The Israeli military has rapidly seized land in Gaza since resuming its genocidal war on March 18 and now controls more than 50% of the Palestinian territory and has created “kill zones,” The Associated Press reported on Monday.
The most significant piece of territory Israel controls is a so-called “buffer zone” along the Gaza-Israel border, an area where the Israeli military has demolished buildings and agricultural land to make it uninhabitable.
The buffer zone was initially cut about 1 kilometer into Gaza’s territory, but since March 18, the IDF has significantly expanded it and is conducting more demolitions. Some parts of the buffer zone now push as far as 3 kilometers into Gaza.
An Israeli soldier deployed with a tank squad guarding a demolition team spoke with the AP. “They destroyed everything they could, they shot everything that looks functioning … (the Palestinians) will have nothing to come back, they will not come back, never,” the soldier said.
The soldier said that Israeli bulldozers flattened land to create a “kill zone” and that anyone who came within 500 meters of the tanks would be shot, including women and children.
“I came there because they kill 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, and we destroyed their houses,” the soldier said.
The IDF has also recaptured the Netzarim Corridor, which separates northern Gaza from the rest of the Strip, another area it has made uninhabitable. Israeli media reports have said that Israeli soldiers deployed at the Netzarim Corridor had a policy of shooting and killing anyone who approached.
Yaakov Garb, a professor at Ben Gurion University in Israel, told AP that the buffer zone and the Netzarim Corridor make up about 50% of Gaza’s territory.
The Israeli military is also in the process of establishing a similar corridor in the south, between the cities of Rafah and Khan Younis, which Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has dubbed the “Morag axis,” using the name of a Jewish settlement that was located in the area before the 2005 “disengagement.”
Netanyahu and other Israeli officials have made clear they want to control the captured territory in Gaza permanently and that the goal is the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population.
Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz said last month that he instructed the Israeli military to “seize additional areas in Gaza” with the goal of “permanent Israeli control of the territory.”
