A new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) has established that Israeli authorities have caused massive and deliberate forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, in what amounts to a war crime.
The international human rights organisation analysed satellite imagery, Israeli forced evacuation orders and statements by senior Israeli officials to show that authorities in Israel are deliberately and permanently making returning to large areas of Gaza effectively impossible for the Palestinian population.
Report author, Nadia Hardman told journalists in a news conference that Israeli forces have destroyed the majority of Gaza’s water, sanitation, communications, energy and transport infrastructure as well as its schools and hospitals and systematically razed orchards, fields and greenhouses. “So much civilian infrastructure has been destroyed that much of Gaza has been rendered uninhabitable,” Hardman said.
In addition to the widespread destruction carried out by Israeli forces across the besieged enclave, HRW found that Israel has continued to expand three so-called “buffer zones” by razing large areas of Gaza’s cities, including Rafah, and building Israeli military access roads and structures to make them permanent features in the Palestinian territory.
“A new road constructed by the Israeli military that bisects the north and south halves of Gaza and runs east to west – this ‘Netzarim Corridor’ as it’s called – is more than 4km [2.4 miles] wide and at the time of publication keeps expanding towards north Gaza and the south, beyond Wadi Gaza.”
Nadia Hardman
The Human Rights Watch report said that the razing and destruction of the vast majority of Palestinian homes, fields, orchards, wooded areas and infrastructure in these so-called “buffer zones” was “one of the clearest examples of forcible transfer in Gaza.”
Notably, the rights group said that to qualify as a war crime, the forcible transfer of a population must be carried out intentionally.
The report’s authors provided almost two dozen statements from senior Israeli ministers supporting the forcible transfer of Palestinians.
Separately, the UN special committee to investigate Israeli practices released a report that determines mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions are “intentionally imposed” on Palestinians in Gaza by the Israeli army.
The committee said in a press release that since the beginning of the war, Israeli officials “have publicly supported policies that strip Palestinians of the very necessities required to sustain life – food, water, and fuel.”
It added that these statements along with the systematic and unlawful interference of humanitarian aid “make clear Israel’s intent to instrumentalise life-saving supplies for political and military gains.”
The report’s findings that Israel intentionally withholds aid from the Strip, uses starvation as a weapon of war and is careless in its infliction of civilian casualties are consistent with other UN and humanitarian condemnations of Israel’s conduct.
Israel Unstoppable As Long As International Law Is Scoffed At
Mohamad Elmasry, Professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, told a news agency that about 95 percent of Israel’s weapons come from the United States and Germany, “so as long as those countries scoff at the idea of international law, we won’t get anywhere with the calls for an arms embargo against Israel.”
He noted that there has been a suggestion that there might be a draft resolution put forward at the United Nations Security Council. “There is no question in my mind that nearly all of the countries on the Security Council would support that resolution,” he said, stressing that all countries except for the US.
He added that there is also no question in “my mind that the United States would veto it, so one of the reasons why we are where we are is because of the United States.”
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