‘I’m bored, so I shoot’: Chilling testimonies detail Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza

By Humaira Ahad

The Israeli military has turned Gaza into a wasteland. Armed bulldozers have been levelling every structure in sight. Once bustling markets, peaceful homes, and crowded factories have been reduced to rubble by explosives detonated by the regime's army in the besieged territory.

The Zionist army orchestrated this destruction with the weapons supplied by the United States. Israeli troops were given orders to demolish everything in sight. The soldiers razed residential buildings, destroyed agricultural land, and killed anyone unknowingly wandering near the so-called deadly “buffer zones” in Gaza.

Breaking the Silence, an Israeli veterans' group critical of the regime's occupation of Palestinian land, released a damning report early this month detailing the genocidal crimes committed by the occupation soldiers involved in creating the deadly so-called "buffer zones" in Gaza.

The NGO report includes testimonies by regime soldiers and officers who took part in creating the so-called “buffer zone,” turning it into an area of utter destruction.

Death zone created

As per the report titled “The Perimeter”, the Israeli occupation army created an area between 800 and 1500 meters in breadth and 1.5 km deep inside the besieged Gaza Strip, occupying a considerable area to kill Palestinians with complete impunity.

According to the description given by the group, the Israeli regime continued to extend the borders of the occupied area, aka “buffer zone.”

Before the launch of the genocidal war, the buffer zone between the occupied territories and the Gaza Strip extended approximately 300 meters, and access to it was limited.

According to the Breaking the Silence group, “buffer zones” are a fundamental part of Israel's settler-colonial military strategy, with the current zones in Gaza established after "wholesale destruction", entirely reshaping around 16 per cent of Gaza.

The recent report says that the breadth of the new “perimeter” was not uniform. To create this new “buffer zone,” Israel launched a major military engineering operation on roughly 55-58 square kilometres, an area previously home to some 35% of Gaza's agricultural land.

The “buffer zone” or “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 the Israeli-occupied territories.

“Israeli military razed to the ground the lion's share of what existed in the buffer zone from the very first month of the fighting until the new perimeter was fully established in around December of 2024,” the group detailed in the exhaustive report.

During the demolition process carried out by the occupying forces, the death zone's name changed according to shifting political needs: "buffer zone," "security zone," "security space," and "perimeter."

“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,” the report noted.

The Zionist military created a death zone of enormous proportions, eradicating everything. Places where people had lived, farmed, and established industry were transformed into a vast wasteland.

Breaking the Silence gathered multiple testimonies from Israeli occupation soldiers, narrating the grim and excessive brutality carried out by the regime’s army against civilians.

The soldiers, most of them speaking on the condition of anonymity, described a near-total absence of rules in their conduct in Gaza.

Destroying Gaza

The testimonies show that the Israeli occupation soldiers were given orders to “deliberately, methodically, and systematically” eliminate whatever was within the designated “perimeter”, including entire residential neighbourhoods, public buildings, educational institutions, mosques, and cemeteries.

Industrial zones and agricultural areas that served the entire population of Gaza were destroyed.

Dismantling civilian infrastructure and buildings has been an integral part of the Israeli army’s chosen method of warfare, the report noted.

Some soldiers even testified that certain commanders viewed the destruction as a way of exacting revenge and punishment for the October 7, 2023 Operation Al Aqsa Storm (Flood) that exposed the myth of Israel’s military and intelligence prowess.

Previous testimonies by Israeli soldiers reveal a systematic policy of setting Palestinian homes on fire after occupying them.

“Before you leave, you burn down the house — every house,” an Israeli sergeant stated. “This is backed up at the battalion commander level. It’s so that (Palestinians) won’t be able to return.”

The scale of destruction described by the soldiers is staggering. Yuval Green, a reservist of the Israeli army, stated that his unit “destroyed everything we wanted to,” adding, “This is not out of a desire to destroy, but out of total indifference to everything that belongs to (Palestinians).”

The testifiers described how they and their units transformed cultivated farmlands and residential areas into the new “buffer zone.” They were given mission objectives and directions for launching the operations of total destruction on the ground.

According to the report, the regime’s desire to maintain military control and create the “perimeter” led to the demolition of more than 3,500 buildings, as well as industrial and agricultural areas, which are critical for sustaining life in the besieged strip and would be vital for any attempt at reconstruction.

“All of them were wiped off the face of the earth. Annihilation, expropriation, and expulsion are immoral and must never be normalized or legitimized,” an Israeli army reservist told the NGO.

