An international investigation must be launched into “war crimes” by Israel’s armed forces for the “unjustified” destruction of entire neighborhoods of the Gaza Strip along the border with Israeli territory to create a buffer zone, a report says to the public today Amnesty International.

According to the human rights NGO, over 90% of buildings appear to have been “destroyed or severely damaged”, as well as 59% of agricultural crops, between October 2023 and May 2024 in the Strip of Gaza, along a zone 1 to 1.8 km wide, which starts at the wall that separates it from Israeli territory. The destruction in total has an area of ​​up to 58 square kilometers, in other words 16% of the territory of the Palestinian enclave, Amnesty calculates.

In four areas where the NGO made a thorough investigation, “buildings were deliberately and systematically demolished” after the Israeli armed forces took control of them, without this being due to fighting with Hamas, it emphasizes in the report it makes public.

“The relentless campaign of destruction carried out by the Israeli army” in the Gaza Strip is “unjustified”, underlines Erica Guevara-Rosas, director of research at Amnesty International. “The creation of any ‘safe zone’ should in no way imply collective punishment of the Palestinian civilian population,” he insists.

Amnesty International points out that it raised questions about the issue in July to the Israeli authorities. He had received no response two months later.

The war in the Gaza Strip was triggered by an incursion by Hamas’ military arm into southern Israel on October 7, which killed 1,205 people, most of them civilians, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli data. Of the 251 people abducted and taken to the enclave that day, 97 are still being held in Gaza, but 33 have been declared dead by the army.

In retaliation, the Israeli armed forces began carrying out large-scale operations in the Gaza Strip that have so far killed at least 40,861 people, according to the Hamas health ministry, causing a humanitarian and health disaster and displacing almost all of 2.4 million inhabitants. Most of the victims were women and children, according to the UN.

In August, the United Nations estimated that roughly two-thirds of the buildings in the small coastal enclave had been completely destroyed or damaged since October 7.

As for the “neutral zone”, Amnesty International insists that “no military objective can justify these massive and systematic destructions”, judging that they should be “subject to a war crimes investigation”.