(Revised, May 7) The Horror: Germany prevents eye-witness doctor to ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza from testifying in France; Here’s what the German government doesn’t want you to hear

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak

In memory of Aaron Bushnell. And of John Franklin and Ruth Asawa, two teachers who knew the Horror and who tried to teach their children well so that it would never again come back. And with thanks to JK.

“Have we learned nothing?”

— I.F. Stone

As Israel, refusing a cease-fire proposal formulated by Egypt and accepted by Hamas, intensifies its bombing and genocidal killing in Rafa, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah, an Anglo-Palestinian plastic and reconstructive surgeon who returned in April from 43 days operating on civilians wounded and maimed by Israeli bombardments in al-Shifa hospital, the majority of them children, as a volunteer with the French NGO Doctors without Borders — before Gaza’s largest hospital was completely leveled last month by Israel, which left more than 300 bodies buried in mass graves — was prevented by Germany Saturday from entering France, where he had been invited to testify before the French Senate.

“I’m at Charles De Gaulle airport,” Dr. Abu-Sittah, rector of Glasgow University, tweeted Saturday morning, according to the Agence France Presse as reported in Le Figaro. “They’re preventing me from entering France. I’m supposed to speak before the French Senate today. They’re telling me that the Germans have banned my entry in Europe for a year.” A police source confirmed to the AFP that Germany had placed an “interdiction [to circulate in] the Schengen zone” order on Dr. Abu Sittah which effectively prevents him from entering any of the European countries covered by the Schengen convention, meant to regulate immigration and protect member states from terrorists.

In April, police in Berlin raided and forcibly shut down a three-day Palestine Congress whose co-organizers included Jewish Voice for Peace an hour after it had begun and banned from entering the country scheduled speakers including Dr. Abu-Sittah and the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, citing concerns about “anti-Semitism”; governments in Germany, the United States, and other countries have informally adopted, as the New Yorker’s Masha Gesen has revealed, new standards for defining what constitutes anti-Semitism which include criticism of Israel. “This is not about protecting Jewish lives and Jews from anti-Semitism,” Varoufakis told Democracy Now April 16 after he was banned from entering Germany, also contending that among those arrested were a young Jewish Voice for Peace activist with a handmade sign reading “Jews against genocide.” “It’s all about protecting the right of Israel to commit any war crime of its choice.”

As for Dr. Abu-Sittah, he recounted to DN in the same broadcast that “upon arrival” in Berlin to participate in the congress in April, he was stopped at the passport office. “I was then escorted down to the basement of the airport, where I was questioned for around three-and-a-half hours. At the end of three-and-a-half hours, I was told that I will not be allowed to enter German soil…, and that this ban will last the whole of April. And not just that, that if I were to try to link up my Zoom or FaceTime with the conference, even if I was outside Germany, or I were to send a video of my lecture to the conference in Berlin, then that would constitute a breach of German law and that I would endanger myself to having a fine or even up to a year of prison.” Varoufakis said he was also warned by German authorities about participating by remote video-stream in the congress.

Following Dr. Abu-Sittah’s tweet that he was being prevented from entering France, where the Ecologist (formerly Green) party senatrice Raymonde Poncet had invited him to participate in a colloquium she’d organized at the Senate’s chambers in the Luxembourg Gardens, the president of the party’s Senate group tweeted, «Scandalous, Ghassan Abu-Sittah, plastic and reconstructive surgeon, has been prevented from participating in a Colloquium at the Senate. We are in discussions with the office of (interior minister) Gerald Darmanin and that of (foreign minister) Stéphane Séjourné,” the senator estimating nevertheless that Dr. Abu-Sittah would probably be sent back to Grand Britain, for which he already had an airline ticket for Saturday night.

His testimony before the French Senate having effectively been vetoed by the German government, the Dance Insider would like to share some of what Dr. Abu-Sittah might have said.

