Rabbi who became mascot for Gaza genocide honoured by Israel on independence day
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Rayhan Uddin
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Tue, 04/21/2026 - 12:03
Avraham Zarbiv's name became a verb for the destruction in Gaza after he spent over a year bulldozing Palestinian homes and boasting about it
Avraham Zarbiv poses in front of a bulldozer in the Gaza Strip (Screengrab/Social media)
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Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, whose name became synonymous with destroying Palestinian homes in Gaza, will light a torch at Israel’s national independence day ceremony - one of the country’s highest civilian honours.
The annual ceremony, held on 21 April, celebrates the establishment of Israel in 1948 (an event known to Palestinians as the Nakba - or catastrophe - which ethnically cleansed over 750,000 people).
Miri Regev, the populist right-wing transport minister, chose the rabbi as one of those to light a torch this year.
The ceremony is attended by key government and military figures, and includes a ritual where a handful of citizens considered to have made exemplary contributions to society light 12 torches.
Zarbiv is a rabbinical court judge in Ariel, an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank.
He lives in the Israeli settlement of Beit El, where his home was built illegally on private Palestinian land.
Last week, a complaint was made against him to an Israeli judicial watchdog, stating that his home - already on a settlement which is illegal under international law - breaches Israeli law by being built outside the settlement’s boundaries.
'We will flatten you and destroy you'
- Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv
Zarbiv spent more than a year in Gaza, where he was a D9 bulldozer operator during Israel’s genocide.
He became famous across Israel for his commitment to flattening Palestinian homes.
The 54-year-old rabbi filmed himself razing civilian buildings to the ground, and sometimes did so while reciting the Torah and blowing a shofar.
In one video, with destroyed houses visible in the background, he stated “you will have nothing left” and “we will flatten you and destroy you”.
In another video, he said: “Such profound impurity pervades these homes that everything must be destroyed; not a single tree is untouched by it.”
'Indelible stain'
In an interview from January 2025, he said that he destroyed “50 homes on average per week”, describing bulldozing as “an art form we’ve acquired”.
"They have nothing to return to in Rafah and Jabalia... tens of thousands of families have no papers, childhood photos, ID cards, no homes - they have nothing,” he said of Palestinians.
“Thousands of Palestinians were killed and left uncollected, to the point that they were reportedly eaten by cats and dogs because no one came to retrieve the bodies.”
In December 2023, an image was published in a Gaza classroom with a gun and an Islamic prayer mat in front of Zarbiv. On the whiteboard behind him read the words: "Khan Younis Rabbinical Court".
Zarbiv became so famous that his name was turned into a verb: "to Zarbiv”, meaning to flatten like Gaza. A sticker of him on a D9 bulldozer also went viral.
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He didn’t only destroy Palestinian homes - in recent weeks footage has emerged of the rabbi partaking in the demolition of homes in southern Lebanon.
Last year, the Hind Rajab Foundation filed a complaint against Zarbiv to the International Criminal Court and called for his immediate arrest.
The legal group submitted video evidence using his own interviews and social media posts.
They accused Zarbiv of breaching the Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute, including by allegedly attacking civilians, destroying property not justified by military necessity, and intentionally attacking civilian objects.
Middle East Eye has contacted the Israeli embassy in London for comment.
“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,” Haaretz newspaper wrote in a lead editorial last week.
“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.
“Using the Hebrew conjugation, it has ‘Zarbived’, if you will, Gaza and is proud of it. What Israel has done in Gaza is an indelible stain. Zarbiv represents the image of the state today.”
Israel's genocide in Gaza
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