los Angeles, the slow deterioration of ecosystems across Pacific Island nations. These are intentional acts of violence connected by the deeper truth that climate justice has never just been about emissions data and temperature targets—important though they are. It’s about power; about who is protected, and who is left behind.
As the rest of the world bears witness to Gaza’s destruction, and to the growing assault on homes in Los Angeles and the Pacific, the moral stakes are becoming impossible to ignore. That clarity demands a broader vocabulary: one that recognizes the need for decarbonization and conservation as urgently as it calls for an end to surveillance, displacement, and occupation. Because if climate justice is to mean anything, it must be a fight not only for our ability to adapt to an uncertain future—but for the right to remain. To rebuild. To root.
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