In an April 1 interview with Democracy Now after he returned from Gaza (and before Germany raided and pre-empted the Berlin event and banned him from German and effectively, it now appears, European soil), where he spent 43 days working at al-Shifa as a volunteer for the French NGO Doctors without Borders, Dr. Abu-Sittah said that half of the eight to 12 daily surgeries he conducted at al-Shifa involved operating on children, and that “the sheer ferocity of the bombing, the fact that the Israelis were targeting people’s homes, meant that a lot of these children, either their limbs were blown off at the explosion or were crushed beyond repair as a result of the debris and the collapsing buildings that they were taken from underneath,” and that “as the war progressed, as the health system became so overwhelmed, previously reconstructable limbs became unreconstructable and required amputation to save the patients’ lives from gangrene and infection.” As of April 1 (the time of the DN interview), Dr. Abu-Sittah estimated, between 4,000 and 5,000 of the Gazan children injured by Israeli bombing were “left with disabilities that will change the course of their lives” in what he decried as “a war Israel (has) declared on Palestinian children…. Israel wants to wipe out Palestinian children, because Palestinian children represent the Palestinian tomorrow that is incompatible with the Zionist settler-colonial project.”

Of the 35,000 Gazans Israel has killed (not counting the 7,500 still buried under the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israel) — the majority civilians according to Amnesty International, the United Nations, and the defense secretary of the United States — since Hamas massacred 1,400 people October 7, also mostly civilians, at least 14,500 are children.

As for those children the Israeli bombing has maimed, Dr. Abu-Sittah told DN, “We know from the medical literature that each child with a lower limb prosthetic will need a new prosthetic every six months, because their body outgrows the length of the prosthesis, and will need between eight and 12 surgeries by the time they’re of adult age, because the bone grows faster than the soft tissues, or the nerves attach themselves to the skin and they can’t wear the prosthesis. And so, this is a lifelong trajectory of surgery and of disability and of mental health scarring as a result of the deformity. Take into account, in addition to that, that a lot of these children are orphaned. You know, there are 17,000 children in Gaza who have lost their parents, and many of these are wounded children. And so, to go through all of this with no family to look after you is just — the legacy will be the legacy of this war.”

Following Israel’s deadly siege of al-Shifa hospital — Gaza’s largest — last month, Palestinian civil authorities discovered hundreds of bodies buried in mass graves. One of those slain by Israel in an earlier attack on the hospital was Dr. Ahmad Maqadmeh, a “young, brilliant plastic surgeon” to whom Dr. Abu-Sittah paid tribute on Democracy Now on April 1.

“His body, alongside that of his mother, was found today when the Israeli troops withdrew, and they had been executed by the Israeli army while trying to escape Shifa. Dr. Ahmad was a brilliant and dedicated young surgeon who had won the humanitarian fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of England. And it’s critical that we remember their names and we remember their stories. And today I want to send my love to his wife and to his children, both under the age of 5, who are now left without a husband and a father. Along with so many of my colleagues who we’ve lost, this is the second plastic surgeon who I had worked with at Shifa who has been killed by the Israelis, and over 345 doctors and nurses and paramedics who have been killed by the Israelis….”

During their April 1 interview, DN host Amy Goodman quoted an interview with Dr. Abu-Sittah in the New Yorker in which Eliza Griswold writes of his operations on children maimed by Israeli bombs, ““To mark the gravity of these procedures, and to mourn, Abu-Sittah and other medical staff placed the severed limbs of children in small cardboard boxes. They labeled the boxes with masking tape, on which they wrote a name and body part, and buried them.” Dr. Abu-Sittah elaborated to DN:

“There was one night when I was in Ahli Hospital when the Israelis had targeted a mosque which had been used by the internally displaced, where, by five that morning, I had performed amputations on six children. And such is the aim, to dehumanize these children, the aim of the settler-colonialist genocidal war, to dehumanize these children, that my colleagues and I wanted to maintain their dignity and wanted to not just bear witness but to hold on to anything that makes us and them human in the face of this dehumanizing war machine. And so we insisted that whenever there was a limb that was amputated, that it gets the right burial and that this child’s name is on that amputated limb and that we maintain the dignity of our patient to the extent that we can.”

