As of kafka 2.3.0 version, there is an alternate way to soft deletion of Kafka (old approach are deprecated ).
Update retention.ms to 1 sec (1000ms) then set it again after a min, to default setting i.e 7 days (168 hours, 604,800,000 in ms )
Soft deletion:- (rentention.ms=1000) (using kafka-configs.sh).
bin/kafka-configs.sh --zookeeper 192.168.1.10:2181 --alter --entity-name kafka_topic3p3r --entity-type topics --add-config retention.ms=1000
Completed Updating config for entity: topic 'kafka_topic3p3r'.
Setting to default:- 7 days (168 hours , retention.ms= 604800000)
bin/kafka-configs.sh --zookeeper 192.168.1.10:2181 --alter --entity-name kafka_topic3p3r --entity-type topics --add-config retention.ms=604800000