‘Our job is to flatten Gaza’: Inside one Israeli battalion’s yearlong mission of destruction
Palestinians walk next to the remains of Al-Azhar University in Gaza City on 10 February 2024
Younis Tirawi and Sami Vanderlip report in Drop Site News on 22 October 2024:
Over the past year, the 749 Battalion has played an indispensable role in Gaza. Its soldiers are reservists—alumni of the combat engineering corps, which trains soldiers in demolition. The battalion comes in after combat units, toppling buildings and homes that managed to survive air strikes.
The 749 Battalion was among the first to enter the strip through the Netzarim corridor, the four-mile-long road separating Gaza City and Deir al-Balah that Israel occupied early in the war in order to divide the north and south of Gaza. After helping to cement control of south Gaza City, including the Netzarim corridor, the battalion later advanced into areas like Shuja’iya in Gaza City, the Bureij Refugee Camp in Central Gaza, and even Rafah.
At the time of writing, the 749 Battalion is operating in northern Gaza and Jabalia, where, even following Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s killing in southern Gaza, Israel’s campaign has intensified to the point of executions and depopulation. There, the battalion is seemingly racing to destroy as many buildings as possible. As one soldier put it, “We will leave them nothing!”
The images in this investigation come primarily from the group’s own social media page, which Drop Site News gained access to, as well as the personal accounts of dozens of soldiers from various companies within the battalion. By stitching together the information shared within the battalion, we were able to clearly map out the unit’s organizational structure and identify over a hundred of its members.
Drop Site News was also able to use the videos to determine the areas where the 749 Battalion was operating and document their activities in the Gaza Strip in detail. They are not the only battalion tasked specifically with demolitions—if it was, Gaza wouldn’t look the way it does—but a close examination of its daily activity offers a rare window into the Israeli operation on the ground in Gaza.