You can read, listen to, and watch more of Dr. Abu-Sittah’s interview with Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman, in which the doctor describes his eye-witness view of what he qualifies as Israel’s “genocidal machine,” here.

What I’d like to address now is the harrowing potential implications of the German government now not only cracking down on free speech critical of Israel’s war on Gaza in Germany (including by Jews), under the guise of any criticism of Israel being anti-Semitic (by all evidence, purely because the state implicated is putatively Jewish), even when backed-up by evidence and international court, UN, and NGO findings, but apparently also being able to prevent even eye-witness testimony from being heard in any European country in the Schengen zone, even when the witness is a doctor working with a European charity and even when he has been invited to testify by a European governmental body, by using a convention, the Schengen zone, which was set up to control immigration and protect European countries from the real physical threats posed by terrorists, not to protect them from by clamping down on free speech and thus stop legislative bodies from hearing evidence of potential war crimes, in this case preventing an expert witness from telling the French Senate what he saw while working as a doctor as a volunteer with a French association, Doctors without Borders, in a Gaza hospital later destroyed by Israel and where the French government itself has called for an investigation after 300 bodies were found buried in mass graves; a convention meant to protect European citizens from bodily harm, and not from hearing testimony that might make them uncomfortable, challenging them to disrupt the consent largely being manufactured by the mainstream media (although recent coverage is more balanced, at least in this domaine; no one here in France, even in the mainstream media, is any longer trying to blame the death and destruction Israel has reigned down on hospitals in Gaza on Hamas’s allegedly using civilians as human shields or having tunnels under the hospitals) — and activate them to engage their governments to do more to stop the war crimes and to stop what the International Court of Justice, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and others have agreed is at the least “plausibly” a genocide in progress.

I’m not going to mince words. As a Jew — thus, one of those on whose behalf and for whose ostensible protection Germany is putatively blocking an expert witness to what the IJC has described as a “plausible” genocide and other war crimes from entering not just its soil but that of any E.U. country governed by the Schengen convention and testifying to what he’s seen, perhaps (I can’t see any other reason) doing so because that genocide is being perpetrated by a purportedly Jewish state (purportedly because Israel’s complete and devastating devaluation of Palestinian lives does not represent Jewish values) and Germany (I guess) still feels (I don’t) it has to make up for the genocide it perpetrated on Jews yesterday by protecting a “Jewish” state committing genocide today — as a Jew I have the right (which doesn’t mean others don’t) to not mince words when it comes to giving my opinion on an action, in this case constriction of freedom of speech and especially where that speech bears witness to an ongoing genocide and the maiming for life of children, being conducted in my name, supposedly to protect me but in reality protecting no one but a rogue state in the process of committing a genocide, protecting it by blocking this witnessing from being heard in the country where I live and which I love. And where it goes to censoring eye-witness testimony of war crimes — including against children — and doing so not just in their own country, Germany, but even in the country where I live and which I love — as a Jew I have the moral obligation to speak out. (Not that there’s anything particularly courageous in doing so; I’m not one of the 140 journalists, the majority of them Palestinian, who have been killed by Israel documenting its war on Gaza on the ground, I’m just a commentator on the side-lines. And if in Germany even Jews denouncing genocide are sometimes muzzled — such as the 87-year-old American survivor of German concentration camps and the Allied bombing of Dresden whose speaking tour of German schools was “postponed” after she denounced the genocide being perpetrated by Israel, or the young male Jewish Voice for Peace member referred to above by Varoufakis who he claims was “apprehended, arrested, manhandled” outside the raided Palestine Congress for carrying a handmade placard reading “Jews against genocide” — in France, by contrast, the courts (if not all politicians and hardly all journalists) have been air-tight in drawing the distinction between anti-Semitic speech and free speech (including free speech critical of Israel), which is sacred in a country where journalists, cartoonists, psychologists, policemen and women, and teachers have been killed by fundamentalist terrorists for defending and practicing it, the courts even recently dismissing allegations of inciting anti-Semitic hate against a radio humorist after he made remarks which, in my view, actually are anti-Semitic, describing Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu on two occasions as a “sort of Nazi without a foreskin.”)

