‘Render it unusable’: Israel’s mission of total urban destruction
Palestinians walk through the destruction caused by the Israeli air and ground offensive in Rafah,southern Gaza, early in 2025
Meron Rapoport and Oren Ziv write in +972 on 15 May 2025:
In early April, just weeks after resuming its assault on 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.”