I. Introduction

These houses should have been demolished and evacuated a long time ago … Three hundred meters of the Strip along the two sides of the border must be evacuated … Three hundred meters, no matter how many houses, period.

Major-General Yom-Tov Samiya, former head of IDF Southern Command1

I built homes for Israelis for 13 years. I never thought the day would come when they’d destroy my house. … They destroyed the future. How can I start all over now?

Isbah al-Tayour, Rafah resident, former construction worker in Israel2

 

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Over the past four years, the Israeli military has demolished over 2,500 Palestinian houses in the occupied Gaza Strip.3 Nearly two-thirds of these homes were in Rafah, a densely populated refugee camp and city at the southern end of the Gaza Strip on the border with Egypt. Sixteen thousand people – more than ten percent of Rafah’s population – have lost their homes, most of them refugees, many of whom were dispossessed for a second or third time.4

As satellite images in this report show, most of the destruction in Rafah occurred along the Israeli-controlled border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. During regular nighttime raids and with little or no warning, Israeli forces used armored Caterpillar D9 bulldozers to raze blocks of homes at the edge of the camp, incrementally expanding a “buffer zone” that is currently up to three hundred meters wide. The pattern of destruction strongly suggests that Israeli forces demolished homes wholesale, regardless of whether they posed a specific threat, in violation of international law. In most of the cases Human Rights Watch found the destruction was carried out in the absence of military necessity.

In May 2004, the Israeli government approved a plan to further expand the buffer zone, and it is currently deliberating the details of its execution. The Israeli military has recommended demolishing all homes within three hundred meters of its positions, or about four hundred meters from the border. Such destruction would leave thousands more Palestinians homeless in one of the most densely populated places on earth. Perhaps in recognition of the plan’s legal deficiencies, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are not waiting for the government to approve the plan. Ongoing incursions continue to eat away at Rafah’s edge, gradually attaining the desired goal.

This report documents these and other illegal demolitions. Based on extensive research in Rafah, Israel, and Egypt, it places many of the IDF’s justifications for the destruction, including smugglers’ tunnels and threats to its forces on the border, in serious doubt. The pattern of destruction, it concludes, is consistent with the goal of having a wide and empty border area to facilitate long-term control over the Gaza Strip. Such a goal would entail the wholesale destruction of neighborhoods, regardless of whether the homes in them pose a specific threat to the IDF, and would greatly exceed the IDF’s security needs. It is based on the assumption that every Palestinian is a potential suicide bomber and every home a potential base for attack. Such a mindset is incompatible with two of the most fundamental principles of international humanitarian law (IHL): the duty to distinguish combatants from civilians and the responsibility of an Occupying Power to protect the civilian population under its control.

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