Israeli soldiers, who related to the veterans’ group “Breaking the Silence” (BTS) their eyewitness accounts of the deliberate demolition of large swaths of Gaza, also spoke with the Associated Press and Britain’s The Guardian yesterday. The testimony of those who now have broken the silence makes clear Israel’s policy to make Gaza unlivable, but also the rage that has driven the process.
BTS released the report titled “The Perimeter” yesterday. It related that the one-kilometer buffer zone carved out of Palestinian land has been doubled since March 18. “This space was to have no crops, structures, or people. Almost every object, infrastructure installation, and structure within the perimeter was demolished.” Soldiers reported that they were “given orders to deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighborhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions…. Places where people had lived, farmed, and established industry were transformed into a vast wasteland, a strip of land eradicated in its entirety.”
Five soldiers told AP that they were, in AP’s words, “ordered to destroy farmland, irrigation pipes, crops and trees as well as thousands of buildings, including residential and public structures…. Several soldiers said their units demolished more buildings than they could count, including large industrial complexes.” One soldier, deployed with a tank squad to protect the demolition teams, said that an armored bulldozer flattened land, creating a “kill zone,” and that anyone who came within 500 meters of the tanks would be shot, including women and children. He said: “I came there because they kill us and now we’re going to kill them. And I found out that we’re not only killing them. We’re killing them, we’re killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs, and we destroyed their houses.”
Four soldiers described to The Guardian their daily routine: “Get up in the morning, each platoon gets five, six, or seven locations, seven houses that they’re supposed to work on. We didn’t know a lot about the places that we were destroying or why we were doing it. I guess those things today, from my perspective now, are not legitimate. What I saw there, as far as I can judge, was beyond what I can justify that was needed..”
Asked for a response, the Israel Defense Forces was silent.
Israel’s “buffer” zone has doubled in size since March 18, according to a map issued by the IDF. BTS’s “The Perimeter” report says that the expanded buffer zone has wiped out what was over one-third of Gaza’s agricultural land and represents more than 15% of all of Gaza. It, along with the Netzarim and Philadelphi Corridors, make more than 50% of Gaza off-limits to the population. Israeli PM Netanyahu announced last week that a third corridor is being set up, cutting Rafah off from the rest of southern Gaza.