IDF soldiers admit to committing war crimes in Gaza, with one officer revealing they not only kill military-age men, “we’re killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs …[and] pissing on their graves.”
IDF forces in the Gaza Strip on October 20, 2024. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit photographer, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
By Brett Wilkins
Common Dreams
An Israeli human rights group on Monday published a report in which Israel Defense Forces officers and soldiers who took part in the creation of a buffer zone along Gaza’s border with Israel described alleged war crimes including indiscriminate killing, as well as the wholesale deliberate destruction of civilian infrastructure in what multiple whistleblowers called a “kill zone.”
The new report from Breaking the Silence (BTS) details how Israel — which for decades has dubiously relied upon defensive buffer zones in territories it conquers or controls — decided on a policy of “widespread, deliberate destruction” in order to create a security perimeter ranging between roughly half a mile and a mile in width on the Gaza side of the Israeli-Palestinian border.
“To create this area, Israel launched a major military engineering operation that, by means of wholesale destruction, entirely reshaped about 16% of the Gaza Strip… an area previously home to some 35% of Gaza’s agricultural land,” the report states.
“The perimeter extends from the coast in the north to the Egyptian border in the south, all within the territory of the Gaza Strip and outside of Israel’s internationally recognized borders.”
“The Perimeter:” a new collection of testimonies from soldiers who fought in Gaza in 2023-2024. It chronicles the systematic annihilation and expropriation of entire villages and agricultural zones while creating the new Gaza buffer zone, which the IDF “completed” last December?… pic.twitter.com/Vj9hA86nl7
— Breaking the Silence (@BtSIsrael) April 7, 2025
“The mission given to soldiers in the field, as revealed in their testimonies, was to create an empty, completely flat expanse about a kilometer wide along the Gaza side of the border fence,” the publication continues. “This space was to have no crops, structures, or people. Almost every object, infrastructure installation, and structure within the perimeter was demolished.”
“Palestinians were denied entry into the area altogether, a ban which was enforced using live fire, including machine gun fire and tank shells. In this way, the military created a death zone of enormous proportions,” the report adds.
“Places where people had lived, farmed, and established industry were transformed into a vast wasteland, a strip of land eradicated in its entirety.”
“The testimonies demonstrate that soldiers were given orders to deliberately, methodically, and systematically annihilate whatever was within the designated perimeter, including entire residential neighborhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries, with very few exceptions,” the paper says.
“Industrial zones and agricultural areas which served the entire population of Gaza were laid to waste, regardless of whether those areas had any connection whatsoever to the fighting.”
“Places where people had lived, farmed and established industry were transformed into a vast wasteland.”
Palestinians who dared enter the perimeter, even accidentally, were also targeted, including civilian men, women, children and elders.
The officers and soldiers interviewed by BTS struggled to explain whether noncombatants were informed of the no-go zone’s limits, with one saying civilians knew to stay away when they saw that “enough people died or got injured” crossing the unmarked boundary.
Some people who entered the perimeter out of sheer desperation were targeted. Israel’s blockade of Gaza has fueled widespread and sometimes deadly starvation, and Palestinians entered the “kill zone” to pick hubeiza, a nutritious wild plant, after the area’s farmland was razed.
“The IDF really is fulfilling the public’s wishes, which state: “There are no innocents in Gaza. We’ll show them,” one reserve warrant officer explained.
“People were incriminated for having bags in their hands. Guy showed up with a bag? Incriminated, terrorist. I believe they came to pick hubeiza, but… boom,” tank shells were fired at him from half a mile away, he said.
In a separate interview with The Guardian, that same officer said that at first, his attitude toward invading Gaza was, “I went there because they killed us and now we’re going to kill them.”
“And I found out that we’re not only killing them — we’re killing them, we’re killing their wives, their children, their cats, their dogs,” they added. “We’re destroying their houses and pissing on their graves.”
Another IDF reservist officer told BTS that he was briefed that “there is no civilian population” in the area, where Palestinians are “terrorists, all of them.” Asked what the area looked like after the IDF clearing operation, the officer replied: “Hiroshima.”
A captain in an armored division of the IDF reserves said “the borderline is a kill zone,” where “there are no clear rules of engagement,” or “proper combat procedure.”
“Anyone who crosses a certain line, that we have defined, is considered a threat and is sentenced to death,” the captain added.
Israeli Air Force Shaldag unit operator in Gaza on Dec. 3, 2023. (IDF Spokesperson’s Unit photographer, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0)
The BTS report follows an investigation published last December by Haaretz, Israel’s oldest newspaper, in which IDF soldiers and veterans described a “kill zone” in the Netzarim corridor in the heart of Gaza, where troops were ordered to shoot “anyone who enters.”
“The forces in the field call it ‘the line of dead bodies,’” one commander said. “After shootings, bodies are not collected, attracting packs of dogs come to eat them. In Gaza, people know that wherever you see these dogs, that’s where you must not go.”
