IDF 'razed Gaza border land to create kill zone'

Israel's military razed huge swathes of land inside the perimeter of Gaza and ordered troops to turn the area into a "kill zone" where anybody who entered was a target, according to testimony by soldiers who carried out the plan.

- Quique Kierszenbaum Tel Aviv Oliver Holmes

Israeli combatants said they were ordered to destroy homes, factories and farmland roughly half a mile inside the perimeter of Gaza to make a "buffer zone", with one describing the area as looking like Hiroshima.

The testimonies are some of the first accounts by Israeli soldiers to be published since the latest war started in October 2023 after Hamas's attack on Israel. They were collected by Breaking the Silence, a group founded in 2004 by Israeli veterans who aim to expose the reality of the military's grip over Palestinians. The Guardian interviewed four of the soldiers, who corroborated the accounts.

Titled 'The Perimeter' and published today, the report said the stated purpose of the plan was to create a thick strip of land that provided a clear line of sight for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to identify and kill militants.

It said: "This space was to have no crops, structures, or people. Almost every object, infrastructure installation, and structure within the perimeter was demolished."

Soldiers were "given orders to deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighbourhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions", the report added.

The ultimate result, however, was the creation of "a death zone of enormous proportions", the report said. "Places where people had lived, farmed, and established industry were transformed into a vast wasteland, a strip of land eradicated in its entirety." It stretches along the frontier with Israel, from the Mediterranean coast in the north to the strip's south-east corner next to Egypt.

A sergeant in the combat engineers corps said that once an area in the perimeter "was pretty much empty of any Gazans, we essentially started getting missions that were about basically blowing up houses or what was left of the houses".