Booby-Trapped Cars Are Being Used in Gaza – And It’s Blowing Up in Israel’s Face

Right, so here we are. Israel has rolled into Gaza City, tanks grinding over rubble, drones circling like vultures, and a million civilians still trapped inside. You’d think the plan would be to clear buildings or confront fighters. But no — the latest reports say Israel is planting booby-trapped cars in the streets. Cars. In a city where escape is a fantasy right now, where the sight of four wheels and a fuel tank might look like salvation, Tel Aviv has decided to turn survival itself into a trip wire. Hospitals are bombed first, the internet is cut, children are left to starve or worse — and the world is told this is “security.” Israel’s of course. It’s not. It’s the deliberate weaponisation of hope, the transformation of Gaza into a death trap, and the exposure of the so-called civilised order of the Middle East’s alleged only democracy as a hollow fraud.
Right, so what kind of state looks at a city of one million civilians, half the entire population of the Gaza Strip, and decides the answer to its military and political crisis is extermination? What kind of army, after two years of bombing, starvation, and systematic destruction, rolls its tanks into Gaza City, blinds the world by cutting its internet, and then, according to multiple independent reports, seeds the streets with booby-trapped cars and armoured vehicles? Not to fight an enemy in uniform. Not to clear military targets. But to turn the act of survival itself into a death trap.
This is of course not war at all. This is genocide in real time, Israel is simply writing the next chapter.
Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza City, that has begun over the last few days is not a “military operation,” no matter what the language of diplomats or the headlines of Western media would suggest. It is the culmination of a strategy that has defined every phase of this conflict: famine used as a weapon, medical care collapsed by design, children targeted again and again, communications silenced, and the line between civilian and combatant deliberately erased until, in Israel’s eyes, there are no civilians left, because there are no innocents. The reports now emerging from journalists on the scene and doctors on the ground are consistent and chilling. They describe Israel deploying an unprecedented number of booby-trapped vehicles in Gaza City now, meant to detonate in residential areas.
Now some, the pliant politicians the mainstream media will argue over the veracity of such reports, but the question is not whether these reports are credible. The question is how they could not be. Israel has already been documented doing this before. In Jenin in 2002, Amnesty International recorded homes wired with explosives and destroyed, 140 buildings levelled and 4,000 people displaced in a matter of days. In Gaza during Operation Cast Lead in 2008, Human Rights Watch and Breaking the Silence reported entire neighbourhoods demolished after being seeded with charges. In Operation Protective Edge in 2014, Israeli veterans themselves admitted that their orders were to “sterilise” whole blocks by explosives even after fighting ended. Remote-controlled bulldozers and unmanned demolition systems have been tested and deployed for years. To see booby-trapped cars now is not a shocking break from precedent, it’s just the refinement of an old doctrine.
But we must ask what this means for the civilians still trapped inside Gaza City.
What does it mean to invade a city of one million people without granting them the time, the opportunity, the chance to leave? What does it mean to surround half the population of an entire enclave and treat them as acceptable casualties? Over a million people remain in northern Gaza, concentrated in Gaza City. Israel’s evacuation orders were meaningless. Safe corridors never materialised. Roads southward were shelled. “Humanitarian windows” were bombed before they opened. When tanks rolled in, hundreds of thousands tried to flee under fire, but hundreds of thousands more could not. They had nowhere left to go.
This is not a failure of planning. It is deliberate. Israel knows exactly how many civilians remain in Gaza City. It launched its ground invasion anyway, not caring if the city itself becomes a mass grave. Under international law, indiscriminate attacks on civilians are prohibited. But what is indiscriminate about rolling into a city you know is still home to one million people? That is not indifference. It is intent.
Families displaced ten or twelve times have given up counting. The Abu Jarads, who have been profiled by the Associated Press, were driven from eleven different shelters before tanks entered Gaza City. Each time they moved, the bombs followed. Each time they settled, the house collapsed around them. For them, as for hundreds of thousands of others, displacement is not a temporary condition. It is permanent war.
So why are the reports of booby-trapped vehicles so believable? Because they fit perfectly into this strategy of total war against civilians. According to The Cradle, Israel intends to “flood Gaza City” with an unprecedented number of booby-trapped cars and armoured carriers.
What does a car mean to a starving civilian in Gaza City though? Of course it means escape doesn’t it? In a city cut off from water and power, it means movement. It means the possibility of safety, however faint. That is why the symbolism of this tactic is so obscene. A vehicle that looks like an escape route is turned into a bomb. Hope itself becomes a weapon. The act of trying to survive becomes a trap and you can only argue such a device is aimed at targeting desperate civilians.
This is not hyperbole. In a city of one million desperate people, where families cling to the faintest sign of safety after two years of genocidal trauma, it is inevitable that people will approach abandoned vehicles. In that context, deploying booby-trapped cars in residential areas is not an anti-tank strategy. It is bait. And when civilians take the bait, they die.
And if any doubt remained about intent, look at what Israel bombed first. PressTV reported that Gaza City’s only children’s hospital was hit in the opening hours of the ground invasion. This is not new. In 2023, Israel bombed Gaza’s only children’s cancer hospital, forcing doctors to evacuate children mid-treatment. UNICEF called it “unconscionable.” Amnesty and Médecins Sans Frontières documented that the hospital had no military use. It was simply erased.
