Israeli soldiers detail orders to ‘annihilate’ Gaza land for buffer zone
Israeli troops conducting operations in Gaza’s Tel Al-Sultan, Rafah in an army handout released on 2 April 2025
Mera Aladam reports in Middle East Eye on 8 April 2025:
Israeli troops were given orders to raze agricultural land, destroy residential blocks and open fire on anyone who came near them to make way for deadly buffer zones in Gaza, a report by Israeli veterans’ group Breaking the Silence (BtS) has revealed.
According to Israeli soldiers interviewed for the report, titled “The Perimeter”, the army created a perimeter, between 800 and 1500 metres in breadth and 1.5km inside the Gaza Strip, where “large swathes of the land were turned into massive kill zones”.
The soldiers said that the borders of such areas were invisible, constantly changing and were not communicated to Palestinians.
“At first, the IDF (Israeli army) designated a certain area that was forbidden to cross. The IDF decides on a certain line, and conceptually, anyone who crosses it is considered a threat,” one reserve commander testified.
“It happened at the Netzarim Corridor and it happened on the border, too. There are no clear rules of engagement. There is some room for discretion on the ground. Like, ultimately, it’s down to the company commander and the battalion commander.”
The Netzarim Corridor, a six-kilometre stretch of land south of Gaza City that divides the strip into its northern and southern parts, is used by Israeli forces to monitor and control the movement of Palestinians between northern and southern Gaza and to launch military operations. In December, a Haaretz investigation revealed that hundreds of Palestinians, including children, had been indiscriminately shot dead by Israeli soldiers along the corridor.
It had been designated as a “kill zone” by the Division 252 commander, according to a senior officer, allowing soldiers to shoot “anyone who enters”.
“There is no proper combat procedure like there is in Judea and Samaria [West Bank]. Company commanders make all kinds of decisions about this, so it ultimately very much depends on who they are. But there is no system of accountability in general,” the Israeli reserve commander told BtS. “Anyone who crosses a certain line, that we have defined, is considered a threat and is sentenced to death. That did exist. It was an IDF definition. There was a line.”
A land without rules
The testimonies given to Breaking the Silence reveal the orders soldiers received to conduct missions searching for corpses and the razing of vast stretches of Gaza.
“Within the Perimeter, the IDF created a vast expanse where rules of engagement were seemingly nonexistent and civilian homes were methodically destroyed en masse, alongside infrastructure and agriculture critical to Gaza’s future self-sufficiency and rehabilitation,” BtS reported.
Israel has been accused of forcibly razing Gaza’s border areas ever since the early months of the war, with the UN high commissioner for human rights saying these acts may constitute war crimes in February last year.
According to Breaking the Silence, buffer zones are a fundamental part of Israel’s defence strategy, with the current zones in Gaza established after “wholesale destruction”, entirely reshaping around 16 percent of Gaza.