By Malik Mukhtar — ainnbeen.blogspot.com
There are wars fought with weapons, and then there are wars fought with absence — of truth, of conscience, of boundaries.
Israel calls this absence the perimeter.
It sounds clinical, almost hygienic — a military term with the sterile precision of a ruler drawn across a map.
But in Gaza, the perimeter is not a line.
It’s a wound — a thousand meters wide — where humanity has been methodically erased under the camouflage of “security.”
“There are no civilians. They’re terrorists, all of them.”
A reservist from the Armored Corps recalls the words of his commander during briefings:
“There is no civilian population. They’re terrorists, all of them.”
That’s not a metaphor. That’s policy.
So the rules of engagement, that sacred language of military morality, dissolved into something simpler — something primitive.
If it moves, it dies.
If it doesn’t move, the bulldozer will come later.
“There were no clear rules of engagement,” says another captain. “Sometimes the battalion commander would talk about ‘escalation measures,’ but nobody cared.”
What followed wasn’t war. It was arithmetic.
A thousand meters of clearance.
A thousand meters of moral anesthesia.
The Theology of Fire
“We fired at something,” one officer admits. “Sometimes you see people. Sometimes you don’t. Sometimes the radar said there was movement. Sometimes we just fired.”
He pauses, searching for logic in the rubble:
“There was a lot of instigating fire — for the sake of instigating fire. Somewhere between wanting to produce a psychological effect and just for no reason.”
Fire as language. Fire as punctuation.
Fire to fill the silence of doubt.
“We shot at people carrying bags.”
Another soldier tells of the northern Gaza Strip, near Beit Hanoun.
“We’d built a defense position — mounds of sand and dirt around our tanks. Once that position existed, anything moving nearby became suspicious.
A guy shows up with a bag? Incriminated — terrorist. We fired shells. Maybe he was picking hubeiza (mallow). People were hungry. They kept coming back. We fired again.”
He laughs — not out of humor, but disbelief.
“I think they were just collecting greens to eat. But the army said, ‘No, they’re hiding.’ Boom. That’s considered a miss. They were supposed to hit them.”
A thousand meters of terror, bordered by hunger.
“Our mission was to destroy everything inside the line.”
A sergeant in the 5th Brigade remembers the orders in December 2023:
“We crossed into Shuja’iyya to destroy the industrial zone. Warehouses, factories, even the Coca-Cola plant. We called it cleaning. That’s what we said — ‘We’re cleaning the area.’”
Cleaning — a word that does not belong to rubble.
That industrial zone was once Gaza’s fragile dream of coexistence — born out of the Oslo Accords, meant to employ thousands, to send goods through the Karni Crossing.
But it stood too close to Israel’s border.
And so, in the new theology of war, it was declared impure.
Unclean.
Uninhabitable.
“The Engineering Corps laid down explosives,” he recalls. “We went back into Israel, blew it up, and that was a sortie.”
The result?
Mountains of glass where Coca-Cola once fizzed.
Concrete dust where pharmacies once packaged hope.
The Bureaucracy of Oblivion
There’s something obscene about the calm precision of it all.
The soldiers are not monsters; they are bureaucrats of destruction.
Their testimonies read like administrative reports filed from hell.
“The system for classifying suspicious sites fell apart,” one says.
“Nobody cared who was a civilian or who wasn’t. We set out to win, out of anger, out of pain. Past the line, everyone’s a suspect.”
And how do Palestinians know this invisible line exists?
“They don’t,” the soldier admits. “Enough people died crossing it. That’s how they learned.”
The Language of Innocence
Israel calls these acts “defensive operations.”
But the soldiers — its own sons — speak a different language.
They talk about “instigating fire,” “cleaning areas,” and “suspects with bags.”
They describe a machine that no longer distinguishes between safety and supremacy.
And we, the global audience, are fluent in denial.
We watch the livestream and call it complicated.
We measure outrage in characters per tweet.
We debate proportionality while counting bodies as statistics, not stories.
The Moral Perimeter
The truth is this: the perimeter was never just a military boundary.
It is a moral quarantine — a space where empathy is forbidden, and language is weaponized to disinfect atrocity.
A thousand meters between civilization and conscience.
A thousand meters where rules dissolve, where hunger becomes guilt, and where life itself is an act of trespass.
Israel’s perimeter is not Gaza’s tragedy alone.
It is ours — the world’s.
Every unmoved government, every silent newsroom, every Western state still shipping weapons while mouthing human rights — they all stand comfortably within the perimeter.
Because the moment the line moves closer — the moment it touches our reflection — the illusion of moral distance collapses.
And then, perhaps, we will finally see the truth that has been written not in ink, but in ash:
that the perimeter is not protecting Israel.
It is protecting our indifference.
— From ainnbeen.blogspot.com
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