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L’étude menée ici prétend clarifier certains problèmes-clés pour la compréhension des processus actuels qui affectent l'aménagement spatial de la ville de Gaza, et qui ont remodelé la ville depuis l’époque du Mandat britannique jusqu'à la fin de 2011, aujourd’hui conditionné par la situation politique et géographique des Territoires Palestiniens Occupés.La ville de Gaza est le centre économique et administratif de la Bande de Gaza. Son développement urbain relève de cinq différentes administrations qui gèrent la ville selon des stratégies différentes. L’Empire ottoman n’a pas été inclus dans larecherche parce qu’il aurait nécessité une étude à lui tout seule. Une approche diachronique n’aurait pas permis une analyse du développement urbain de la ville. Le tissu urbain, surtout dans le centre historique est, pourrait-on dire, de nature organique, sans grille de distribution et où rues et cul-de-sac résultent d’une parcellisation progressive. Dans de nombreux blocks la trame ancienne et la réimplantation moderne se superposent avec une densité exceptionnelled’occupation des sols. Le mot block relève du cadastre et n’a pas de signification morphologique : pour cette raison, il sera toujours en italiques.La thèse analyse la transformation de la ville à travers les permis de construire, et présente le contexte historique de la ville, de la fin de période ottomane à la transition avec le Mandat Britannique. La création de la Bande de Gaza aconditionné le développement urbain de la ville jusqu’à nos jours. L’étude a été arrêtée à la fin de 2011. L’étude aboutie est le fruit d’un va-et-vient entre les données qualitatives, issues d’entretiens plus ou moins fiables, les données empiriques des permis de construire, les plans et la documentation photographique / The research project attempts to elucidate certain key issues in the understanding of process affecting urban planning of the city of Gaza and that have shaped its image since the days of the British Mandate rule until today, 2011, in the light ofthe particular political and geographic situation that condition life in the occupied Palestinian territories.Gaza city is the economic and administrative centre of the Gaza Strip. Its present urban situation has as its basis the five different administrations that have influenced the city through different strategies. We have not been so ambitious asto deal with the Ottoman Empire, as it would have needed a full research on its own. A diachronic approach would not have been useful for the analysis of the city. Its urban fabric, in particular in the old core is « organic » with no regular gridpattern and many dead-end streets that are the result of progressive haphazard parcelling. In many of its blocks the old fabric and the modern are superimposed with intense land-use density. The word block is used in the cadastral sense andnot in its morphological meaning: for this reasons it is always written in italics.The text analyses the transformation of the city through its building permits, presenting as contextual support the historical growth of the city from the end of the Ottoman rule to the transition to the British Mandate, to the creation of the Gaza Strip that has conditioned the next 60 years of planning in the city. The data utilised for the research stops at the end of 2011 although there are echoes of 2012 events, since the researcher is often in Gaza and is permeated by the reality of the city. The study is the product of a movement between qualitative data from the interviews, the empirical data of the building permits, maps and photographic documentation

The 21 inscribed ceramic sherds (or ostraca) known as the "Lachish Letters", which were discovered during the British Mandate Period excavations of Tell ed-Duweir (Lachish), underwent eighty years of scholarship that improved our understanding of at least some of these inscriptions. The archive is terse and fragmentary, and the least well-preserved and faded ostraca from this collection have been seriously overlooked, ironically when the "Lachish Letters" have more or less been regarded as a homogenous group of documents written during the final decades of the Judahite kingdom. Some of the ostraca were discovered in different stratigraphic contexts and pertaining to different settings, if not timeframes. The principal aim of this study is to produce an updated edition of these ostraca by objectively and systematically reassessing and understanding these artefacts, the inscriptions they bear, and their respective stratigraphic layers and archaeological contexts. This is carried out by integrating past studies and modern-day developments on the ostraca (and the site itself) from different perspectives: archaeology, palaeography, philology, the Hebrew Bible, and Classical Hebrew studies. This interdisciplinary approach enables a revision of outstanding controversial issues and a dismissal of outdated proposals on the readings, interpretation, and import of these ostraca in their contemporary world. Despite the illegibility of some inscriptions, this study pays attention to all 21 ostraca via physical examination under the lens, to confirm or deny any dubious readings as far as the naked eye can tell us. A crucial criterion is the integration of photographic data and written documentation gathered from unpublished and archived material of the Mandate Period that were accessible to the author at the time of writing. The study concludes that this surviving group of ostraca is far from homogeneous, and there still exist lacunae in their historico-archaeological contexts and interpretations. Our understanding of the source and function of the ostraca (especially the few legible messages and lists of names) remains riddled with controversies, which derive from the fragmentary nature of the corpus and the limitations in the documentation and preservation of these artefacts.