“The ‘bear’, the D9 (armoured bulldozer), drives and mows down everything in its path…Essentially, everything gets mowed down, everything,” another Israeli soldier testified.

Describing the devastation carried out by the Zionist regime, an ex-army man said, “Everything is everything. Everything that's built. Orchards? Yes. Cowsheds, chicken coops? Yes, yes. What does the area look like after? Hiroshima. That's what I'm saying, Hiroshima.”

A first-class sergeant who was working with the combat engineering corps of the Israeli army said that every structure or anything that falls within this geographic area gets (buffer zone) destroyed to its foundation. “Destroyed to the foundation, yes, absolutely.”

Another Israeli veteran described that the Zionist army aimed to bombard everything, ranging from high-rise buildings to one or two-story residential cubes.

“Residential buildings, greenhouses, sheds, factories; you name it — it needs to be flat. That's the order,” he noted.

“This is a directive that comes from (higher-ups)? I came across it as a command in the brigade, which got it from the division's operations branch. It wasn't some local invention.”

A reservist, identified as S, recounted the chilling details of the violence carried out by the regime’s forces, “We finish a place, and a few days later, we're in the next place. It started with the houses that overlook the border. In the end, the neighbourhood was no longer standing.”

Narrating the destruction of agricultural land in the Jabalya refugee camp in north Gaza, a first sergeant of the 5th brigade's unit of the Israeli army said, “The D9 (armoured Bulldozer) took down mainly fields, agriculture, olive trees, and eggplant fields. A very large excavator just comes through and takes out all the soil, kind of rolls it up, flattens it. It was a shame, great agriculture, beautiful eggplants and beautiful cauliflowers.”

The soldier was placed in northern Gaza in November-December 2023.

Another veteran of the Israeli army detailed the eradication of industries in the besieged Strip.

“We did cross–border missions that were essentially to destroy the Shuja'iyya Industrial Zone…What does this industrial zone look like before and after the work? We arrived after some demolition had already been done, but like I said, a huge industrial area, huge factories, and after it's just a pile of rubble, piles of broken concrete. The most astonishing thing was the Coca–Cola factory, because it was just mountains of broken glass, insane. To the point where it was difficult to find a safe spot on the ground to sit on.”

Many army men believe that the goal of the wide-scale destruction is “to create a sense of security for the future residents of Nir Oz who will return.”

Nir Oz is an illegal Israeli settlement bordering Gaza.

Free hand at shooting Palestinians

Israeli troops are given carte blanche to shoot Palestinians, set their homes ablaze, and desecrate the corpses, all with the explicit approval of the regime's higher-ups.

In a 2024 testimony, the occupation soldiers described how the ability to shoot without restrictions “became a way to alleviate boredom or blow off steam.”

Green recounted a particularly disturbing incident during the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah.

“The whole battalion opened fire together like fireworks, including tracer ammunition (which generates a bright light). It made a crazy colour, illuminating the sky, and because (Hanukkah) is the ‘festival of lights,’ it became symbolic.”

The army veterans reiterated that there is no system of accountability in the Israeli army, and Palestinians can be killed at any time and place.

“Anyone who crosses a certain line that we have defined is considered a threat and is sentenced to death. That did exist. It was an ‘IDF’ definition,” said a captain of the armoured corps of the Israeli army.

The captain was posted in the besieged strip in October-November 2023.

“In the perimeter, what are the orders? Adult, male — kill. Shoot to kill.”

The Israeli soldier further added that the Palestinians are not given any information about the extension of the “buffer zone.”

An Israeli army captain posted in the southern Gaza Strip also spoke to Breaking the Silence.

“Israel 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 armed groups) didn’t matter. Nobody cared. We decided on a line which is the borderline, past which everyone is a suspect, but it's not clear to me how familiar Palestinians are with this line,” he said.

Pleading anonymity, an Israeli veteran said that he personally fired bullets without any specific reason. Inside the regime's army, it is called ‘normal fire’, which is a codename for “I’m bored, so I shoot.”

Many former Israeli soldiers stated that the atmosphere within the Israeli army is one of demonising Palestinians. “There is no civilian population. They are all terrorists,” is the refrain.

Carrying out genocide has grown into a legitimate idea for the occupying army.

"People were incriminated for having bags in their hands. Guy showed up with a bag? Incriminated, terrorist. I believe they came to pick Khubeiza (wild spinach), but the army says, 'No, they're hiding.' Boom (shells were fired in their direction). That's considered a miss. They were supposed to shoot (hit) them," a first rank Israeli soldier testified in the report.

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