The Book of Destruction is a new exhibition at the Mosaic Rooms in west London by the award-winning German photographer,Kai Wiedenhöfer, which witnesses and interprets the destruction of Gaza’s buildings and the injuries inflicted on its inhabitants during the Israeli offensive in 2009, known as Operation Cast Lead.

For over a decade Kai Wiedenhöfer has documented the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Every six months, he has been returning to the territories to document the construction of the 650 kilometers of walls, fences, ditches and earth mounds, which form the border between the State of Israel and a future Palestinian entity.

Wiedenhöfer's pictures are controversial because they focus almost exclusively on the Palestinian experience. Self-employed and funded often by grants, he is free from the requirement of television and print media to tell both sides of the story with equal weight, instead photographing what interests him. This has rankled deeply with some of Israel's supporters.

Peter Beaumont in The Observer says that the exhibition and book funded by the Fondation Carmignac Gestion, is unquestionably about violence, documenting in almost unbearable detail the damage left after Israel's assault on Gaza in 2009:

Unpeopled images of ruined buildings, photographed with an architectural precision, are contrasted with portraits of equally ruined people with truncated limbs and scarred bodies. His human subjects look into the camera, seated in their own homes: women and children; the family of fighters and civilians – all displaying bewildering variations of traumatic amputation and burns.

When the photographs were shown in Paris many French Jews groups asked for its closure and pressured Museum officials and the city council.