On Monday, April 21, 2025, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich explicitly said that bringing home hostages was “not the most important goal” of the current offensive in Gaza. He said it was secondary to eliminating “the Gaza problem.” Two days earlier, on Saturday, he called for a full military occupation of the strip. According to NIFC funded partner Breaking the Silence, which has been collecting Israeli soldiers’ testimony about the way this war is being prosecuted, Smotrich appears to have put into words the government’s true intentions in this war.
According to a new Breaking the Silence report, the reoccupation and ethnic cleansing of Gaza are taking place via various methods–including an end to “safe” zones and the zeroing out of humanitarian aid. Yet another is clearing a military ‘perimeter’ around Gaza, demolishing homes and other buildings in some 36% of the Strip.
Here is an example of one soldier’s testimony from their new report “Perimeter”:
Sergeant First Class | Reserves – Combat Engineering Corps: “We take down houses. Everything over there is in ruins, but the skeleton of the building is still standing – [so we] knock it down, so there’s absolutely nothing left, a pile of rubble. It’s really become like a day-job: You get up in the morning, get the locations (structures the military has defined as targets). ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5’ – this department, ‘6, 7, 8, 9, 10’ – another department.”
Q: “Every day?”
Soldier: “Every day, except if we run out of explosives. […]”
Q: “[Is there] a required target of say, 10 houses per department per day?”
Soldier: “The goal is as many as possible. That’s simply the mission….it could be 40-50 [per day]…the narrative was [that we were demolishing] neighborhoods that overlook communities inside Israel, the kibbutzim, [and] It started with the houses that overlook the border. In the end, the neighborhood was no longer standing.”
This testimony is from November of 2023, but the most recent IDF actions echo these tactics. A new IDF corridor now cuts Rafah off from the rest of the strip. Its residents were told to evacuate, and the area was swallowed by this very same “perimeter.” Read the full report here.
