Everyone in the Gazan buffer zone is a justified shooting disc, according to testimonials from Israeli soldiers

The buffer zone that Israel has laid in Gaza along its own border serves in practice as a ‘murder zone’ where every living soul is a justified goal. This is evident from testimonials that Israeli soldiers have taken to the veteran organization Breaking The Silence. Israel has completely equalized the area in question; One of the soldiers compares the level of destruction with Hiroshima after the atomic bomb.

During this war, Israel destroyed a new border with the Gaza Strip, on average a kilometer inland. All in all, it is about 16 percent of the land area of ​​Gaza, an area of ​​about 55 square kilometers. In that buffer zone, nobody is allowed to come or he is being shot. « Everyone who crosses a certain limit that we have defined is considered a threat and is sentenced to death, » says a reserve captain of the armor corps in the south of the Gaza strip. A colleague adds: « It is not clear to me how well known the Palestinians are with this border. »

The testimonies shed new light on the instructions for violence for Israeli soldiers. For some time it has been suspected that Israel has a broad definition in Gaza who can be considered as a suspect. This is confirmed by a few testimonials in the report, for example of this reservist: « People were considered a suspect because they had a bag in their hands. I believe they came to get small cheese herb (a plant species), but the army says » No, they hide « . Boem (grenades were fired in their direction). »

Perimeter

The report is called Perimeteraccording to the nickname that soldiers gave at the border zone. Breaking The Silence writes that creating the buffer zone is ‘completely unrelated’ on the official goals of Israel in Gaza: the elimination of Hamas and freeing the hostages. Instead, according to the organization, the buffer zone mainly contributes to « future Israeli control » of Gaza.

The testimonials show that soldiers were instructed to destroy everything that was in that border zone « deliberately, methodically and systematically, writes Breaking The Silence, » including entire residential areas, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques and cemeteries, with very few exceptions.  » It is estimated that the organization is equated with 3,500 buildings.

Industrial areas and agricultural areas that served the entire population of Gaza were also destroyed. More than a third of the Gazan agricultural land was in the area. A reserve grant first class of the fifth brigade tells about the D9-Bulldozers that were used for this in the north of the Gaza Strip: « The D9 has mainly repeated fields, agriculture, olive trees, aubergine fields. A very large excavator just comes through and pulls the whole bottom.”

Buildings in the buffer zone were not destroyed because they would have housed Hamas fighters, as is often the argument for destruction elsewhere in Gaza. In the border zone there was another goal: to make the fully visibility free of the area, so that Israeli soldiers can perceive any suspect movement. Some soldiers testified that certain commanders saw the destruction as a way to take revenge and to punish Hamas for the atrocities of October 7.

Separation wall

Setting buffer zones is not unusual for Israel. On the West Bank, the – according to international law illegal – separation wall was deliberately not laid on the border, but largely within. Many illegal Israeli settlements lie in those created buffer zone, which in this way contributes to de facto annexation of Palestinian territory. Many Palestinian landowners were separated from their (agricultural) land by the construction of the wall.

Breaking The Silence is an organization of former soldiers in the Israeli army who have regretted the way they have treated Palestinians. The club regularly collects testimonies from (former) soldiers. The organization is not very popular in Israel because of the criticism of its own army; Surprising governments have Breaking the Silence limits try to impose.

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