1 Jul 2026 – This Friday, July 3, marks one thousand days of Israeli genocide in Gaza.
For 1,000 days, the Israeli military has systematically flattened Gaza — and now south Lebanon — to make it impossible for Palestinians and Lebanese to return to their homes.
Israel’s unrelenting campaign of airstrikes accounts for some of this destruction. But the majority of it is being carried out by Israeli bulldozers and armored personnel carriers that are loaded with explosives and detonated remotely — all deployed after the bombs have stopped falling, in order to destroy whatever structures were left standing.
Israeli officials have publicly expressed their desire to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians time and time again. Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said as much himself in March, endorsing the so-called “Trump plan for voluntary migration”:
“We are destroying more and more homes — they have nowhere to return to,” Netanyahu reportedly remarked in May. “The only expected result will be a desire for Gazans to emigrate outside the Strip.”
In war, “you tend to see a kind of haphazard, almost random distribution of ruination,” Forensic Architecture founder Eyal Weizman told The +972 Podcast. “It’s much more than destruction. It’s the erasure of destruction … The rubbing out of any trace of existence.”
“There is no city”
From the moment it launched its genocidal war on Palestinians in Gaza, the Israeli military set out to make the territory unlivable — whether through the intentional destruction of critical infrastructure like water treatment plants, the targeting and destruction of most of Gaza’s hospitals, or the torching of agricultural land. Their aim is clear: to annihilate every trace of Palestinian life in Gaza. This is the definition of genocide.
The systematic destruction of entire residential neighborhoods is one of many genocidal tactics deployed by the Israeli military. These demolitions are being carried out to facilitate the ethnic cleansing of millions of Palestinians and Lebanese.
Take Gaza’s southernmost city, Rafah, as an example: By April 2026, the Israeli military had destroyed 90% of residential neighborhoods in Rafah. After the Israeli military formally took control of Rafah in April, it went to work flattening what remained, transforming the once bustling Palestinian city — which includes Gaza’s only border with the outside world — into a barren buffer zone.
“The official mission was to open a logistical route for maneuvering, but in practice, the bulldozers were simply destroying homes,” one Israeli soldier told +972 Magazine and Last Call. “The southeastern part of Rafah is completely destroyed. The horizon is flat. There is no city.”
During the first two years of the Gaza genocide, the Israeli military destroyed or damaged over 92 percent of Gaza’s housing units, forced over 90 percent of Palestinians living in Gaza to flee their homes, for most multiple times over, and placed more than 86 percent of the enclave under displacement orders or transformed it into Israeli military zones.
By December 2023, just a few months into the genocide, international legal experts were already sounding the alarm about “domicide,” — “the widespread or systematic destruction of housing and civilian infrastructure essential to the survival of a population.”
The same tactics in Lebanon
The Israeli military began carrying out its genocide in Gaza in October 2023. Emboldened by the absence of any accountability for these crimes, it then expanded its campaign of destruction and ethnic cleansing to the people of Lebanon.
The heaviest damage has been concentrated in Lebanon’s south. Since 2023, the Israeli military has systematically flattened entire villages in South Lebanon and intentionally destroyed critical infrastructure and public services to make the area unlivable. A report from last week indicates that as of April 2026 over 11,000 buildings in South Lebanon alone had been completely leveled and thousands more partially destroyed — an estimated $1.38 billion in damage.
All of this is intentional: Before the October – November 2024 Israeli ground invasion, Israeli soldiers were provided with “demolition training” and told explicitly that their aim was to flatten Shi’a villages to make it impossible for local residents to return to their homes, a reservist told +972 Magazine and Local Call.
1,000 days of genocide
Despite a so-called “ceasefire” agreement reached in October, the killing hasn’t stopped. Last Wednesday, an Israeli missile killed an 11-year-old boy, Ahmed Al-Raqab, as he played next to his family’s makeshift tent on a beach west of Gaza city. A few days later, shrapnel from Israeli tank shelling killed 13-year-old Eileen al-Farra in southern Gaza.
“‘The children were playing and they fired a missile directly on them,’ Ahmed’s father, Sabri Al-Raqab, said, sobbing as he knelt on the floor of Nasser hospital with his arms across his son’s dead body in a final embrace.” – reporting from DropSite
This week, a UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry published a report confirming what Palestinians have always known: the Israeli military is deliberately targeting Palestinian children — killing over 20,000 children in the first two years of the genocide alone.
Since the “ceasefire” was reached in October, Israel has killed one child in Gaza every single day, according to UNICEF spokesperson James Elder.
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Jewish Voice for Peace, with roughly 750,000 members, supporters, and participants, is the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world; a national, grassroots, multiracial, cross-class, intergenerational movement of U.S. Jews working towards Palestinian freedom and Judaism beyond Zionism. We envision a world where all people live in freedom, justice, equality, and dignity and believe that through organizing, we can and will dismantle the institutions and structures that sustain injustice.
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Tags: Anti Zionism, Ceasefire, Collective Punishment, Colonialism, Colonization, Crimes against Humanity, Cultural violence, Direct violence, Ethnic Cleansing, Famine, Gaza, Genocide, Hamas, Hunger, Israel, Israeli occupation, Palestine, Palestinian Holocaust, Sociocide, State Terrorism, Structural violence, USA, War crimes, West Bank
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