What we have here, then (here’s where I don’t mince words), is the country whose ancestors gave us the worse genocide of the 20th century trying to stop witnesses to the worse genocide of the 21st century from testifying — and not just in Germany — even when government bodies have invited them to do so, as was the case in France last week-end with Dr. Abu-Sittah, apparently (I can’t see any other reason for such drastic action) because the ancestors of today’s perpetrators were yesterday’s victims, because, perhaps out of some kind of twisted, ill-placed (I as a Jew am over it and don’t blame today’s Germans for what some of their ancestors did to some of mine eighty years ago) residual guilt complex, Germany (or its government anyway) seems to think it has to make up for its ancestors killing Six Million Jews eighty years ago by letting a supposedly Jewish state do to another Semitic people what the Germans did to them, or their ancestors, in the last century. (The pretense — or well-intentioned motivation, if you prefer — of such a draconian and geographically over-reaching free-speech crackdown being that any criticism of Israel, including for war crimes and plausible genocide amply documented by various governmental bodies, including the United Nations and various NGO’s, among them Amnesty International, is anti-Semitic.)

Germany (or at least its present government), which we thought — which swore to us — had learned from its ancestors’ criminal mistake (or rather deed; it was not a mistake, it was intentional) lethal to Six Million human beings, has in fact learned nothing.

If it had learned its lesson, it would recognize that the malady, the sickness, the pathology which was at the root of the crime its ancestors committed against the Jews in the last century is now at the root of the crime a supposedly Jewish state is perpetrating against another Semitic people in this one, today, right now: The dehumanization — the racist dehumanization — of the victim by the perpetrator (enabled by the rest of us, because after all they’re only Arabs, “used to living in filth,” as the acclaimed Palestinian-American writer Susan Abulhawa ironically put it on Democracy Now after returning from Gaza, just as they were only smelly, usurious Jews before) to justify the killing, the forced starvation, the maiming for life of children, the assassinations of journalists and medical workers and teachers and poets, the destruction of universities and schools, the attacks on mosques, churches, homes, refugee camps, refugee refuges, hospitals, of those seeking nourishment desperately needed thanks to Israel’s blockages at food distribution points, of six-year-old girls fleeing with their families, of ambulance drivers sent to rescue the six-year-old girls with Israel’s approval, of other families killed while driving on routes or sheltering in places Israel has told them are safe. Of the “collateral damage” victims. I mean, my God, Israel has created, as the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham has revealed (in the Israeli magazines 972 and Local Call), one artificial intelligence program, “Lavender,” which enables it to augment the “collateral damage” allowance it accords itself to as many as 300 civilians for one individual target deemed legitimate by Israel (even there there is what Israel acknowledges is a 10 percent error rate), and another, “Where’s Daddy?,” which enables it to locate its “targets” in their homes, killing their families along with them. Because this is the other horror of what Germany did to Jews and that a self-proclaimed Jewish state, enabled by the German government in its muzzling of critics of and witnesses to the ongoing genocide, is now reproducing on Palestinians (and another comparison we’re not allowed to draw, according to the new unofficially expanded standards of what constitutes anti-Semitism): Wedding feudal barbarism and racist hate to modern technology to yield the maximum results, enabling the persecuting state to increase its genocidal killing exponentially, in plain English, to kill as many people as possible, including civilians, women, entire familes and generations of familles, and children. We are not allowed to make this historical comparison — to say that Jews are doing to Gazans now what Germans did to Jews then, but my God, what does the writing, study, consideration, contemplation, teaching, understanding, and regard of history exist for if not to keep us from repeating our mistakes or, in this case, from repeating the moral abdication of preceding generations because “we didn’t know,” in once again enabling the atrocities of new states when thanks to witnesses like Dr. Abu-Sittah, we cannot make this claim today? To paraphrase the dying words of Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old marine who burned himself to death in front of the Israeli embassy last February: What would you do if you were alive then and knew? You’re doing it now.

