Israeli troops were given orders to raze agricultural land, destroy residential blocks and open fire on anyone who came near them to make way for deadly buffer zones in Gaza, a report by Israeli veterans’ group Breaking the Silence (BtS) has revealed.
According to Israeli soldiers interviewed for the report, titled “The Perimeter”, the army created a perimeter, between 800 and 1500 metres in breadth and 1.5km inside the Gaza Strip, where “large swathes of the land were turned into massive kill zones”.
The soldiers said that the borders of such areas were invisible, constantly changing and were not communicated to Palestinians.
“At first, the IDF (Israeli army) designated a certain area that was forbidden to cross. The IDF decides on a certain line, and conceptually, anyone who crosses it is considered a threat,” one reserve commander testified.
“It happened at the Netzarim Corridor and it happened on the border, too. There are no clear rules of engagement. There is some room for discretion on the ground. Like, ultimately, it’s down to the company commander and the battalion commander.”
The Netzarim Corridor, a six-kilometre stretch of land south of Gaza City that divides the strip into its northern and southern parts, is used by Israeli forces to monitor and control the movement of Palestinians between northern and southern Gaza and to launch military operations.
In December, a Haaretz investigation revealed that hundreds of Palestinians, including children, had been indiscriminately shot dead by Israeli soldiers along the corridor.
It had been designated as a “kill zone” by the Division 252 commander, according to a senior officer, allowing soldiers to shoot “anyone who enters”.
“There is no proper combat procedure like there is in Judea and Samaria [West Bank]. Company commanders make all kinds of decisions about this, so it ultimately very much depends on who they are. But there is no system of accountability in general,” the Israeli reserve commander told BtS.
“Anyone who crosses a certain line, that we have defined, is considered a threat and is sentenced to death. That did exist. It was an IDF definition. There was a line.”
A land without rules
The testimonies given to Breaking the Silence reveal the orders soldiers received to conduct missions searching for corpses and the razing of vast stretches of Gaza.
“Within the Perimeter, the IDF created a vast expanse where rules of engagement were seemingly nonexistent and civilian homes were methodically destroyed en masse, alongside infrastructure and agriculture critical to Gaza’s future self-sufficiency and rehabilitation,” BtS reported.
Israel has been accused of forcibly razing Gaza’s border areas ever since the early months of the war, with the UN high commissioner for human rights saying these acts may constitute war crimes in February last year.
According to Breaking the Silence, buffer zones are a fundemental part of Israel’s defence strategy, with the current zones in Gaza established after “wholesale destruction”, entirely reshaping around 16 percent of Gaza.
Amnesty says the mass devastation of buildings and agricultural lands along the eastern boundaries amount to collective punishment of Palestinian civilians, even if civilian property may have been used by armed groups in the past.
In its report, Breaking the Silence notes that the creation of such a perimeter isolates Gaza and ensures Israel has “absolute military control over the area”.
Soldiers testified that certain areas were divided into sections called “polygons”, where they were given instructions to systematically dismantle and ravage them using bulldozers, mines and explosives.
“Basically, our main mission was blowing things up, I’m talking up to hundreds of structure units (buildings). It’s not like the high rises in Shati (refugee camp in Gaza City). It’s one-storey or two-storey cubes. But the destruction is total,” an Israeli sergeant major operating in Khan Younis said.
He added that the logic behind mass destruction and erasure of infrastructure was to “create flat lines of observation and fire.”
“There’s a map that the Gaza Division made of polygons along the Strip fence that are marked in green, yellow, orange, and red,” the sergeant major explained.
“Green means that more than 80 percent of the buildings were taken down – residential buildings, greenhouses, sheds, factories; you name it – it needs to be flat. That’s the order.
“There are no structures, except for that Unrwa school and that small water facility – for everything else, the directive was ‘nothing left.'”
Dismantling Palestinian self-sufficiency
The report also outlines how Israel sought to destroy Palestinian self-sufficiency in food production with the army razing “around 35 percent of all agriculture in the Gaza Strip”.
“This crippled Gaza’s self-sufficiency by increasing its reliance on food entering from IDF-controlled crossings, sabotaging any future attempt at rebuilding sustainably,” the report added.
“Industrial zones and agricultural areas which served the entire population of Gaza were laid to waste, regardless of whether those areas had any connection whatsoever to the fighting.”
According to a former reserves first sergeant in the 5th Brigade, areas in Gaza’s boundaries were razed, and completely demolished, even if they were residential blocks or agricultural land.
“What you do is bite off a kilometre west along the strip, from the fence inward. Essentially create a sterile strip – where there once used to be fields, groves, all kinds of things – nothing, sterile,” he said.
“Fields or groves before. After – sand, dunes, destruction. It really didn’t surprise me, it was clear to me that this is what’s going on, that we’re going to take a bite out of the [Gaza] Strip.”
Another soldier said that large excavators were used in fields, taking out the soil and growth in the area.
“Achzariot [armoured personnel carrier] and tanks provide security, and the D9 [armoured bull dozer] just mows down everything within a certain square, and then you move on northwards,” the solider said.
The D9 destroyed “mainly fields, agriculture, olive trees, eggplant fields. A very large excavator just comes through and takes out all the soil, kind of rolls it up, flattens it. It was a shame, great agriculture, beautiful eggplants and beautiful cauliflowers.”
The report noted that the creation of the perimeter and enforcing heavy military control led to the annihilation of over “3,500 buildings, as well as industrial and agricultural areas which are critical for the fabric of life in the Gaza Strip”.
“All of them were wiped off the face of the earth. Annihilation, expropriation, and expulsion are immoral and must never be normalised or legitimised,” the report said.
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