Israel trucks out Gaza’s rubble to ‘hide genocide’ and ‘redraw the map’

Israel is carrying out a massive, organised operation to crush, mix and transport millions of tonnes of rubble out of the Gaza Strip, according to human rights groups and monitors.

The Israeli military’s systematic reshaping of the urban landscape comes against a backdrop of a staggering human toll, with at least 73,387 Palestinians – mostly children and women – killed since Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza began in October 2023.

This removal of rubble could be an attempt at demographic engineering and erasing evidence of the genocide, the Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor has said, in a report entitled Gaza Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment.

Obliterating the truth

The report estimates that there are approximately 68 million tonnes of rubble across the Gaza Strip, much of the result of Israel’s ongoing genocidal war on the enclave.

At least 10 million tonnes of rubble have already been removed, crushed or moved from their original sites within areas under Israel’s unlawful military control, which encompass about two-thirds of the enclave.

About 400 heavy pieces of excavation, crushing and transport machinery are also working to demolish the remaining structures in Gaza.

Debris is being loaded onto nearly 100 Israeli trucks daily, which are leaving the Gaza Strip for undisclosed sites within Israel and the occupied West Bank.

Budour Hassan, a researcher at Amnesty International, told Al Jazeera that this could be a calculated attempt to destroy evidence of crimes committed by Israel during the war.

“The bulldozing is an integral part of all attempts to destroy the lands in Gaza City and in the Gaza Strip in general,” Hassan said.

“The real fears are that these operations are taking place with the aim of obliterating and hiding evidence.”

Preventing access to evidence of crimes is a direct challenge to the International Court of Justice, Hassan said. The ICJ is currently overseeing a genocide case against Israel brought by South Africa and supported by numerous other nations.

“The occupation systematically works to obliterate evidence and destroy the features of the crime,” she added.

Mohammed Salha, director of the NGO Network in the Gaza Strip, believes the debris being moved out of the enclave contains missile fragments, ammunition, and personal belongings – crucial for future accountability.

“The occupation is moving the rubble, fragmenting it, and moving it into the Green Line to obliterate the evidence and facts,” Salha told Al Jazeera.

“Naturally, there are thousands of martyrs under this rubble, and moving this rubble with their remains means a deliberate destruction of the crime scene that contains the basic evidence that exposes the occupation’s commission of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.”

Urban engineering

The mass removal of rubble could serve a distinct military and colonial purpose. Euro-Med Monitor reported that the large-scale crushing and removal of rubble destroys land boundaries, house foundations and street networks, stripping Palestinians of the physical markers of ownership and deepening ethnic cleansing in Gaza. This sets the stage for efforts to re-establish Israeli settlements in Gaza.

Retired Brigadier General Elias Hanna, a military and strategic expert, explained to Al Jazeera how geography is being used against the population as an extreme form of collective punishment.

“The building and the geographical area have become part of the battle and part of the weapon itself,” Hanna said.

“When the Israeli enemy destroys and bulldozes, this bulldozing falls within the policy of collective punishment; that is, you create a new urban engineering and a new phase and a different shape for the social and security environment to punish those who resist and punish the civilian incubator at the same time,” Hanna said.

This strategy of urban engineering aims to permanently alter the ecosystem of the enclave by preventing the return of Palestinians to their homes and making the destroyed areas in Gaza unliveable or unbuildable, Hanna added.

The daily tragedy

The removal of ruins also means that the bodies of missing people, estimated by Gaza’s civil defence in July 2026 to number about 8,500, could be gone forever.

Using heavy machinery without prior forensic surveys risks crushing or scattering these remains, severely infringing on the rights of families to know the fate of their relatives.

Abu Asim, a Palestinian citizen whose family members remain buried in the eastern areas of the Gaza Strip, now designated as behind a military “Yellow Line“, shared his agony with Al Jazeera.

“My family’s story is that their body parts were scattered in the streets, and some of them are still to this day under the rubble of the house, and their remains have not been brought out,” he said.

“We lost them, and the first tragedy was their martyrdom, and the second and daily tragedy is the absence of these graves and the absence of the evidence with which we will try this occupation for these crimes and atrocities.”

Rescue efforts have been entirely paralysed in areas seized by the Israeli military.

Samir al-Mana’ama, a lawyer with the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, told Al Jazeera that during the war, Israeli authorities seized an area of approximately 70 percent of the eastern Gaza Strip.

“[The Israeli military is] preventing the access of rescue crews to recover the bodies of the martyrs, and it is also tampering with the rubble areas and moving them from one place to another, which leads to a clear and explicit violation of the provisions of international humanitarian law and international human rights law,” al-Mana’ama told Al Jazeera.

Raed al-Dahshan, the director of civil defence in Gaza, highlighted the impossibility of their mission.

“In the available areas where we move now, things are very difficult and complex,” he told Al Jazeera. “So how about the situation if the matter requires coordination to enter the areas located inside the Yellow Line, which requires special equipment, coordination, and securing … the nature of our work there.”

Even known resting places of the dead have not been spared, Salha said, with historical burial sites included in this campaign of erasure.

“Reports and human rights documentation state that the occupation completely or partially destroyed more than 93 percent of the cemeteries in the Gaza Strip,” Salha said. “Neither stone, nor human beings, nor even the dead in their graves have been spared from the occupation.”