‘Render it unusable’: Israel’s mission of total urban destruction

While airstrikes account for mass casualties, bulldozers and explosives are flattening Gaza from the ground — what soldiers say is a systematic campaign to make the Strip unlivable, a joint investigation reveals.

By Meron Rapoport and Oren Ziv May 15, 2025

https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-total-urban-destruction/

Gaza, Israeli forces announced that they had taken control of the southernmost city of Rafah to create the “Morag Axis,” a new military corridor further dissecting the Strip. Over the course of the war, according to Gaza’s Government Media Office, the army had destroyed more than 50,000 housing units in Rafah — 90 percent of its residential neighborhoods. Now, the army proceeded to flatten Rafah’s remaining structures, turning the entire city into a buffer zone and cutting off Gaza’s only border crossing with Egypt. 

Y., a soldier who recently returned from reserve duty in Rafah, described the army’s demolition methods to +972 Magazine and Local Call. “I secured four or five bulldozers [from another unit], and they demolished 60 houses per day. A one or two story house, they take down within an hour; a three or four-story house takes a bit longer,” he said. “The official mission was to open a logistical route for maneuvering, but in practice, the bulldozers were simply destroying homes. The southeastern part of Rafah is completely destroyed. The horizon is flat. There is no city.”

Y.’s testimony is consistent with those of 10 other soldiers who served at different times in the Gaza Strip and southern Lebanon since October 7, and who spoke with +972 Magazine and Local Call. It also aligns with videos published by other soldiers, on-the-record and off-the-record statements from current and former senior officers, satellite image analysis, and reports by international organizations. 

Together, these sources paint a clear picture: the systematic destruction of residential buildings and public structures has become a central part of the Israeli army’s operations, and in many cases, the primary objective.

Some of this devastation is the result of aerial bombardments, ground fighting, and IEDs planted by Palestinian militants inside buildings in Gaza. However, while it is difficult to obtain precise figures, it appears that most of the destruction in Gaza and southern Lebanon was not carried out from the air or during combat, but rather by Israeli bulldozers or explosives — premeditated and intentional acts. 

According to +972 and Local Call’s investigation, this was driven by a conscious, strategic decision to “flatten the area,” to ensure that “the return of people to these spaces is not something that will happen,” as Yotam, who served as a deputy company commander in an armored brigade in Gaza, said.

“Non-operational” destruction, devoid of a direct military justification, began within the first months of the war: As early as January 2024, the Israeli investigative outlet The Hottest Place in Hell reported that the army had carried out the “systematic and complete destruction of all buildings near the fence within a kilometer into the Strip, without them being identified as terrorist infrastructure — neither by intelligence nor by soldiers on the ground,” with the goal of creating a “security buffer zone.”

The report quoted soldiers who said that in areas near the border fence such as Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia, and the Shuja’iyya neighborhood in the northern part of the Strip, as well as in Khirbet Khuza’a on the outskirts of Khan Younis, between 75 and 100 percent of the buildings had been destroyed by that time, almost indiscriminately. But what began in Gaza’s perpheries soon became a widely deployed method throughout the Strip, tied to Israel’s broader plan to make much of Gaza unlivable for Palestinians.

These actions amount to clear violations of the laws of war, according to Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer and human rights expert. “Destruction of [individual] property not imperatively demanded by the necessities of war constitutes a war crime,” he explained, “and there is also a specific and more serious war crime of [wanton and] extensive destruction of property not justified by military necessity. Among legal experts, human rights activists, and academics, there is significant discussion about the need to establish a crime against humanity of ‘domicide’ — the destruction of an area used for human habitation.”

‘Nowhere to return to’

Since Israel violated the ceasefire in March, approximately 2,800 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, with nearly 53,000 killed and 120,000 injured over the course of the war; as +972 has previously reported, airstrikes have accounted for the vast majority of civilian casualties. But it is the systematic destruction of Gaza’s urban space that is laying the groundwork for the ethnic cleansing of the Strip — referred to in Israeli political discourse as “implementing the Trump Plan.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu openly endorsed this vision in late March, soon after Israel resumed the war. “Hamas will lay down its weapons. Its leaders will be allowed to leave. We will see to the general security of the Gaza Strip and allow the realization of the Trump plan for voluntary migration,” Netanyahu affirmed. “This is the plan. We are not hiding it and are ready to discuss it at any time.”

