The Horrors of Israel’s Gaza Genocide Blown Open
Detail from Guardian of the Fire (1988), by Palestinian painter Ismail Shammout. Image Credit: Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research
On November 14, a Special Committee of the United Nations issued a report, summarising in prose the horrors that global media channels had broadcast and livestreamed since October 2023. Not for the first time since Israel began its most extreme assault ever on the isolated and impoverished Gaza strip – home to a people already displaced many times over – an official body of the UN has held Israel guilty of warfare methods “consistent with the characteristics of genocide”. Israel’s actions, the Special Committee ruled, were in gross violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law: “distinction, proportionality, and precautions in attack”.
The Special Committee, set up in 1968 to monitor Israel’s conduct in territories occupied in the 1967 war, expressed its horror at the “unprecedented destruction of civilian infrastructure and high death toll in Gaza”. Media reports emerging in the early weeks of the assault had spoken of Israel’s deployment of mass surveillance and big data processing in target identification. These artificial intelligence algorithms often chose moments to strike when civilian damage was likely to be most severe. In relation to military objectives, the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) had scaled up the acceptable ratio of innocents killed in breach of all norms.
The 2.1 million people in Gaza had been displaced multiple times, corralled into narrow strips of territory which were then heavily bombed despite being declared evacuation zones. This had happened with “no regard for their rights to life, dignity, liberty and security”. The extent of devastation made it “impossible to conceive of any durable solution to their displacement, given Israel’s systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, atop the immense psychological toll the conflict has taken on the people of Gaza”.
Humanitarian supplies had been weaponised and Israel made no secret of its intention to deny the people of Gaza essential sustenance. In an increasingly dire situation, Israel had repeatedly attacked aid convoys, even when notified well in advance and cleared for safe passage at every level. Humanitarian workers and health care professionals had been killed with little discrimination.
Well before the current genocidal assault, food security in Gaza was precarious, with a substantial number of people feeling the adverse long-term nutritional deficiencies of an Israeli siege imposed in 2005. By the end of 2023, “over 90 per cent of the Gaza population was estimated to face high levels of acute food insecurity”, 40% at an “emergency level”, and over 15% at “catastrophe levels”. The targeting of farmland with tonnes of munitions, their enduring potential toxicity, and the destruction of 70% of Gaza’s fishing fleet, spoke of the deliberate application of food deprivation as a means of warfare.
Parallel to the genocidal assault on Gaza, life in the West Bank and East Jerusalem had become more dire. Illegal Jewish settlements had expanded, alongside “mass detentions, arrests, torture and ill-treatment”. Arbitrary curfews made daily life almost impossible, resulting in “economic strangulation”. Frequent and lethal raids by the IDF had become a daily reality, when armed settler gangs were not carrying out their own depredations.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, has meanwhile, filed two reports for the General Assembly’s consideration. The first of these, published in March, and granted official imprimatur in July 2024, summed up the state of affairs as observed after five months of military operations in Gaza:
… Israel has destroyed Gaza. Over 30,000 Palestinians have been killed, including more than 13,000 children. Over 12,000 are presumed dead and 71,000 injured, many with life-changing mutilations. Seventy per cent of residential areas have been destroyed. Eighty per cent of the population has been forcibly displaced. … Thousands have been detained and systematically subjected to severe ill-treatment. The incalculable collective trauma will be experienced for generations to come.
Certain inescapable conclusions followed: “The threshold indicating the commission of genocide by Israel has been met”, and “more broadly” the logic driving Israel’s actions were “integral to its settler-colonial project in Palestine”. This signalled a “tragedy foretold” since Israel has over decades, in full view of the world, “advanced its settler-colonial project through military occupation, stripping the Palestinian people of their right to self-determination”.
In a report datelined October 1, Albanese took these findings forward under a title chosen with intent: “Genocide as colonial erasure”. The signals were sent out very early in the assault on Gaza. Within a week of the armed incursion by Palestinian resistance fighters into the southern territory of Israel on October 7, 2023, Israel issued orders for 1.1 million Palestinians in the north of the Gaza strip, to move south. Compliance was demanded within 24 hours, in what the Special Rapporteur observes, was “one of the fastest mass displacements in history”.
