‘Kill zone’: A report says Israel destroyed homes on the border with Gaza in a planned way
A group of former Israeli soldiers has released a new report that shows how the government is harshly establishing a large buffer zone between Gaza and the occupied areas further along the coastline.
A report from the Israeli rights group Breaking the Silence (BtS) says that to make a “kill zone” around the enclave, Israeli troops destroyed whole neighborhoods and farmland in the war-torn Gaza.
The soldiers’ stories were put out by Breaking the Silence (BtS) on Monday in a study called The Perimeter: Soldiers’ Testimonies from the Gaza Buffer Zone 2023–2024.
Interviews with many Israeli soldiers who were stationed in Gaza and helped build the so-called buffer zone (which the report calls the fence) were used to gather information for the report.
According to the report, an Israeli army warrant officer who served in northern Gaza from January to February 2024 told BtS that the buffer zone would go up to 1.5 kilometers into Gaza, making it impossible for civilians to get there and destroying all buildings there.
“Just like Hiroshima.”
They said “Hiroshima” when asked what the area would look like when they were done. Hiroshima, that’s what I mean.
“This is a policy of the current Israeli government that will leave us without any security in the future,” said Joel Carmel, advocacy head at BtS.
Carmel said that Israel’s repeated attempts to expand the perimeter into Gaza during the conflict show that the expanded zone, which makes it harder for Palestinians to get in and out, could become a permanent feature of Gaza after the war. She also said that Israel is creating a future for Gaza in which “no one can ever come back” to that area.
It was in October 2023 that Israeli Foreign Minister Eli Cohen said, “Gaza’s territory will shrink.” This is what Carmel used to back up his claim.
One man who talked to BtS was a sergeant first class in northern Gaza in November 2023. During their offensive in Gaza, they said, their unit was told to blow up more than 100 houses around the lines.
Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the sergeant said that Israeli troops were told during a briefing that the targets were close to Israeli towns and settlements, which made them a security risk and had to be destroyed.
The sergeant pointed out that this was the first time they had talked about the perimeter during their task.
On March 18, the Israeli army attacked the Gaza Strip from the air, killing at least 1,391 people and hurting 3,434 others. This broke the peace agreement with Hamas and the deal to trade Israeli prisoners for Palestinians who had been kidnapped.
The Health Ministry in Gaza says that since October 7, 2023, the brutal Israeli military attack on Gaza has killed over 50,750 Palestinians, mostly women and children, and hurt over 115,470 others.