Just this week, Netanyahu made this link between the destruction of civilian buildings and forced displacement more explicit. “We are destroying more and more homes — they have nowhere to return to,” he reportedly said at a meeting of the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee. “The only expected result will be a desire for Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip.”

In December 2024, the UN estimated that 69 percent of all buildings in the Gaza Strip — including 245,000 housing units — had been damaged, with over 60,000 buildings completely destroyed. By the end of February, that figure had risen to 70,000, according to Adi Ben Nun, a GIS specialist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who conducted a satellite analysis for +972 and Local Call. At least 2,000 additional structures were destroyed in March, more than 1,000 of them in Rafah alone.

Now, according to a visual analysis conducted by researcher Ariel Caine for Local Call and +972, over 73 percent of buildings in Rafah and its surroundings have been completely destroyed, with less than 4 percent showing no visible damage. The area contained approximately 28,332 buildings, spanning from the Philadelphi Corridor to the Morag Axis.

Some of the buildings in Gaza that were completely leveled by bulldozers or explosives in planned demolitions had been previously damaged, whether by airstrikes or during ground battles. However, one indication of the large number of structures destroyed without operational necessity comes from the UN data: between September and December 2024 — a period during which there was no intense combat in Gaza — more than 3,000 additional buildings in Rafah and around 3,100 new buildings in the northern Strip were damaged.

The main weapon in the army’s arsenal of destruction is Caterpillar’s D9 armored bulldozer, which has long been used to commit human rights violations in the occupied Palestinian territories. But soldiers who spoke to +972 and Local Call also described another favored method used to collapse entire residential blocks: filling containers or defunct military vehicles with explosive material, and detonating them remotely.

“In the end, the D9 [armored bulldozer] shaped the face of the war,” tweeted right-wing Israeli journalist Yinon Magal in early February. “It is what made the Gazans return south, after [they came north to their homes during the ceasefire and] they realized they had nowhere to return to …  And this wasn’t a directive from the Chief of Staff or the General Staff — this was a policy of the ‘field,’ from division commanders, brigade commanders, battalion commanders, and even the military engineering teams who changed reality.”

A former senior security official in the Israeli military, who maintained contact with many commanders, confirmed that some commanders in the field have taken it upon themselves to order the destruction of as many buildings in Gaza as possible, even in the absence of any formal military directives from senior officers. “I received reports from officers in the field that actions were being taken unnecessarily from an operational perspective: demolishing homes, forcing tens and hundreds of thousands of residents to leave, systematically destroying Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahia. They told me that D9 units were operating out of their control,” he told +972 and Local Call. “I don’t know what percentage was non-operational destruction, but it was a lot.”

Commanders in Gaza have broad discretion regarding the demolition of buildings, an official military source admitted while denying that there is a directive in Gaza to “destroy for the sake of destroying.” “A commander can take down a building that could pose a threat,” he said, noting more junior-level commanders may have been the ones responsible for the more widespread destruction.

Meanwhile, multiple reservists testified that the army’s method of systematic and deliberate flattening of civilian infrastructure was also employed in southern Lebanon, during the October-November 2024 ground invasion. According to one reservist, preparations for the invasion included demolition training — where the explicitly stated goal was to destroy Shiite villages, nearly all of which were defined as Hezbollah strongholds, to prevent residents from returning.

“If soldiers took their time, checking which wall to attach the explosives to, and then came out of the building and filmed the explosion, that proves that there was no [operational] justification for it,” explained Muhammad Shehada, visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations and a native of Gaza. A friend of his, who holds a foreign passport and entered the Gaza Strip during the ceasefire, described to him how methodical the destruction was. “He said that you could see that [the soldiers had] demolished a house, cleaned up the rubble and moved on to the next one.”

