Israel’s military operations in Gaza have resulted in a huge loss of civilian life since October 7. At least 20,000 people have been killed — including nearly 8,000 children — and over 52,000 people are injured. According to many legal experts, they bear witness to Israel’s war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of genocide.
While the immense attacks on Gaza and the Palestinians continue, the United States and European states refuse to intervene or hold Israel accountable. At best, they pay lip service to the idea that Israel must respect international humanitarian law.
Meanwhile, they continue to provide Israel’s military with bombs and military goods, which Israel may see as a blank check to proceed with its deadly crimes.
War crimes
There is massive evidence available to support many war crimes charges against Israeli leaders and individual commanders arising from the many violations of international law committed against the occupied Palestinians.
For example, the transfer of parts of Israel’s own civilian population into illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, where arrest warrants could and should have been issued not later than 2021 by the International Criminal Court. Or the deportation or transfer of Palestinians within or outside occupied territory in the West Bank and on a massive scale, as we currently witness in Gaza.
Israeli forces further commit war crimes when undefended towns, villages, dwellings, or buildings in Gaza or the occupied West Bank are attacked or bombarded without being military objectives.
The Financial Times reported that the percentage of buildings damaged in northern Gaza exceeds that of two years of carpet bombing by the Allied Forces on the German city of Dresden in World War II.
When Israel dropped heavy bombs on Jabaliya refugee camp on October 31 with the aim of murdering a commander of the resistance, at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, were killed, and 280 civilians were reported injured.
The Airwars NGO investigates the use of air power in military conflicts. Their data reveal that Israel used 2,000lb bunker buster munitions in the strike on Jabaliya, which bombs produce a wide crater and cause an “earthquake-like” phenomenon on impact.
This attack is an important case to examine for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Israeli forces also have intentionally targeted the health system in Gaza, attacking buildings, materials, medical units and transport, and personnel wearing distinctive emblems of the Geneva Conventions, like the Red Cross and the Red Crescent. These war crimes resulted in the collapse of the health system in Gaza, a tragedy for the thousands of injured who now lack the needed medical treatment.
In addition, Israeli army chiefs and government officials have been clear about their criminal intention to use starvation of civilians as a method of warfare, depriving them of water, electricity, and food indispensable to their survival, including willfully impeding relief supplies — all flagrant war crimes contrary to the Rome Statute.
Yet another more recent example of a vicious war crime is documented in videos and photos by Israeli soldiers.
The Rome Statue also criminalized “outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment.” In Palestine, the mass “outrage upon the personal dignity” of the Palestinians was achieved by the act of tying, blindfolding, and stripping naked Palestinians in public while filming and photographing the humiliation and publishing it online. This presents irrefutable evidence of the commission of war crimes and indicates organized and planned acts of humiliation, amounting to widespread or systematic attacks on a civilian population.
Inflicting such mass inhumane treatment, therefore, makes those involved suspects of crimes against humanity.
There is also evidence that Israeli forces further used semi-naked Palestinian detainees as human shields in the course of military operations.
Until now, no state or court has held Israel accountable for its war crimes.
Even the chief prosecutor to the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, has failed to create a deterrent for Israel’s ongoing crimes against the Palestinians.
When Khan was appointed in 2021, an investigation was already ongoing. It is shameful that he hasn’t issued arrest warrants for some of the key cases that fall under his jurisdiction, which go back to 2014.
Israel is allowed to act with impunity, which can be seen as an encouragement to commit more war crimes.
Genocide
In 1948, only three years after the Nazi Holocaust, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
The Genocide Convention defines genocide in simple, straightforward terms:
“Genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”, as such: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”
Evidence for Israel committing acts of genocide in Gaza is twofold:
Firstly, military and political leaders have repeatedly publicly expressed the intention to destroy Palestinians living in Gaza who are part of a national group.
Secondly, there is extensive evidence available of some of the “index offenses” that qualify as acts of genocide.
Israel’s military has killed and injured thousands of men, women, and children and denied Palestinians access to basic needs such as water, food, electricity, and health services while forcing them into unsafe and overcrowded conditions and knowing that disease is spreading fast and risking many lives.
Moreover, after forcibly transferring Palestinians in Gaza from the north to the “safe” south of Gaza, Israel has dropped bombs on Palestinian civilians wherever they are, deliberately causing serious mental and bodily harm, including in zones declared “safe” by Israel.
A few weeks after Israel’s military started its vengeful operations in Gaza, scholars and practitioners of international law, conflict studies, and genocide studies publicly warned of the possibility of genocide being perpetrated against Palestinians. On October 20, over 800 scholars had signed the warning.
Therefore, there is an unusually strong case to accuse Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
Bring a genocide case to the International Court of Justice
On November 17, the International Commission of Jurists reminded states of their duty to prevent Genocide under the Convention in a legal briefer.
The commission mentioned the massive number of civilian deaths, including women and children, during the ongoing attacks since October 7, in addition to recent warnings that included a group of independent United Nations human rights experts on November 16 — all of which indicate that “the grave violations committed by Israel against Palestinians in the aftermath of 7 October, particularly in Gaza, point to a genocide in the making.”
That is why the Commission urged States to fulfill their international legal obligations, in particular the obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention, to take immediate action to prevent acts of genocide in Gaza.
World leaders who have talked about their concerns about genocide in Gaza have a positive duty to act to prevent it.
For example, South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor told parliament that “the Crime of Genocide sadly looms large in the current situation in Gaza.” She recalls that during the genocide in Rwanda in 1994, the world was watching as innocent people were massacred.
By expressing concern about an unfolding genocide in Gaza, South Africa has legal obligations to act to prevent it.
South Africa could take Israel to the International Court of Justice, which has jurisdiction on genocide. The court can take, at the request of states, measures to try and bring an end to the acts of genocide in Gaza.
Other states with similar concerns as Foreign Minister Pandor should act upon the duty to prevent genocide.
Gambia set an important precedent in 2019 when it took Myanmar to the ICJ over the genocide against the Rohingya. On January 23, 2020, it obtained provisional measures to seek the end of certain acts of genocide against the Rohingya.
Thank you for cleanly, clearly and succinctly laying out the litany of crimes all in one place. It’s clear to anyone that hasn’t been stuffing their pockets with lobbyist money or filling their mind with Israeli state-sponsored propaganda and AIPAC talking points that Israel is long overdue for a trip to The Hague. Which is why the US is also feverishly working behind the scenes in Switzerland to immunize Israel from international accountability for violating the Geneva Conventions.