‘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.”
