Israel cleaning up Rafah, the shelter Gazans once fled to: Reports

Israel has flattened large swathes of Rafah, the southernmost city in the Gaza Strip, according to media reports citing satellite imagery.

Rafah was in global news last year when Israel’s military campaign in Gaza displaced the vast majority of the population. As many as 1.5 million Palestinians had moved southward to seek refuge in Rafah. Israel eventually attacked Rafah in phases, where multiple battalions of Hamas had also made their last stand, instead of a full invasion under pressure from the Joe Biden administration of the United States.

Now vast swathes of Rafah are in ruins as Israel has flattened entire neighbourhoods with excavators and controlled demolitions as per The New York Times.

The newspaper has reported that buildings destroyed are not terrorist infrastructure, but civilian infrastructure, including mosques, schools, and greenhouses. A soldier involved in the razing told +972 Magazine that the military was simply destroying Palestinian homes.

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Israel is not just creating a buffer zone with the demolition of these structures, but is building military infrastructure that suggests it wants a military presence in the area in the long term.

This video and accompanying satellite imagery for the location it was filmed is a brief encapsulation of what's happened over all of Rafah and its environs. Some destruction pre-ceasefire, then nearly countless buildings wiped off the map in April/May. pic.twitter.com/GcWhwHhpXu

— Aric Toler (@AricToler) May 15, 2025

In an addition to a military corridor, which comprises a road protected by berms, trenches and several military outposts, Israel has built several other outposts in areas where they have razed Palestinian neighbourhoods, which are paved and have defensive walls. The corridor has been named ‘Morang Axis’.

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Israeli destruction of civilian infrastructure in Gaza, including homes, is part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s plan to make Gaza as uninhabitable as possible, so that if and when the war ends, Palestinians cannot simply live there and are forced to migrate. He and US President Donald Trump have already made the intention clear to expel all Palestinians from Gaza and take over the Palestinian enclave.

‘We are demolishing more and more houses’

Last week, Netanyahu made it clear that the idea behind the demolitions in Rafah and elsewhere in Gaza was the expulsion of Palestinians.

Netanyahu told the foreign affairs and defense committee of the parliament that Israel was destroying more and more houses in Gaza so that the strip is as uninhabitable as possible for Palestinians.

“We are demolishing more and more houses. They have nowhere to return to. The only inevitable outcome will be the desire of the Gazans to emigrate out of the Gaza Strip. Our main problem is with the receiving countries,” said Netanyahu, according to Maariv parliamentary reporter Avraham Bloch.

This area in northwestern Rafah has been rapidly developing over the last few weeks, near a still-under-construction hospital that the IDF has been using as a base of operations. It looks similar to the JLOTS area near the doomed American pier.https://t.co/2yi29hqkD7 pic.twitter.com/nVbNWBWfKS

— Aric Toler (@AricToler) May 13, 2025

Separately, soldiers and officers part of the razing campaign have confirmed this.

A soldier told +972 Magazine and Local Call, “I secured four or five bulldozers [from another unit], and they demolished 60 houses per day. A one or two story house, they take down within an hour; a three or four-story house takes a bit longer. The official mission was to open a logistical route for maneuvering, but in practice, the bulldozers were simply destroying homes. The southeastern part of Rafah is completely destroyed. The horizon is flat. There is no city.”

Yotam, a deputy company commander, said that the razing was driven by a conscious, strategic decision to “flatten the area” to make sure that “the return of people to these spaces is not something that will happen”.