The humanitarian focus in Gaza will soon begin to shift, thanks to the more than $4 billion in pledges that were made by international donors at the Sharm el-Sheik conference this month. Among the emergency relief workers, the humanitarian workers, and medics flooding the strip, there will be some unexpected people trawling through the rubble before reconstruction starts.

A small army of architects and urban planners working with the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, are poised to make a bee-line to the half-standing buildings that remain in the strip. In the broken remnants of Gaza, they say, lie the clues as to what shape Israeli military practice is likely to take in the future. One of the few tactical advantages Palestinian militants have in the face of Israel’s military might is an intimate knowledge and command of their own architecture and urban space. The maze-like streets, alleys, and thickly packed, high-rise buildings of the Palestinian refugee camps have played to the favour of militants in the camps in times of conflict. This was made clear most recently in 2007, when a small group of Islamic militants infiltrated the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon and used it as a base.

Holed up there, the militants manipulated the architecture to their military advantage, much as Palestinian militants traditionally have. “The Palestinian camp is an urban neighbourhood but it is also a single building — it is contiguous,” says Eyal Weizman, an Israeli architect and author of “Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation.” He says, “This contiguity of the structure allows a certain movement across it that is not possible in other urban environments.”

So to keep ahead, the Palestinians have to innovate further. This has made warfare between Israel and enemies such as Hamas and Hezbollah a kind of tactical conversation. “Hamas has disappeared underground and Israel controls the sky,” says Weizman. “The more dominance they have of the sky, the more the Palestinians master the subterranean.”

The permeability of the Palestinian camp has been effectively neutralised by the IDF’s appropriation of the tactic in their own ground offensives on camps.The camps in Gaza have extended underground, not just in the form of the tunnel lifelines to Egypt at Rafah, but in a sophisticated network of bunkers, control rooms, and hideouts at inland camps like Al Shati and Jabilia. This is the latest puzzle the IDF has to solve in its ongoing cat-and-mouse game of war tactics with the Palestinian militants.

How close they are to solving it may become clearer once the architects and urban planners working with B’Tselem are allowed to re-enter Gaza. The teams will undertake a “forensic” survey of the rubble, taking photos, discerning patterns of destruction, and creating 3-D reconstructions of areas and buildings. Since Israel has not yet developed technology to discern this logic, the Palestinian militants remain one step ahead. —The Christian Science Monitor