Before the war, Shehadeh himself lived in Tel Al-Hawa, a district in Gaza known for its high-rise buildings and home to officials and academics, not far from the Netzarim Corridor. “When the residents of Gaza hear that the army is going to open a corridor, they realize that not a single building will remain,” he said. “We knew that Tel Al-Hawa would disappear.”

‘The message is clear — we’re just going to destroy’

When the ceasefire took effect in late January, thousands of Palestinians rushed to return to Jabalia in northern Gaza — only to find that the refugee camp as they knew it no longer existed, with entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble. Their accounts of the destruction are consistent with the testimonies of soldiers who served in Jabalia from October 2024, when the Israeli army re-entered the camp, until the ceasefire.

Avraham Zarviv, a D9 operator who became known as the “Flattener of Jabalia” for the videos of destruction he uploaded to social media, explained his methods in an interview with Channel 14.

“I had never seen a tractor in my life, only in pictures,” said Zarviv, who in civilian life is a rabbinical court judge. The Givati Brigade, in which he served, decided a few months into the war to establish a specialized engineering unit for demolition operations. “We got on tractors, D9s, excavators… we learned the craft, we became highly professional. You don’t understand what it’s like to bring down a building — seven, six, five stories — one after the other.”

Between October 2024 and January 2025, Zarviv said that every week he destroyed on average “50 buildings — not housing units, buildings … In Rafah, they have nowhere to go, in Jabalia they have nowhere to go back to.” Zarviv recently returned to serve in Rafah. Ahead of the Passover seder in April this year, he uploaded a video from Rafah showing him against the backdrop of a street where some buildings were still standing. Zarviv did not specify in the video what exactly he was doing in Rafah, but said he had returned “to fight until victory, until settlement … We are here forever.”

While some D9 operators like Zarviv have proudly touted their war crimes, other soldiers don’t publicly discuss the destruction, according to Y. “There’s apathy: People are on their fourth or fifth deployment, they’ve gotten used to it.” But regardless of their level of zeal, Y. affirmed, soldiers understood how the bulldozers were meant to be used. “There was no formal order [to decimate Rafah], but the message is clear — we’re just going to destroy it.”

The army’s complete annihilation of Rafah came despite the fact, as Y. noted, that “there were no encounters [with Hamas fighters], we only ran into paramedics,” a reference to the incident in which Israeli soldiers killed 15 paramedics and firefighters in the city’s Tel Al-Sultan neighborhood.

Like Y., the other soldiers interviewed by +972 and Local Call said they did not see any written orders from the army’s General Staff to carry out the demolitions, and that usually such orders came from the brigade or division level.

The former senior security official said he contacted the General Staff after learning about the systematic destruction in the northern Strip, and he is “convinced that this didn’t come from the Chief of Staff [Herzi Halevi], but he lost control over it. Destruction that is not related to military objectives is a war crime. This came from below [from midlevel officers, including brigade and battalion commanders]. Revenge isn’t an [official] military objective, but it was allowed to happen.”

‘When you enter a house, you blow it up’

H. served in the reserves in Gaza twice, the first time at the beginning of 2024, and the second between May and August as an operations room commander for a battalion stationed in the Netzarim Corridor. “During my first reserve duty, I was in Khirbet Khuza’a [a village near Khan Younis]. We destroyed everything, but there was a logic — to expand the contact line [buffer zone] because it was close to the border,” he said.

“[The second time,] the area we were in was along the Netzarim Corridor by the sea. There was no operational justification to demolish buildings. They posed no threat to Israel. It had become a routine: The army got used to the idea that when you enter a house, you blow it up.

“This wasn’t a local initiative — It came from the battalion commander,” H. continued. “The demolition targets [buildings marked for destruction] were sent to the brigade. I assume it went up to the division too. The battalion commander marked buildings with an X and checked how many explosives were available. They’d send a company commander to verify there were no POWs or missing persons [hostages] inside. In cases where Palestinians were still in the houses, they were told to leave — but those were rare cases.”

