Israel detonates 17 booby-trapped vehicles daily in Gaza City, each like a 3.7-magnitude earthquake
Smoke rises following an Israeli strike amid an Israeli operation, as seen from central Gaza, 21 September 2025
Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor reports on 21 September 2025:
Over the past week, the Israeli army has detonated around 120 booby-trapped vehicles carrying nearly 840 tons of explosives in residential areas of Gaza City, an average of more than 17 vehicles per day. Each detonation is equivalent to a 3.7-magnitude earthquake on the Richter scale, marking the largest campaign of brute force aimed at destroying the population as part of Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, now in its 24th consecutive month.
According to scientific standards used to measure explosive energy and earthquakes, seismological and military physics estimates indicate that detonating 6–7 tons of TNT, the load carried by each vehicle, roughly equals the energy released by a natural earthquake of 3.7 magnitude.
Severe destruction from such blasts typically extends for tens of metres (around 90 metres at a high intensity level), while fractures and minor damage can reach several hundred metres, extending up to nearly one kilometre in open areas.
Field documentation in Gaza City shows that the detonations cause clear shaking of buildings even several kilometres away from the blast centre, lasting a few seconds in a manner similar to natural earthquakes.
Given that nearly all buildings in Gaza have already been damaged or weakened by more than 23 months of continuous bombardment, each new explosion causes disproportionately greater destruction. The cracked structures and open spaces amplify the impact, damaging dozens of buildings hundreds of metres away from each new blast.
The Israeli army’s practice of converting out-of-service armoured vehicles into massive, remotely detonated explosive charges is unprecedented in scale and method in modern history. Yet this barbaric conduct faces no effective response from the international community, reflecting stark double standards, injustice, and disregard for Palestinian lives.
In the past week, Israel has intensified its use of these booby-trapped vehicles in three main axes of Gaza City, the southern, eastern, and northern axes, with the declared objective of destroying the city’s central residential blocks and forcibly displacing its population.
The catastrophic impact of these explosions extends beyond physical destruction and displacement. They are also used as a systematic tool of psychological terror, spreading extreme fear among civilians and coercively driving them to flee. The detonations produce deafening blasts that reverberate throughout Gaza City, causing the remaining buildings to shake under the pressure of violent shockwaves, leaving civilians trapped in a state of constant fear, trauma, and insecurity.
International inaction and the complicity of some states have enabled Israel to openly pursue the destruction of Gaza City without even attempting to offer legal pretexts, reinforcing its impunity and undermining the effectiveness of international law in protecting civilians from the gravest crimes, foremost among them genocide.
The use of such booby-trapped vehicles is explicitly prohibited under international humanitarian law, as they constitute inherently indiscriminate weapons whose effects cannot be confined to legitimate military targets. Due to their wide-scale explosive nature, they inevitably strike civilians and civilian objects, in clear violation of the principles of distinction and proportionality, two pillars of international humanitarian law.