"Our Job Is to Flatten Gaza. No One Will Stop Us"
"Our Job Is to Flatten Gaza. No One Will Stop Us"
By Anonymous - Human Synthesis - 22 October 2024
“Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy everything that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.”
Inside One Israeli Battalion's Yearlong Mission Of Destruction.An investigation into 749 Combat Engineering Battalion’s mission to destroy “the symbols of Gaza’s future.”
This is what the deputy commander of Israel’s 749 Combat Engineering Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Adi Bekore, posted on his personal Facebook account on October 9, 2023, just two days after the Hamas attacks of October 7.
Numerous soldiers from the battalion he had command over liked the post. It is a quote from a biblical passage in which the biblical nation of Israel is commanded to attack the Amalekites, an ancient biblical nation that was a recurrent enemy of the Israelites. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also invoked this reference early in the war—a moment cited by South Africa in its case to the ICJ as a piece of genocidal rhetoric:
Like much of the rhetoric coming from all organs of the Israeli military since its assault on Gaza started, these words served as a stark warning of what was to come. One year later, countless homes, schools, hospitals, and residential buildings have been bombed and destroyed. 42,718 people have been killed, according to the most recent Gaza Health Ministry figures.
The actual figure is certain to be a lot higher: An estimated 10,000 people are buried in the rubble, and the official count doesn’t include those indirectly killed by Israel’s assault on Gaza.
Soldiers from Israel’s 749 Battalion planting explosives, September 19, 2024 in south Gaza City. Source: @gdud749 on Instagram
Over the past year, the 749 Battalion has played an indispensable role in Gaza. Its soldiers are reservists—alumni of the combat engineering corps, which trains soldiers in demolition. The battalion comes in after combat units, toppling buildings and homes that managed to survive air strikes.
The 749 Battalion was among the first to enter the strip through the Netzarim corridor, the four-mile-long road separating Gaza City and Deir al-Balah that Israel occupied early in the war in order to divide the north and south of Gaza. After helping to cement control of south Gaza City, including the Netzarim corridor, the battalion later advanced into areas like Shuja’iya in Gaza City, the Bureij Refugee Camp in Central Gaza, and even Rafah.
At the time of writing, the 749 Battalion is operating in northern Gaza and Jabalia, where, even following Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar’s killing in southern Gaza, Israel’s campaign has intensified to the point of executions and depopulation. There, the battalion is seemingly racing to destroy as many buildings as possible. As one soldier put it, “We will leave them nothing!”
The images in this investigation come primarily from the group’s own social media page, which Drop Site News gained access to, as well as the personal accounts of dozens of soldiers from various companies within the battalion. By stitching together the information shared within the battalion, we were able to clearly map out the unit’s organizational structure and identify over a hundred of its members.
Drop Site News was also able to use the videos to determine the areas where the 749 Battalion was operating and document their activities in the Gaza Strip in detail. They are not the only battalion tasked specifically with demolitions—if it was, Gaza wouldn’t look the way it does—but a close examination of its daily activity offers a rare window into the Israeli operation on the ground in Gaza.
749 Battalion’s chain of command.
“Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined”
In December 2023, Company A of the 749 Battalion was tasked with rigging up the south Gaza City campus of Al-Azhar University with explosives and detonating the, reducing Gaza’s second-largest university to rubble.
"On Shabbat, we loaded the mines, and I signed off on the shipment with a modification due to the sanctity of Shabbat,” First Master Sergeant David Zoldan, the operational officer of Company A of Israel’s 749 Battalion wrote in a Facebook post on December 20.
“A few days later, we assembled them and booby-trapped one of Gaza’s symbols of the future—Al-Azhar University in the northern part of the strip—and blew it up.”
An operation of this size would generally have required sign-off not just from the deputy commander, Bekore, but also from the battalion commander.
The current chain of command for Company A. Prior to Maimon, the commander was Lt. Col. Guy Tyeeb. Credit: Drop Site News.
Zoldan—a reservist who normally works as a journalist at ICE, a local Israeli news outlet—attached several photos and videos of the entire operation “from the unloading stage to the massive explosion.” In one of the videos, he cheers as the three buildings of the university campus are prepared to be blown up.
“This is the explosion before redemption. December 2023.”
As the university is blown up, Zoldan tells his fellow soldiers, “Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, did you see?!”
Zoldan did not provide a military justification for the explosion and the Israeli military have not reported to have found anything at this campus. In a chilling post ahead of the explosion, Zoldan wrote on his Facebook page on November 19, 2023:
"Gazan student, you could have been a doctor of nuclear physics, you could have studied philosophy in your fifth year, and now, what now? Nails and feathers and the destruction of dreams."
