Israeli troops demolished almost every structure and flattened huge swathes of land inside the perimeter of Gaza after they were directed to turn the area into a “kill zone” where anybody who entered was an easy target, said some soldiers who worked on the plan in testimony.
Israeli soldiers said they were told to destroy homes, factories, and farmland roughly 1 km (0.6 miles) inside the perimeter of Gaza to create a “buffer zone”.

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The testimonies were collected by Breaking the Silence, a group founded in 2004 by Israeli veterans who aim to expose the reality of the military’s grip.
The report titled ‘The Perimeter’, published on Monday, said the plan was to create a broad strip of land that provided a clear line of sight for the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) to identify and kill militants. “Almost every object, infrastructure installation, and structure within the perimeter was demolished,” it said.

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Israel says the buffer zone encircling Gaza is needed to prevent a repeat of the October 7, 2023 attack by thousands of Hamas-led fighters who crossed the previous 300-metre-deep buffer zone to unleash a horrific assault on Israeli communities.
The attack, which killed 1,200 people and saw 251 taken hostage, was one of the worst security disasters in Israel’s history.

Soldiers were “given orders to methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighbourhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions”, the report added.

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The ultimate result was a death zone stretching along the frontier with Israel, from the Mediterranean coast in the north to the strip’s south-east corner next to Egypt, the report said.

A sergeant said that once an area “was pretty much empty of any Gazans, we started getting missions about blowing up houses or what was left of them”.
The IDF did not respond to a request for comment on the report.

One soldier who provided testimony on condition of anonymity said their unit was told to shoot anyone in the perimeter area on sight. The mentality was that everyone who walked into the perimeter would be considered a “terrorist” but rules on who can be killed on sight appeared to vary for units.

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One sergeant said he was given “shoot to kill” orders for any male adult who entered the perimeter. “For women and children, [the order was] ‘shoot to drive away’, and if they come close to the fence, you stop [them]. You don’t kill women, children, or the elderly,” he said.

“The borderline is a kill zone. Anyone who crosses a certain line, that we have defined, is considered a threat and is sentenced to death,” said a captain in an armoured corps unit.
“[We] set out on this war out of insult, out of pain, out of anger, out of the sense that we had to succeed. This distinction [between civilians and terrorist infrastructure], it didn’t matter. Nobody cared. We decided on a line … past which everyone is a suspect.”

“Enough people died or got injured crossing that line, so they don’t go near it.”
Israel had previously established a buffer zone inside Gaza that extended to 300 metres, but the new one was intended to range from 800 to 1,500 metres.

The Hamas attack on 7 October 2023 made many Israelis feel the “need to pick up a gun”. “A lot of us went there, I went there, because they killed us and now we’re going to kill them,” they said.

In the early expansion of the zone, bulldozers and heavy excavators were used along with mines and explosives, and a few of the buildings demolished contained the belongings of hostages.