According to H, the destruction was a daily matter. “Some days we demolished eight to 10 buildings, some days none. But overall, in the 90 days we were there, my battalion destroyed between 300 and 400 buildings. We’d [back away] 300 meters [from the building] and blow them up.”

When H. arrived at the Netzarim corridor in May 2024, its width extended only a few dozen meters wide to the north and south. By the time he completed his service three months later, the demolitions had expanded the corridor to seven kilometers on each side. “We took 3 kilometers from Zaytoun [north of Netzarim] and also from Al-Bureij and Nuseirat [to the south]. There’s nothing left, not a single wall higher than a meter,” he said. “The scale and intensity of the destruction is so massive — it’s indescribable.”

Yotam, the deputy company commander, joined the reserves on October 7 and served 207 days in Gaza, participating in the first ground incursion in Gaza City and along the Netzarim Corridor. He was later dismissed from service after signing a letter calling on soldiers to stop serving until the hostages are returned.

“We’d wake up, and the battalion was assigned an engineering company for the day, along with a specific quantity of explosives,” Yotam explained, describing how the demolition missions began. “That would mean demolishing between one and five buildings [in a day].”

As deputy company commander, Yotam was tasked with leading the missions. “I went to the battalion commander who told me, ‘Find something relevant in the field and demolish it.’ I told him, ‘I’m not doing a mission like that.’ So I went to the engineering company’s commander, we opened a map, and selected five buildings. If we didn’t, they’d just go pick buildings at random — anyway, they wanted to demolish the entire neighborhood. The general feeling was: ‘We’ve got an engineering company today, let’s go destroy something.’”

Like other soldiers who spoke with +972 and Local Call, Yotam affirmed that the primary military objective in the second phase of the war in March and April 2024 was destruction for its own sake. He added that a division commander said that it was a “pressure lever on Hamas” to reach a hostage deal, but at a practical level “this is not an operational mission. It serves no concrete purpose. There are no set protocols.”

Yotam said that in the Netzarim area, field units had considerable freedom to decide what to destroy. “The operational thinking was that this is territory the IDF holds and won’t be returning any time soon — and no one cares about the lives of the Palestinians who were there. It’s not an area that’s going to become a Palestinian neighborhood again.

“I saw with my own eyes hundreds of buildings that were flattened. Entire neighborhoods north of the Turkish hospital [in the central Gaza Strip] were leveled. You can’t remain indifferent to such a scale of destruction.”

‘A show every evening’

Multiple soldiers interviewed described the ceremonial rituals that accompanied the demolitions in Gaza. A reservist corporal in Brigade 55 who served near Khan Younis, spoke about his experience on missions: “We’d go through houses, confirm there was no intel of interest or militants present, and then the engineering unit would come in to each building with 10-kilo charges, which they’d attach to the support columns,” he said. “It was like a show every evening: a senior officer, usually a company commander or higher, would get on the radio with the bomb disposal unit and engineering corps, give a speech about why we’re here, count down, and then boom. We’d look back and nothing would be standing.”

Yotam also spoke about these rituals during his reserve duty in Gaza. “When a row of buildings was blown up, the battalion commander would get on the radio, say something heroic about someone who died and about continuing the mission, and then they’d lift an entire row of buildings into the air.”

Another common practice was the burning of houses that Israeli forces had used as temporary military facilities, marking the end of a mission, as +972 has previously documented. “It was routine — they did it all the time,” Yotam said. “Later they stopped and only burned houses that had been used as command centers.”

Soldiers also understood the larger meaning behind these ritualized demolitions. In the absence of any operational objective, they served a political and ideological one: to make Gaza unlivable for generations to come.

“In the end we’re not fighting an army, we’re fighting an idea,” the commander of Battalion 74 told the Israeli newspaper Makor Rishon in December 2024. “If I kill the fighters, the idea can still remain. But I want to make the idea unviable. When they look at Shuja’iyya and see there’s nothing there — just sand — that’s the point. I don’t think they’ll be able to return here for at least 100 years.”

