WASHINGTON, April 7. /TASS/. The Israeli army in the Gaza Strip systematically leveled buildings and agricultural fields to create a sprawling buffer zone inside the enclave in the early months of the war, The Washington Post said, quoting a report from the Israeli human rights organization Breaking the Silence.
The report, available to the newspaper, is based on interviews with more than 10 Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers and officers who took part in the operation from October 2023 to August 2024. According to them, immediately after the start of the operation in response to the terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023, the IDF was ordered to create a buffer zone 40 km long and 9 km deep.
The army engineering units were ordered to destroy about 3,500 residential, commercial, and administrative buildings with explosives and bulldozers. One of the ruins is a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Gaza. According to the military interviewed, the orders to destroy the infrastructure were not accompanied by a clear justification.
"Unlike many other combat zones in the Gaza Strip, the annihilation of infrastructure and buildings in the perimeter sometimes occurred after the area was captured, when no immediate or concrete threat to the forces was present," the report said. A soldier said that of the dozens of houses destroyed by his team, only two or three were directly linked to Hamas.
Another officer said that when the industrial zone was destroyed, they "did not meet Hamas there —we did not find anything related to Hamas at all." The only argument of the command was the need to prevent a repeat of the terrorist attacks on October 7, the interviewees said.
The IDF also systematically destroyed agricultural fields inside the buffer zone being created.
"We’re talking about 35% of Gaza’s agricultural land being completely wiped out," Joel Carmel, a former IDF soldier and advocacy director for Breaking the Silence, said. "It means that there’s that much less of a chance that the Palestinian population of Gaza can be reliant on itself."
International humanitarian law "prohibits any destruction by the occupying power of civilian property except when absolutely necessary for military operations," Adil Haque, an international law professor at Rutgers University, said. That bar was not met in this case, he said. Agricultural lands, seen as critical to sustaining the civilian population, are accorded extra protection under international law.
"Nobody cared" whether the people they fired on were civilians or militants, one captain in the armored corps, who was deployed to southern Gaza in October and November 2023, was quoted as saying in the report. "We decided on a line which is the borderline, past which everyone is a suspect, but it’s not clear to me how familiar Palestinians are with this line."
Eliav Lieblich, a professor of international law at the Tel Aviv University, said that such orders "would be illegal." According to Breaking the Silence, there are currently no signs inside the buffer zone that any of the displaced persons have been allowed to return there. According to Karmel, the information about the approach to creating a buffer zone indicates that the expansion of the IDF-controlled territory in Gaza after the resumption of hostilities on March 18 may also be accompanied by similar actions.
Resumption of operation
On April 2, Prime Minister of the Jewish State Benjamin Netanyahu said Israel was taking control of the Morag axis, which crosses the Gaza Strip from east to west in its southern part between the cities of Rafah and Khan Yunis. According to him, it will become a "second Philadelphia corridor," a buffer strip about 15 km long on the border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt.
On March 18, the Israeli army interrupted a ceasefire established in January, launching heavy strikes on Gaza. Netanyahu's office explained this by Hamas's rejection of the proposals put forward by mediators and US special envoy Steven Witkoff. It said the purpose of the operation is the release of all hostages. The radicals blamed Israel and the United States for the resumption of hostilities.