The international human rights organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) on December 19 issued a 186-page report concluding that Israel has been perpetrating crimes against humanity in Gaza, including the crimes of extermination and genocide.
HRW’s report follows a 294-page report from Amnesty International documenting Israel’s violations of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention).
The same day HRW issued its report, the international humanitarian medical organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, issued a 34-page report titled “Gaza: Life in a Death Trap”, documenting what the group calls “Israel’s campaign of total destruction”.
The medical group’s report states that
MSF’s firsthand observations align with those of an increasing number of legal experts and organisations, concluding that ethnic cleansing and genocide are taking place in Gaza. MSF calls on States, particularly Israel’s closest allies, to end their unconditional support for Israel and fulfill their obligation to prevent genocide in Gaza.
By far the greatest facilitator of Israel’s genocide is the United States government. The Genocide Convention also prohibits acts of complicity in genocide, so US officials could also theoretically be prosecuted for the crime of genocide by the International Criminal Court (ICC), which on November 21 issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Whereas Amnesty International’s report took a broad approach to examining the question of whether Israel is violating the Genocide Convention, HRW focused largely on Israel’s policy of deliberately depriving the civilian population of water.
This includes “extensive damage and destruction to water and sanitation infrastructure, including the apparently deliberate, systematic razing of the solar panels powering four of Gaza’s six wastewater treatment plants by Israeli ground forces, as well as Israeli soldiers filming themselves demolishing a key water reservoir.”
Indeed, Israeli soldiers have been gleefully documenting their own war crimes, such as sharing videos to social media of themselves celebrating their wanton destruction of Gaza’s civilian infrastructure.
The horrific sanitary conditions in Gaza have risked an outbreak of polio, a virus transmitted primarily via the fecal-oral route. In August, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced the first case of polio in Gaza in a quarter century, a 10-month-old child who became paralyzed in one leg due vaccine-derived poliovirus, which is caused by infection with the strain of the virus used in the “live” oral polio vaccine, which is attenuated but can revert to virulence and in rare cases causes the disease the vaccine is designed to prevent. This phenomenon has hindered the WHO’s goal of achieving global eradication. Since 2017, more cases of paralytic polio have been caused by the vaccine strain than the wild virus.
The HRW report also noted that the question of intent is decided by statements from Israeli officials openly declaring their aim of depriving the entire civilian population of Gaza of goods and services necessary for their survival. It cites, for example, the statement from then Defense Minister Yoav Gallant on October 9, 2023, ordering “a complete siege” of Gaza so that Palestinians would have “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel, everything is closed.”
“Since then,” the report observes, “Israeli authorities and military forces have matched these statements with actions.”
The rights group also notes that, in a case charging Israel with genocide brought by the government of South Africa, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on January 26, 2024, issued provisional measures requiring Israel to take steps to comply with its obligations under the Genocide Convention, including facilitating the entrance and distribution of desperately needed humanitarian aid.
While the ICC was established under the Rome Statue, the ICJ was established under the UN Charter, and as a UN member state, Israel is legally obligated to comply with the ICJ’s orders, which the court issued on the grounds that South Africa had presented a “plausible” case that Israel was committing genocide.
HRW notes that the ICJ subsequently issued two further provisional measures, including on May 24 ordering Israel to halt its military assault on Rafah in southern Gaza, where 1.5 million displaced Palestinian civilians were sheltering because they had been ordered by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) to flee there.
“Since that time,” HRW’s report notes, “Israel has violated the ICJ’s measures, including preventing ‘the deprivation of access to adequate food and water.’”
As the report concludes,
Israeli authorities have over the past year intentionally inflicted on the Palestinian population in Gaza ‘conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.’ This policy, inflicted as part of a mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza means Israeli authorities have committed the crime against humanity of extermination, which is ongoing. This policy also amounts to an ‘act of genocide’ under the Genocide Convention of 1948.
The rights group also calls for an arms embargo against Israel, reminding the US and other suppliers of arms to Israel of their own obligations under international humanitarian law and human rights law, including the Genocide Convention.
Cross-posted from JeremyRHammond.com.
