TLDR

      A May 2025 investigation in +972 Magazine by Meron Rapoport and Oren Ziv (“Render it unusable: Israel’s mission of total urban destruction”) documents how Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has gone beyond targeting Hamas. Bulldozers, explosives, and systematic demolitions have turned cities like Rafah and Jabalia into rubble, with the explicit goal of making them uninhabitable. This behaviour is also called domicide—the destruction of human habitats. Such actions are against the values of human dignity, the rule of law, and civilian protection.

Genocidal actions by the Israeli military in Gaza

The +972 Magazine report shows that Israel’s war in Gaza is also done through human rights abuses and genocidal actions through ground-level destruction by bulldozers and explosives. Soldiers interviewed admitted to demolishing up to 60 houses a day, often without military justification. Satellite evidence confirms the systematic flattening of neighborhoods. For example, by early 2025, over 70 percent of Rafah’s buildings were destroyed.

This pattern is not incidental but intentional and planned. Netanyahu himself linked the policy to displacement, saying Gazans “have nowhere to return to,” aligning with the “Trump Plan” of encouraging Palestinian emigration. Human rights lawyers describe this as a war crime, even proposing a new legal category—domicide.

Domicide reflects how destruction is not a side effect of combat but its central aim. In the West Bank, similar methods have been used in the past, as in refugee camps. The strategy is consistent in order to deny Palestinians the possibility of rebuilding their lives.

At the same time, Israel’s democracy, meanwhile, is weakened by militarism and authoritarian behaviours. Liberal values rest on limiting the violence of war, upholding the distinction between combatants and civilians, and ensuring that property and homes cannot be destroyed arbitrarily. When military rituals celebrate the flattening of neighborhoods and killing civilians, these values collapse. As in Israel, journalists and activists are silenced, while militarized and extremist policies dominate.

Concluding Reflections

The destruction of cities and homes in the Gaza area shows that such systematic actions erase entire communities. To uphold human dignity and the rule of law, all democratic institutions, such as the EU, must start imposing more sanctions on Israel and even intervene with a peacekeeping force. Because at stake is not only the survival of Palestinian society but the future of humanity and dignity around the world.

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