After destroying land to increase its border area, Israel now owns 50% of Palestine.

Israel has dramatically increased its footprint in the Gaza Strip since resuming its war against Hamas last month. It now occupies over 50% of the territory and is pushing Palestinians into ever-narrowing wedges of land.

The army’s largest contiguous territory is around the Gaza border, where soldiers have leveled Palestinian homes, farmland and infrastructure to the point of being uninhabitable, according to both Israeli soldiers and rights organizations. This military buffer zone has recently doubled in size.

Israel has portrayed its tightening grip as a temporary measure needed to pressure Hamas to free the remaining hostages taken in the Oct. 7, 2023, attack that triggered the
war. But the territory now held by Israel, including a corridor that separates the territory’s north from the south, could play a role in exerting sustained control, according to human rights groups and experts on Gaza.

The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said last week that even after Hamas is defeated, Israel will maintain security control in Gaza and work toward pushing Palestinians out.

The demolitions near the Israeli border and the systematic dilution of the buffer zone have been underway since the war began 18 months ago, five Israeli soldiers told The Associated Press.

They destroyed as much as they could, they shot whatever looks functioning … (the Palestinians) will have nothing to return to, they won’t return, never,” said a soldier posted with a tank squad securing the demolition teams. He and four other soldiers spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity due to fear of reprisals.

The group, Breaking The Silence, an anti-occupation veterans group, released a report documenting the accounts of soldiers who served in the buffer zone. A few soldiers — some of whom also spoke to AP — described how they watched the army transform the zone into a vast wasteland.

In the early months of the war, Israeli soldiers displaced Palestinians from border communities and razed the land, establishing a buffer zone more than a kilometer (0.62 miles) deep, according to Breaking The Silence.

Its troops also captured a stretch of terrain throughout Gaza known as the Netzarim Corridor that cut off the north, including Gaza City, from the rest of the narrow, coastal strip, which is home to more than 2 million people.

When Israel renewed the war last month, it expanded the buffer zone, in some places by as much as 3 kilometers (1.8 miles) into Gaza, according to a map released by the military.

The Netzarim Corridor and the buffer zone comprise at least 50 percent of the strip, said Yaakov Garb, a professor of environmental studies at Ben Gurion University who has been studying Israeli-Palestinian land use patterns for decades.

The land within the buffer zone used to host hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and no small part of Gaza’s agricultural output.

Images from satellites reveal once-bustling neighborhoods now reduced to rubble, and nearly a dozen new outposts of the Israeli army added since the end of the ceasefire.

When the ceasefire came to a halt in January, Nidal Alzaanin returned to his home in northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun. His property was located along the edge of the buffer zone and was in ruins.

Now only a photo of him with his wife on their wedding day, a sketch of his son’s visage on a porcelain plate and the skeletal remains of a 150-year-old sycamore planted by his great-grandfather remain. His greenhouse was left a tangle of twisted metal.

The farmer, 55, pitched a tent on the rubble, and hoped to continue his life. But when Israel renewed its campaign and took his land, he was uprooted again.

“It took 20 years to build a house and they destroyed all my dreams and my children’s dreams in five minutes,” he said from Gaza City, where he shelters now.

Throughout the war Israel has bombarded cities and towns across Gaza, and launched ground offensives as well, with entire neighborhoods and neighborhoods in ruins. But the demolition of property inside the buffer zone has been more systematic and far-reaching, soldiers said.

The five soldiers who spoke to the AP said Israeli troops were instructed to raze farmland, irrigation pipes, crops and trees as well as thousands of structures — including residential and public buildings — to ensure militants had nowhere to hide.

Some soldiers said that their units destroyed more buildings than they could count, including large industrial complexes. A factory processing soda was flattened, shards of glass and solar panels littering the ground.