Because at the root of that crime, of the Holocaust committed by Germany against my people (and against the world by the way the barbaric crime, and the usage of modern technology to commit it on a mass scale, debased all civilization) was exactly the same mindset (or lack of soul-set) that is at the root of this one: The dehumanization, fueled by racism, of one people by another, with the end of justifying and enabling the first’s annihilation by the second, yesterday the Jews by the Germans, today the Palestinians by a state that calls itself Jewish.

Germany did everything it could to hide its crime of 80 years ago while it was perpetrating it, not just from its own citizens not serving in the military but from the world.

Now it is doing everything in its power to hide this one, not just from its own citizens but from all the 550 million citizens of Europe.

But we will not let the witnesses be silenced.

(Updated and expanded, May 5 19h00 French time) “We’re not leaving, you don’t scare us”: UCLA Gaza solidarity encampment and journalists attacked by pro-Israel anti-protesters; French high school student union announces nationwide blockages to demand Gaza ceasefire and Palestinian Statehood; Facebook bans Dance Insider for talking about student solidarity

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak

(Updated: Additional new material below bolded in paragraph that starts “While the student protests….” In other mainstream media intoxication developments, French public radio today claimed that a new poll, commissioned and directed by the American Jewish Committee — and for which the only commentator interviewed by French public radio was the AJC’s Paris director — supposedly reveals that 85 percent of French Jews fear being victims of anti-Semitic aggressions. What the newscasters on France Culture and France Inter left out was that the AJC’s primary mission is to encourage Jews to make ‘aliya’ — or migrate — to Israel. In other words, it is an interested party, both in the formulating of the poll questions and the spinning of their results. Also omitted was exactly how the AJC found its poll subjects, as identifying people by race or religion is prohibited in France, not to mention the size of the sampling pool and the margin of error. Reporting on Israel’s closing of al Jazeera’s offices in Israel — in which its theft of al Jazeera material was described as ‘seizure’ — France Inter’s afternoon news anchor also, and erroneously, described the news network, many of whose correspondents in Gaza have been killed by Israel documenting the war, as “pro-Palestinian.”)

As Facebook, once again exposing the risks to fundamental liberties posed by confiding a public utility to a private enterprise, cracked down on free speech Thursday by banning the Dance Insider after the DI published a letter from students at the Freedom Theater of the Jenin refugee camp to students around the world demonstrating for a cease-fire, divestment from Israel and/or severing ties with Israeli universities, and recognition of the state of Palestine, thanking them for their solidarity — the theater and the camp have both been subject to Israeli crackdowns in recent months, with the former’s artistic director being beaten and jailed by Israel, its offices in the Israeli-occupied West Bank ransacked — France’s largest high school student union announced a nationwide high school blockage for Monday and Tuesday , saying it was inspired by the growing number of student protests and encampments in the United States. (One of the latest of which, Democracy Now reported Thursday, terminated with police in riot geer alllegedly using “tear gas, flashbang grenades, and rubber bullets in a face-off with UCLA protestors who chanted, ‘We are not leaving. You don’t scare us,'” just over a day after pro-Israel counterprotesters armed with sticks, metal rods and fireworks attacked the students as well as journalists at the encampment.)

“This is now seven months that we’ve been having conferences and discussions and nothing’s changed, with 35,000 people being killed in Gaza,” a spokesman for the Union of Lycéens explained on French public radio this morning, noting that the students are calling for a cease-fire and recognition of a Palestinian state.

In the past two weeks, encampments have been set up or buildings temporarily occupied by students at the Sorbonne, the prestigious University of Political Science in Paris, Poly-Sci Lyon, and at campuses in Grenoble, Rennes, St.-Etienne, Dijon, Strasbourg, Poitiers, and Lille, where the university cancelled a scheduled conference on Palestine co-organized by France’s second largest political party, Les Insoumis (the Unsubmissive), citing concerns over a conference poster which university officials said seemed to advocate the disappearance of Israel by painting the entire territory green, and the government unsuccessfully tried to stop the party from holding the conference elsewhere in Lille, citing the risk of “troubling public order,” but was over-ruled by the courts.

