A/HRC/12/48 page 212 Similarly, when Khalid Abd Rabbo returned to the home of his extended family in Izbat Abd Rabbo (which he had abandoned intact after the shooting of his daughters, see chap. XI) after the withdrawal of the Israeli armed forces, he found it completely demolished, as were the other houses in the vicinity. Khalid Abd Rabbo drew the Mission’s attention to what appeared to be an anti-tank mine visible under the rubble of his neighbour’s house, which had reportedly been used by the Israeli armed forces to cause the controlled explosion which brought down the building. As in the case of Wa’el al-Samouni’s house, the way the buildings had collapsed strongly suggests that both Khaled Abd Rabbo’s house and that of his neighbour were deliberately demolished by explosives experts, rather than damaged during combat. Khaled Abd Rabbo added that, to his knowledge, his house had been demolished by the Israeli armed forces shortly before they withdrew from Gaza. 1. Factual findings 998. From the facts gathered, the Mission concludes that, in a number of cases it investigated, the Israeli armed forces launched direct attacks against residential houses, destroying them. Although the Mission does not have complete information on the circumstances prevailing in Juhr ad-Dik, al-Samouni neighbourhood and Izbat Abd Rabbo when the houses of the Hajaj, al-Samouni and Khalid Abd Rabbo families were destroyed, the information in its possession strongly suggests that they were destroyed outside of any combat engagements with Palestinian armed groups. Nor were these houses otherwise making any effective contribution to military action. These attacks deprived the extended families living there of shelter and of a significant part of their property. 999. In other cases, residential neighbourhoods were subjected to air-launched bombing and to intensive shelling apparently in the context of the advance of Israeli ground forces. In these cases, although the facts gathered by the Mission do not suggest that the residential houses were directly targeted, it doubts whether there were military objectives pursued by the shelling. 2. Corroboration of Mission’s factual findings and widespread nature of housing destruction 1000. Testimonies of Israeli soldiers deployed in Gaza during the military operations corroborate what the Mission saw for itself and heard from the witnesses it interviewed. Several of the soldiers interviewed by Breaking the Silence spoke of the unprecedented scale of destruction of houses and of “intentional, systematic destruction.”509 The testimonies of the soldiers appear to distinguish between three phases in or types of destruction of residential housing. First, there is the destruction which is incidental to the actual combat between the advancing Israeli forces and the Palestinian combatants or to Israeli forces directing fire at locations from which rockets were launched.510 Second, there is destruction of houses for what Soldiers’ Testimonies…, pp. 59, 66, 69 and 101. One soldier recalls: “There was a point where D-9s were razing areas. It was amazing. At first you go in and see lots of houses. A week later, after the razing, you see the horizon further away, almost to the sea. They simply took down all the houses around so the terrorists would have nowhere else to hide.” 509 In “The hidden dimension of Palestinian war casualties…”, the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs argues that Palestinian houses were also demolished when Palestinian armed groups attacked houses in Gaza in which the Israeli armed forces had taken up positions. This argument is supported with reports of incidents gathered from websites of Palestinian armed groups, such as the following referring to the evening of 9 January 2009: “Three RPG 510