Why target hospitals? Because hospitals are more than buildings. They are symbols of care, of refuge, of continuity and when Israel have got away for decades with labelling every target they go after as Hamas, they’ve done no different here. In a city already largely reduced to rubble, they are the last spaces where people feel any measure of protection. To bomb them first is to break the spirit of the city and the people there. It is to say: nowhere is safe, not even for children in incubators or cancer wards. It is terror by design.
Dr Ali Tahrawi, as covered by Skwawkbox in The Canary today, described a child so unbearably and grievously wounded, yet somehow still alive, that he took one look at her and for once prayed for that child to die. I urge to read that article because what it contains YouTube would never let me describe. His testimony is agonising, and yet essential, because it proves that the destruction of hospitals is not collateral damage but the deliberate stripping away of life itself.
At the same time as the tanks rolled in, Gaza’s internet went dark. This was also no accident.
Cutting internet now, with one million people trapped inside Gaza City, is a strategy of concealment. Families cannot call for help. Journalists cannot upload footage. Aid agencies cannot track movement. The world cannot see. Darkness falls, and in that darkness the killing accelerates. Israel buys time to deny, distort, and bury the evidence. You will only hear their version of events. It blinds the eyes of the world long enough to rewrite the narrative. But are we really going to buy it anymore?
What has this invasion cost so far? The numbers tell the story. 65,000 dead by the official figures, other estimates put it at ten times that now. Dozens are being killed daily during the Gaza City invasion, with one strike killing 32 people, 12 of them children. Hundreds of thousands are fleeing, hundreds of thousands remain trapped, and families like the Abu Jarads cycle endlessly through displacement.
Famine is the most extreme in northern Gaza. Fuel has run out. Food convoys are blocked. Children die not just from bombs but from hunger and thirst. Hundreds of injured children wait for visas for medical evacuation, their treatment delayed by bureaucracy, their deaths hastened by siege. Many will not survive the wait.
Every statistic is a death sentence. Every number is a life extinguished and we mustn’t become immune to that. This is not oversight. It is not miscalculation. It is strategy. Israel knows exactly what it is doing.
Why should we believe these reports of booby-trapped vehicles? Because they fit into a two-decade pattern. In Jenin in 2002, 140 buildings demolished and 4,000 displaced. In Lebanon in 2006, 1,109 killed, most of them civilians, villages flattened by remote-controlled bulldozers. In Gaza during Cast Lead, 1,400 Palestinians killed, 300 of them children, homes wired for demolition. In Protective Edge, 2,200 killed, 1,400 civilians among them, soldiers ordered to lay explosives in civilian homes. In the Great March of Return in 2018, 189 protesters killed, 23,000 injured by sniper fire and drones. In 2021, 260 Palestinians killed in eleven days, 66 of them children, with entire towers levelled.
This is not aberration. It is doctrine.
So why, after nearly two years of bombing hospitals, starving civilians, shelling schools, and now planting booby-trapped cars in Gaza City, is Israel still allowed to wage this war? Because it is shielded by the United States, protected by Europe, indulged by Britain, excused by Germany. Washington wields its veto at the UN, blocking ceasefire resolutions. Billions in weapons flow without pause. The EU frets about aid while signing off on arms exports. The UK bans Palestine protests while signing Elbit contracts. Germany invokes “never again” not to prevent atrocity but to justify it.
The ICC investigates slowly. The ICJ rules genocide “plausible.” Netanyahu still travels freely. When Russia invaded Ukraine, sanctions arrived overnight. Against Israel? Nothing. The rules are not rules at all. They are privileges of power.
Yet despite the blackout, despite the bombs, despite the impunity, Israel has not silenced the truth. Hamas declared this invasion “a new chapter in the Gaza genocide,” signalling that resistance continues. Civilian resistance continues too. Families endure displacement after displacement. Doctors refuse to abandon their patients. Children cling to life in the ruins.
Globally, flotillas set sail, universities erupt in protest, boycotts cut into Israel’s economy, and courts in Belgium, the Netherlands, and South Africa invoke universal jurisdiction. The ICJ’s finding of plausible genocide is a crack in the wall of silence, and every act of cruelty widens it as does that more recent UN ruling.
What does this invasion reveal? It reveals the collapse of international law, the hypocrisy of Western power, the continuity of Israeli doctrine, and above all the deliberate destruction of a people’s will to live. Cars that could have been escape are turned into bombs. Hospitals that could have been refuge are turned into rubble. The internet that could have been a lifeline is cut.
Hope itself is turned into a weapon.
This is why this invasion is not simply war. It is genocide — the systematic annihilation of a people, not just by killing their bodies but by extinguishing their ability to imagine survival.
History will not remember this as a conflict between two sides. It will not be remembered as a war that Israel constantly justifies. It will remember it as genocide, and as the moment when the mask of civilisation slipped. Israel has weaponised hope. The West has weaponised silence. But Gaza, against all odds, has weaponised endurance. They still endure, they will persist, we must not turn away and each day remember what they are going through and support them in whatever way we can because in that endurance lies the only crack of light they’ve got.
More hope is on the way though. We’ve seen a number of flotillas head to break the siege of Gaza, but nothing on the scale of the Sumud Freedom Flotilla, already some 40 vessels strong, with more joining them shortly from Italy and Greece and to top it all of, they’ve now got some protection of a sort, some bodyguards you might say, so check out all the details of that story as a much needed cheerier story after this one, in this video recommendation here as your suggested next watch.
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