(Also last week, police convoqued Insoumis parliamentary leader Mathilde Panot as well as Franco-Palestinian international lawyer Rima Hassan, an Insoumis candidate for next month’s European parliament elections, for questions French media reported were related to the penal offense of “apology for terrorism,” based on statements they are alleged to have made after Hamas’s brutal October 7 massacre of 1400 Israelis and other nationals, mostly civilians, a charge which Henri Leclerc, honorary president of the French League of Human Rights, called “ridiculous.” Speaking on France Inter public radio Friday, Leclerc warned that the charge of “‘apology for terrorism’ cannot [be used to] attack… liberty of expression. The European Court has an extremely clear position since 1972: Liberty of expression is not only made for ideas and information which are inoffensive, but also for ideas and information which might rattle, shock, and disturb a segment of the population.” Meanwhile, the French minister of justice responded to protests of the convocations by the Insoumis’s coordinator during a Parliamentary session by telling him, “Your friends are the Mullahs.”)

Six students at Science Po Paris also launched a hunger strike Friday after the school’s acting administrator refused student requests to examine the school’s ties with four Israeli universities, before announcing that the school would be closed through May 12, in response to the recent occupation.

Nous ne sommes pas dupes / We will not be intoxicated: A handcrafted poster from the student and worker rebellion that rocked Paris and the suburb of Nanterre in May 1968. Inspired by their comrades in the United States and outrage over 35,000 deaths in Gaza, French college and high school students have not bought into the mainstream media hype that criticising Israel equals anti-Semitism, in either France or the United States, and have launched their own encampments to demand a cease-fire, recognition of Palestinian Statehood, and that their schools examine their relationships with Israeli universities. A recent “debate” about the student protests on French public radio chain France Inter featured no students, a French “expert” who accused the French student activists of being ‘a-historic’ for accusing Israel of genocide (and who neglected to mention the January ruling by the International Court of Justice that this is exactly what Israel is “plausibly” committing, or the U.N. Human Rights Council report “Anatomy of a Genocide”), and the New York Times Paris bureau chief Roger Cohen, who took one look at the Columbia protests on a recent visit to New York and decided that they were pro-Hamas. Elsewhere on the public radio chain France Culture, hosts have variously declared that “there are no journalists in Gaza,” effecively negating the genocide by negating the existence of the 140 jouranlists who have died covering it, most of them targeted by Israel, and that charges of genocide are ‘absurd’ because Israel supposedly passes out flyers before it drops its bombs on homes, and supposed guest experts on the American Jewish community have derided the brave students of Jewish Voice for Peace who have been central to the protests at Columbia and elsewhere as nostalgic “Maoists.” Dance Insider Archvies image courtesy Artcurial.

While the student protests in Paris have been compared to the student and worker uprising that racked Paris and the suburb of Nanterre in May 1968, as have those at Columbia evoked the 1968 student rebellion there against university implication in Vietnam and racist real estate acquisition practices in nearby Harlem, the current and increasingly global student contestation, largely supported by faculty, has a specific local pertinence to what many are calling the “scholasticide” Israel is perpetrating in Gaza. Government and right-wing media commentators on French public radio (always presented as objective scholars, even when they are Israeli as is often the case, inevitably and falsely describing the American student protestors as pro-Hamas, tutored by Black Panther veterans on how to vandalise their schools, and being exclusively Muslim and Black, not including any Jewish kids — all false contentions; one of France Culture animator Marc Weizmann’s guests this afternoon, calling in from Tel Aviv, the other of three total being Israeli, couldn’t even get the history of the Columbia student rebellion of 1968 right) — which rarely offers countering perspectives, including that of the students in question — pontificate that no one has the right to block others from going to class. And yet they rarely mention that the fact that Israel has pulverized every single university (as well as 70 percent of the schools) in Gaza means that these French and American students’ comrades in Gaza have been deprived of that right, deliberately, by Israel as part of its deliberate scholasticide — making any French student blockage (if that’s what they’re doing) a directly pertinent statement. Among the more than 35,000 people Israel has killed (not counting the 7,000 still buried under the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israel), the majority civilians, since October 7 are at least 14,500 children and scores of teachers as well as poets and an estimated 140 journalists, in all of these groups often killed by Israel in their homes and with their families. (The intrepid Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, writing in the magazines 972 and Local Call, revealed last month that Israel is employing an artificial intelligence program, “Where’s Daddy?”, which enables it to localize its targets in their homes, and another, “Lavender,” through which it has augmented its own “collateral damage” allowance to as many as 300 civilians for one target declared legitimate by Israel.) On April 18, Israeli police in Jerusalem arrested, detained, and later strip-searched the respected feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, a dual Israeli-American citizen in her 60s and a professor at Hebrew University, on suspicion of incitation to hate, charges earlier disproved when the university rescinded its suspension of Professor Shalhoub-Kevorkian. And on April 26, an Israeli airstrike on Gaza City killed the eldest daughter and infant grandson of the prominent Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer, who himself was killed in an Israeli airstrike in December, Democracy Now reported. Shaima Refaat Alareer, her husband, and her two-month-old son were killed while sheltering in the building of the international relief charity Global Communities.