Albanese had then “warned of the risk of deliberate mass ethnic cleansing”, and much to her regret, this “proved prescient”. The estimates she has since gathered are concurrent with the findings of the Special Committee: “At least 90 per cent of Palestinians in Gaza have now been forcibly displaced – many more than 10 times – amid calls from Israeli officials and others for Palestinians to leave and Israelis to ‘return to Gaza’ and rebuild the colonies dismantled in 2005”.
The July report of the Special Rapporteur details how Israel’s action meet every one of the criteria listed in the Genocide Convention, adopted by the UN in 1948. Genocide is an international crime every state is obliged to punish. There can be no justification for genocide, and its prevention is a peremptory norm.
South Africa was one state that saw the obvious within the first few months of Israel’s assault on Gaza. In December 2023, it petitioned the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague, demanding action against Israel under the Genocide Convention. In the first of many orders, the ICJ concluded that the requisites for “provisional measures” to safeguard rights claimed by South Africa, were met. It was however, at liberty to decree measures other than those requested by the petitioner.
Accordingly, the ICJ chose not to order an urgent ceasefire, as demanded by South Africa, and instead, demand that Israel must take all measures within its power “to prevent the commission of all acts” defined under Article II of the Genocide Convention. Of the five distinct acts that constituted the crime of genocide under Article II, the ICJ specifically ordered Israel to refrain from four.
On March 28 this year, the ICJ reaffirmed its earlier order, responding to an urgent request from South Africa. It further required Israel, in view of the “catastrophic situation” prevailing, to take “all necessary and effective measures to ensure, without delay, in full co-operation with the United Nations, the unhindered provision at scale by all concerned of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance”. These supplies were to include “food, water, electricity, fuel, shelter, clothing, hygiene and sanitation requirements, as well as medical supplies and medical care”. They were to be provided “throughout Gaza, including by increasing the capacity and number of land crossing points and maintaining them open for as long as necessary”.
On May 10, South Africa submitted another urgent request in the light of the ferocity of the assault on Rafah, the southernmost administrative unit in Gaza. With most of Gaza’s population crowded into the south, Israel seemed embarked upon eliminating even the last of the zones where life may have been relatively safe.
Two weeks later, the ICJ issued its third order, underlining the urgency of full compliance with earlier orders, and adding on the imperative demand that Israel shall “immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”. This was the furthest the ICJ had gone, though it stopped short of fully acceding to South Africa’s demand for a ceasefire and unconditional withdrawal of Israeli forces “from the entirety of the Gaza Strip”.
While the ICJ continues its glacial deliberations, the International Criminal Court (ICC), a body set up outside the UN system with the mandate to sanction and punish (rather than merely advise), has been agonising over a request from its Chief Prosecutor, to issue arrest warrants against the Israeli political leadership.
In an effort at balance, the Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan also requested arrest warrants against three leaders of the Palestinian resistance group Hamas – Ismail Haniyeh, Mohammad Deif and Yahya Sinwar – all since eliminated in targeted assassinations by Israel.
This leaves the ICC with the simpler task of determining when or if Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and Defence Minister (since sacked) Yoav Gallant, should be brought to justice. As of November 19, it has been 183 days since the requests were made, and the ICC is yet to act. A standard for comparison, as also an index of depth of duplicity here, would be the request made for an arrest warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin in March 2023, acceded to within a mere 23 days.
It has been credibly reported that Israel has in the past, threatened and blackmailed ICC officials to pre-empt any possibility of investigation into its actions. This may partly explain why Karim Khan took no less than seven months since the Gaza assault began, to make even a preliminary move. It may also explain why he has in recent weeks, come under investigation for alleged sexual misdemeanours.
The intelligence chiefs of the UK and the US recently published their first ever joint article, warning that Russia had by opening a war-front in Europe, posed the greatest threat to the global order since the Cold War. Afflicted by the myopia (that is shared by all patrons of Israel) they were understandably blind to the damage inflicted on every principle of international law by Israel’s genocidal rampage.
Law, it is often said, is a thin camouflage for the interests of power. And when an overt conflict arises between the two, it is the latter that prevails.
Sukumar Muralidharan is an independent writer and researcher based in the Delhi region. The views are personal.
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