A new report by Breaking the Silence (BTS), a NGO based in Israel, has created statements by soldiers who describe in detail how they destroyed the country’s plots in their mission during the war to expand the buffer zone between Gaza and Israel deeper into the strip.
BTS, which was founded by the veterans of the Israel Defense Forces, has published a report entitled The Perimeter: Soldier products from the Gaza Strip Puffer Zone 2023-2024, which contained information from interviews with dozens of IDF soldiers, which were used in Gaza and in which reported in the perimeter report. CBC News were able to speak to one of the soldiers that looked at the details of the activities of the IDF in the area that runs along the border to the south.
Since its foundation in 2004, BTS has published reports based on more than 1,400 accounts of IDF soldiers that have been based on their experiences during the work in Gaza, in West Bank, in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem since September 2000 to “put the public of the reality of everyday life in the occupied areas” and “to put an end to the occupation”.
In an explanation of CBC News, BTS said that the creation of the perimeter caused considerable obstacles to the reconstruction demonstrations in the Gaza Strip by “confiscation of land” and “undermining its long -term sustainability”. The organization says that statements of Israeli civil servants, including the territory, “remain in the Israeli hands” and that the Palestinians are not allowed to return, which BTS calls “ethnic cleansing”.
BTS also asks the Israeli government to return to the negotiating table and to look for a diplomatic solution to return the hostages and bring peace to the region.
“A future without security”
The Israeli forces have had a radius to the south of the border between Gaza and Israel for at least the early 2000s. In 2015, the Humanitarian agency of the United Nations found that the buffer zone extended 300 meters into the strip. Palestinians were generally not permitted at this distance from the fence that separates the two regions.
Since October 7, 2023, the militants led by Hamas stormed across the border between Gazaa Israel, killed over a thousand people and kidnapped 250, the scope, according to IDF soldiers, has told BTS about their engagement in the mission in the mission in the mission in the Gaza. Although the report does not call the soldiers, it gives their ranks and general areas and periods that they have served them.
An IDF soldier who was presented in the report said a Warrant Officer, who served between January and February 2024 in the North Gaza, to BTS that the buffer zone would be up to 1.5 kilometers in Gaza strip that would be banned and everything would be destroyed. When asked what the area would look like after they were finished, they replied: “Hiroshima. I say that, Hiroshima.”
“This is a policy of the current Israeli government that leads us to a future without security,” said Joel Carmel, Advocacy Director at BTS, to CBC News in a video call.
According to Carmel, Israel’s persistent advance means extending the extent in Gaza during the war, the extended zone in which the Palestinians are not approved will become a permanent component in post-war Gaza and that Israel chooses a future for Gaza in which “nobody can ever return” in this area.
The latest media reports, some cited the Israeli humanitarian organization Gisha, said that the expansion of the buffer zone by Israel will include up to 17 percent of the area of the Gaza Strip.
According to Ocha, 65 percent of the enclave are now in “no -go” bidden, under active shift orders or both. Israel has not fully explained its long-term goals for the areas now recorded, although the residents of Gaza believe that the goal is to permanently degenerate the country swaths, including some of the last arable land and water infrastructures of GAZA.
Carmel refers to a statement by Israel Foreign Minister Eli Cohen in October 2023, in which he said that “Gaza’s territory will shrink after the end of the war”.
CBC News turned to the IDF and Israel government officials for a comment, but did not hear back before the publication.
In their certificates of BTS detailed IDF soldiers who have participated in the expansion of the perimeter, the declining destruction and the effects of the presence of the perimeter both Palestinian and Israeli societies.
Leave gaza as ‘hill from rubble’
A soldier who spoke to BTS and CBC News During your tour in Gaza, more than 100 buildings chase up in the air. Although CBC confirmed the identity of the Sergeant, they spoke on the condition that their identity is kept confidential for fear of their security and their livelihood.
According to the Sergeant, IDF soldiers were communicated in a briefing that the areas they could destroy were close enough to the Israeli settlements and cities that they had to be a security threat. The Sergeant said CBC that this was the first time that the area was mentioned during its mission.
They started their tour in the north of Gaza, an area that was largely rubble, where they were commissioned with destroyed abandoned houses and buildings. Soon they said their mission was bending on the blowing of houses in southern Gaza, where they found that there were still signs of life. At that time, said the Sergeant, questions about the purpose of the mission began to grow in their thoughts.
“The houses there were not almost as destroyed as in the north,” the Sergeant told CBC News about Zoom. “They see that the signs of people’s life were there and their things.”
The Sergeant found that the reservist training they received did not cover how they should blow up houses. Instead, they said, they had taught how to blow up tunnels in the air and set up mines on bridges and fields.
“Houses … are not really something we trained,” said the Sergeant. “Even the commanders learned it as if we were going.”
The Sergeant said when they left the Gaza in December 2023, it was a “hill out of rubble”.
Prof. Adi Ben-Nun says that “everything is destroyed” to the extent that the report that violates silence is created between Gaza and Israel.
“Everything is destroyed”
Professor Adi Ben-Nun from the Department of Geography Information systems at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has pursued the destruction in Gaza and the expansion of the perimeter since the beginning of the war.
He says that there were around 180,000 buildings in Gaza before October 7, 2023, based on the United Nations estimates. He says 120,000 of these buildings were destroyed before the armistice was interrupted in March. Data that has been describing the destruction has not yet been available.
He says that the agricultural land within the circumference contains around 3,000 buildings and that everything has been “completely torn down”.
“You have to understand that it is not just the building, it is the streets, the electricity, the water structure, the waste water … everything destroyed,” he said during a video call to CBC News, where he demonstrated the satellite images with which he followed the destruction.
With his computer, Ben-Nun switched between two satellite images, which he created with Google Maps-a one that showed the condition of the scope before October 7 and the other according to the scope. The map of previously shows green land and buildings. The gray and begging color of the war is created on the map of After; Tanks and destroyed buildings are everything that can be seen.
He says that due to this destruction it would take generations for the Gazans to rebuild what has been lost.
“Even if people are allowed to return home,” said Ben-Nun, “there is no home.”