“No one knows better than us that the Gazans have nowhere to return,” explained a commander, whose battalion was involved in the destruction of about a thousand buildings over two months in 2025. A soldier who served in the same battalion added, “The idea was to destroy everything. Just create strips of destruction.”

‘You take down an entire street in one blast’

In April 2025, Israeli journalist Yaniv Kubovich entered the “Morag Axis” — the strip of land the army cleared between Khan Younis and Rafah — and reported seeing the remains of an old armored personnel carrier (APC) near one of the destroyed buildings.

Soldiers explained to him that this was another method used to collapse buildings — one that causes extensive damage to the surrounding environment. “The IDF loads [the APC] with explosives and sends [it] autonomously into a street or building that the air force would have previously bombed. But after a year and a half of war, the explosive APC became the cheaper alternative.”

According to Kubovich, the remains of these explosive APCs can now be seen everywhere in the Strip, and it appears that their use has significantly expanded since the early stages of the war.

A., who served multiple tours in Gaza, told +972 and Local Call that this method isn’t limited to old APCs. “You take two giant containers, use dozens if not hundreds of liters of explosive material, and with a D9 or a Bobcat [small bulldozer], remotely controlled, place them at a predetermined point — and detonate. You take down an entire street in one blast.

“Once we entered a compound that used to be a youth educational center,” A. continued. “We stayed there for one night, and then they blew it up. We were a kilometer and a half away [from the explosion] and we still felt the shockwave pass over us, like a strong gust of wind. I thought the building had collapsed on me.”

A. said that sometimes this method was used for relatively operational goals: blowing up an area suspected of having an explosive device, for instance, or clearing paths for troops.

But Yotam described it as another tool primarily used to bring down buildings. “The mission is defined once you receive an allotted amount [of explosives] — then it’s, ‘Alright, go,’” he said. “Part of the ideological mission is to flatten buildings or render an area unusable.” Y., who recently served in Rafah, also testified that “Every night, they blow up one or two [of these APCs.] The force is insane — it flattens everything around it.”

As Israeli forces flatten Rafah, the tens of thousands of Palestinians forced to evacuate in April can hear the destruction of their homes from afar. Dr. Ahmed al-Sufi, the mayor of Rafah, told +972 and Local Call that when he returned to the city in January when the ceasefire began, he was shocked to see the extent of the destruction. Now, displaced again outside Rafah, he hears bombings from the air and nonstop explosions from the ground, and he fears the situation is much worse. “Nobody knows what the city looks like now, but we expect it to be completely destroyed,” he said. “It will be very difficult for the residents to return.”

“The Israeli army uses various methods to destroy the city, either through relentless aerial bombardment or by blowing up buildings by booby-trapping them,” Mohammed Al-Mughair, Director of Supply for the Civil Defense in Gaza, explained. “There are also booby-trapped robots that are sent into houses and entire neighborhoods and detonated inside them. There were a number of areas that still had intact, habitable buildings [during the ceasefire] but with this relentless bombing, we don’t know what happened there, especially in the areas surrounding the so-called Morag Corridor.”

‘Our goal was to destroy Shiite villages’

This policy of systematic destruction — a tactic to prevent civilians from returning to their homes — was also implemented during Israel’s two-month ground invasion of southern Lebanon. An analysis of satellite imagery in late November 2024, shortly after the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah had been reached, found that 6.6 percent of all buildings in districts south of the Litani River had been completely or heavily destroyed.

G., a reservist in the 7064 Engineering Battalion, showed up for training in summer 2024 ahead of the planned invasion. He told +972 and Local Call that the briefing explicitly stated that the battalion’s goal was to destroy Shiite villages. “In demolition training before the [ground] invasion, a major from the battalion explained to us that our goal in entering Lebanon would be to destroy Shiite villages. He didn’t say ‘terrorists,’ ‘enemies,’ or ‘threats.’ He didn’t use any military terms, just ‘Shiite villages.’ That’s destruction with no military purpose — only a political purpose.

“The goal was to prevent the residents from returning,” G. continued. “That was stated explicitly. The idea was that there would be no possibility of rebuilding after the war. In retrospect, we saw that they destroyed schools, mosques, and water purification facilities.” He refused to report for further reserve duty, but was not punished.