The 749 Battalion, he wrote after the explosion, “is working day and night and performing holy work in the Gaza Strip.”
Other soldiers from the battalion made no effort to conceal their intentions, gleefully mocking the destruction of civilian and educational property. Maya Radoszkowicz, another soldier in the 749 Battalion, was among them. She filmed the explosion of Al-Azhar University, captioning it, "Goodbye to higher education in Gaza” with an emoji of hands in the form of a heart.
She is one of 27 soldiers Drop Site News identified as being deployed to blow up Al-Azhar University. This group also includes Royi Wickes, who fights with an American-flag patch sewn on his sleeve and was involved in planting the explosives that led to the destruction of the institution.
The destruction of the university campus by the 749 Combat Engineering Battalion, a reserve unit within the IDF’s 5th Brigade, was a reflection of the unit’s special mission: to destroy the livelihood and symbols of Gaza’s future—from mosques, shops, universities, and even homes.
November-December 2023: Creating the Netzarim Corridor
Over several weeks in November and December 2023, Israel used its siege of Gaza to justify the total annihilation of the civilian infrastructure in towns and suburbs throughout the strip. The military not only worked to establish a half-mile “buffer zone” inside the Gaza border by demolishing homes and buildings.
It also flattened a four-mile-wide stretch in the heart of Gaza separating the north from the south of the strip.
Very little is allowed to be published about the demolitions done to establish the Netzarim corridor due to Israel’s stringent military censorship rules. Only in February was a reporter with Israel’s Channel 14 able to publish a video investigation revealing the “latitudinal highway,” with significant razing and paving underway.
But multiple demolition videos posted by members of the battalion show them paving the corridor through Gaza. They played such an integral role in this effort that the main road dividing North Gaza from the South, in the Netzarim corridor, was named Road 749, in recognition of the battalion’s work in constructing it amid the ruins of Palestinian homes and properties.
"Welcome to road 749." The road dividing North and South in Gaza named after the 749 Battalion. Source: @gdud749 on Instagram
Many of the videos are edited together into montages celebrating the destruction of Gaza and summarizing the battalion’s operations. One video, uploaded to YouTube by battalion member Alon Lev-Ari on January 2, shows the munitions used and the faces of many of its members, and features footage of demolitions and the destruction of homes in Gaza City. The video begins with an explosion with fireworks accompanied by Disney’s opening theme music:
Pieces of this montage video had been posted by other soldiers in the unit. On December 30, Nerya Ram, another soldier in 749, posted extended footage of a significant remote detonation of a set of buildings and land.
December 2023: Company D, Shuja’iya Neighborhood
“May your village burn.” Chain of command for 749 Battalion’s Company D. Credit: Drop Site News
The 749 Battalion was hard at work. According to satellite data from the UN, more than 750 structures within the Israel-imposed “buffer zone” and beyond were severely damaged or destroyed from air strikes and demolitions between November 26, 2023 and January 6, 2024.
Gaza City lies to the north of the Netzarim corridor, with Shuja’iya being one of its largest neighborhoods. On December 20, a massive detonation was carried out by soldiers from Company D under the command of Major Amit Pinto, the company commander, and its operational officer Master Sergeant Tom Mor, resulting in the destruction of over 56 civilian buildings in the area of Qubba, east of the Shuja’iya neighborhood.
The video of the detonation was first leaked to right-wing Israeli journalists and subsequently spread widely on social media. In the background, Israeli soldiers can be heard chanting, “May your village burn,” after the explosion. It’s a reference to a song known for inciting violence and celebrating harm against Palestinians and their properties, often chanted by ultra-extremists in Israel.
The song has recently taken Israel by storm, even being played in nightclubs, at weddings, and at schools.
Soldiers from the battalion shared multiple versions of the explosion online—reported at the time by Israeli news outlet Ynet News.
Itamar Levy, a soldier in Company A, posted various clips celebrating the battalion’s work to his Instagram, including an aerial view of the Shuja’iya detonation. The destroyed homes belonged to the Abu Kombaz, Abid, and Jondia families, along with several smaller families.
Itamar Levy from Company A. Source: @itamar_levy0310 on Instagram.
On the same day, Master Sergeant Ori Fadida, a team officer in the battalion who participated in the operation posted a video to his Instagram story captioning it: “We won’t leave a single mouse breathing on the face of the earth, We are done with Shuja’iya Neighborhood.”