Rabbi who boasts of bulldozing Palestinian homes will light torch for Israel’s national day

An extremist rabbi known for razing civilian homes in Gaza will light a torch at Israel’s independence day celebration on Tuesday, a role human rights campaigners said marked the embrace of genocide as the official “spirit of the nation”.

Avraham Zarbiv is one of 14 people chosen for their “extraordinary contribution to society and the state”, alongside a scientist, a Michelin-starred chef, a leading doctor, members of the security forces and entrepreneurs.

A reservist who drives an armoured bulldozer, Zarbiv rose to prominence through videos documenting his personal campaign of destruction in Gaza, often accompanied by inflammatory rhetoric.

“You will have nothing left,” he declares in one voiceover, as the camera pans across a landscape of shattered buildings. “We will flatten you and destroy you.”

The footage spread so widely on social media that his name entered the lexicon of Hebrew slang. “To Zarbiv” now means to destroy, a neologism that the 54-year-old has embraced, making it the title of a lecture earlier this year.

Zarbiv’s selection for the ceremony marks an official endorsement of the dehumanisation of Palestinians and systematic destruction of Palestinian life, according to the rights group B’tselem. It said: “This selection sends a clear message to the citizens of Israel and the entire world – in Israel, genocide, ethnic cleansing and war crimes are the ‘spirit of the nation’.”

Cabinet minister Miriam Regev said she chose Zarbiv for the role because of his “inspirational” dual leadership as a rabbi and soldier, “between the book and the sword”.

That official endorsement undermines Israel’s defence against charges of genocide and incitement to genocide in international courts, Haaretz newspaper said.

“A country that chooses to honour and esteem someone who has become a symbol of the flattening of Gaza is telling the world that it sees him and his values as deserving respect and as representing the state,” the paper said in an editorial.

“Zarbiv indeed deserves to light an independence day torch: not because he is worthy of the honour, but because Israel has lost its way, its moral compass and its conscience.”

Zarbiv has served hundreds of days on reserve duty as a D9 armoured bulldozer operator in Gaza and has been deployed on similar missions of destruction in southern Lebanon.

In January 2025, he boasted of demolishing “50 homes a week” in Gaza. “They have nothing to return to in Rafah and Jabalya … tens of thousands of families have no papers, childhood photos, ID cards, no homes. They have nothing.”

His own home, built on private Palestinian land in an illegal settlement in occupied Palestine, has been under a demolition order for illegal construction since 2000, according to the monitoring group Kerem Navot. That order has never been enforced.

Zarbiv, who is a rabbinical judge in civilian life, has been censured by Israel’s judicial watchdog for extremist statements. Commissioner Asher Kula ruled earlier this year that he had violated the code of ethics for judges.

Israeli military chiefs have sought to distance themselves from Zarbiv and Brig Gen Effie Defrin told a news conference last week he “was not selected in coordination with the IDF – he is not an IDF representative at the torch-lighting ceremony”.

Israel’s military and civilian contractors have levelled swathes of Gaza, reducing towns and cities to piles of rubble.

Nine in 10 homes in the territory have been destroyed or damaged, UN figures show, and other civilian infrastructure including schools, hospitals, mosques, cemeteries and shops have been targeted.

In one video, Zarbiv described his unit’s method of operation as “neighbourhood after neighbourhood … destroy and advance, destroy and advance.”

The devastation is so intense that some experts say it should be recognised as a new war crime: “domicide”.