During G.’s training, no specific distance from the border was given as the limit for destruction, but “Brigade 769, which we were under, decided on a 3-kilometer range. From what I saw [from the Israeli side of the border], they succeeded.” In an interview with Srugim, Brigade 769’s commander confirmed these remarks: “Wherever there is terror, suspicion of terror, or even a whiff of terror, I destroy, demolish, and eliminate.”

L., a reservist who served both in Gaza and the eastern Lebanon front, said the army brought in “a huge number of combat engineering forces, both regular and reserve.” His unit in Lebanon “faced little to no resistance, far less than expected,” and one of the goals was “to destroy all the infrastructure in the villages, because nearly every village was defined as a Hezbollah stronghold.

“They began destroying the villages in a fairly comprehensive and intense way — almost all the houses, not just those marked as Hezbollah commanders’ homes. Mines, explosives, backhoes, D9s — [they used] all the tools to demolish buildings. They also destroyed power, water, and communication infrastructure, to make them unusable in the short term, and even if [the residents] return, it will take a long time to rebuild.”

According to L., the homes that were spared were often those belonging to Christian families. “I noticed that buildings with crosses inside often remained standing,” he explained.

G., as noted, refused to enter Lebanon in order not to take part in the destruction of villages, but from the Israeli side of the border, he saw and heard what his battalion was doing there. “Some of the destruction happened after everything had already been captured and there was no more resistance … I saw evidence on the battalion WhatsApp of intentional destruction. Soldiers from the battalion filmed themselves blowing up buildings. My specific battalion entered only after there was no Hezbollah, no weapons, no buildings being used for any secondary military purpose [against Israel] — nothing that [is permissible to target] under the laws of war.”

This logic of mass destruction has also been applied in the West Bank, albeit on a smaller scale. In fact, a military source told +972 and Local Call that the nature of the destruction in Gaza stems from the tactics the army developed in Operation Defensive Shield in the West Bank during the Second Intifada — “exposing the terrain” in military parlance.

According to a UN OCHA report from March 2025, since the beginning of 2024, Israel has demolished 463 buildings in the West Bank as part of military activity, displacing nearly 40,000 Palestinians from the Jenin, Nur Shams, and Tulkarm camps as part of “Operation Iron Wall.” In Jenin refugee camp, as +972 previously reported, the army has detonated entire residential blocks and bulldozed streets – part of a campaign to re-engineer the camp to suppress Palestinian resistance and undermine the right of return.The military recently announced plans to demolish 116 more homes in the Tulkarm and Nur Shams refugee camps. 

Based on the figures provided by soldiers who served in Gaza, a single battalion in the Strip could destroy that many buildings in a week. But the underlying idea is the same. Destruction is no longer simply the byproduct of Israel’s military activity, or part of a wider military strategy — it appears to be the objective itself.

The IDF Spokesperson responded to our request for comment with the following statement: “The IDF does not have a policy of destroying buildings as such, and any demolition of a structure must comply with the conditions established by international law. The claims regarding statements by soldiers about demolitions unrelated to operational purposes lack sufficient detail and do not align with the IDF’s policies and orders. Exceptional incidents are examined by the IDF’s review and investigation mechanisms.

“The IDF operates on all fronts with the aim of thwarting terrorism in a complex security reality, in which terrorist organizations deliberately establish terrorist infrastructure within civilian populations and structures. The claims in the article reflect a misunderstanding of Hamas’s military tactics in the Gaza Strip and the extent to which these tactics involve civilian buildings.

“In the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) as well, terrorist organizations operate and exploit the civilian population as human shields, thereby endangering them. They plant explosives and hide weapons in the area. As part of the campaign against terrorism in northern Samaria, roads in the area are sometimes breached, requiring the demolition of buildings in accordance with the law. The decision was made for operational reasons and after examining alternatives.

“The IDF will continue to act in accordance with [Israeli] law and international law, continue to neutralize terrorist strongholds, and take all possible precautions to minimize harm to civilians.”