The new report comes as Israeli forces are carrying out an ethnic cleansing campaign in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are being forcibly expelled from areas of Gaza including the south and an expanded border perimeter.
The Associated Press reported Monday that Israel “now controls more than 50% of the territory and is squeezing Palestinians into shrinking wedges of land.”
Israeli troops are moving to seize large tracts of the Gaza Strip for a so-called “security zone” and Jewish recolonization.
Members of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government have said the campaign is being coordinated with the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump, who in February said that the United States would “take over” Gaza, remove all of its Palestinians and transform the Mediterranean enclave into the “Riviera of the Middle East.”
On Monday, Netanyahu visited Washington, D.C. from Hungary for talks with Trump and other U.S. officials regarding topics including a Gaza cease-fire, release of the remaining hostages held by Hamas, Iran policy, and tariffs.
Netanyahu is a fugitive from the International Criminal Court, which last year issued arrest warrants for him and former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza, including extermination and using starvation as a weapon of war.
Israel is also facing a genocide case at the International Court of Justice for its conduct in a war that has left more than 180,000 Palestinians dead, maimed, or missing in Gaza and almost all of the strip’s more than 2 million people forcibly displaced — often multiple times.
Israel’s bombing and invasion of Gaza continues. On Monday, an early morning IDF strike on a tent where numerous journalists were sleeping outside Nasser Hospital in the southern city of Khan Younis killed Palestine Today reporter Hilmi al-Faqaawi and another man, who were burned alive as helpless witnesses were unable to douse the flames or rescue victims.
Nine others were reportedly wounded in the attack, which the IDF said targeted a Hamas member posing as a journalist. More than 230 journalists have been killed by Israeli bombs and bullets since October 2023.
Brett Wilkins is a staff writer for Common Dreams.
This article is from Common Dreams.
Views expressed in this article and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
The single most important thing to understand about the Middle East is this: 1948 “Israel” is NOT related to Biblical Israel… except for having stolen the name. The Palestinians know Israelis are not Israelites, as do most others in the Middle East. Judaeo-Christians (the ultimate oxymoron?) however do not, claiming contemporary “Israel” is synonymous with Biblical Israel. Duh.
Try calling yourself “Bill Gates” and writing a check for a billion dollars… What will that get you?
Fact: Biblical “Israelites” are today found predominantly in Christendom. NOW, read your bible with THAT perspective!
Even admissions are not enough to sway many Americans and Europeans which now makes two things obvious, the attitude of the oblivious German people during WW II and, even more so, that we really don’t know a lot about what WW II was about or just what happened.
Every time the “rules of war” are broken by the axis of pure evil (the US and Israeli military industrial complex disguised as democratically elected governments), I’m reminded that there are no rules.. Lawlessness and organized crime run the world.
You don’t become the billionaire class of elites by paying taxes and abiding by the “law” like the rest of so called civil society.
It’s the law of the jungle and it would be refreshing if our overlords would just admit that and stop pretending that there is a humane shred of hope that these banksters will make decisions that will benefit anyone other than the ruling class of the criminally insane.
HOW I HATE THESE PEOPLE!!!
As does a large proportion of the world, particularly the Global Majority that isn’t infected with the western mainstream media lies.
Yes. We underestimate the scope and the power of the West’s control of narrative. And that power is increased by our own dissemination of its narrative.
The savagery of the Israelis is almost incomprehensible. I don’t recognize them as fellow human beings. What will they say one day when it’s undeniable that they did literally everything the Nazis did, short of burning people in ovens? (Oh God, don’t let that be the next revelation coming our way.) I know that equally savage things have probably been done continuously throughout my lifetime (I was born almost two decades after the end of WW II), but perhaps it’s the fact that we have so much proof of these atrocities while our leaders are so supportive of it–and my taxes pay for it–that guts me. It feels wrong and perverse to be going about my daily life, steeped in luxury as it is (I have ample food and water and a cozy bed); it’s sheer cognitive dissonance every day for a year and a half. And to know how many of my fellow Americans cheer on this barbarity….life makes so little sense these days. Will it ever again?
It is incomprehensible at most levels – this type of savagery and evil is beyond most people’s comprehension. Perhaps, that is why so much of the west denies it’s real, despite the overwhelming amount of irrefutable evidence to the contrary.
We know hatred and loathing breeds extreme contempt and violence, but to see large numbers of a population sink to these depths of depravity as psychotic – truly deranged, mentally ill and evil.
In any normal society, they would be locked up for life in the top security sections of mental institutions, with no possibility of release.
Yet, most western countries not only support this barbarity, but actively fund and weaponise it!
Will even these atrocities stir to action apathetic and self serving governments who benefit from trading
with Israel and/or pleasing the United States, let alone the Western governments, that have historically
treated non-white people with disdain, just like Israel, destroying them and taking from them what they
desire for themselves.
I hope all identifying material for these IOF soldiers is being recorded and retained.