What’s trying to be silenced here — whether by Israel, Facebook, or the various university presidents across the United States who are trying to quell the movement of these brave young people standing up for Gaza and, more important, humanity and human rights and thus saving the honor of the rest of us, the grown-ups — is the word. The word that says no to state terrorism and repression (I’m talking here about Israel, and no one else), the word that says yes to freedom and liberation, the words that say no to the deep-seeded racism that is at the very heart of both this genocide and our enabling of it, the word that says Zionism = Racism not because of ideology but because the proof is in the pudding, the word that says no, criticizing Israel or being anti-Zionist is not being anti-Semite, it is being anti-Racism and, now, anti-genocide and pro-Life, the words of those Palestinian teachers silenced by Israeli bombs and the culture they would have continued transmitting to their students, the words of witness that those courageous 140 journalists in Gaza died trying to get out even as the armchair journalists of France Culture public radio were declaring they did not exist (“There are no journalists in Gaza”), the words of those too often deprived of voice to whom the Dance Insider (humbly among and humbled by the work of many others, notably Democracy Now and numerous Palestinian, Jewish, Israeli, and other scholars and journalists) has tried to give voice for 26 years. (And yes, those brutal Hamas mass murderers were also killing words, including words of peace, when they massacred those 1400 men, women, children, babies, elderly, handicapped, and activists who were on the side they claim to be on but which their crime has only dishonored and shamed, as their monstrous act and monstrous kidnapping has desecrated their alleged cause; many of those they assassinated and kidnapped were life-long advocates of peace and defenders of Palestinian rights and dignity, and we should have no illusions that a Palestinian state ruled by Hamas would be a Valhalla of free speech.) And the poets, their words aborted by state terrorism. But not destroyed, because bombs can’t destroy a conscience. Words and the consciences they represent such as those in these anticipatory stanzas which Refaat Alareer penned shortly before he was silenced by Israeli bombs, a state which claims to represent the people of the Word cutting down an artist of words:

If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze—
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself—
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up
above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale.

According to a guest introduced as an expert on the Jewish diaspora interviewed on the France Culture public radio program “Culture Monde” for a segment on supposed Jewish-American sentiment towards the war in Gaza (the other “expert” was an Israeli historian of Zionism), the courageous young men and women of Jewish Voice for Peace — banned early on by Columbia University’s president — taking part in Gaza solidarity encampments at Columbia and elsewhere are not motivated by their consciences but by Maoist nostalgia. Au contraire! It is the French college and high school students who have now launched their own encampments and other political actions to demand a cease-fire who say they are motivated by their consciences… and inspired by their American comrades. Photo: Juliet Berto, Jean-Pierre Leaud, and Anne Wiazemsky in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1967 “La Chinoise.” Courtesy la Cinematheque française.

Facebook tries to silence Dance Insider for sharing this Letter to the World (updated, with English translation following original French version) from the students of the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin Refugee Camp to students around the world protesting Israeli war on Gaza

Update, May 3: Immediately after we shared the following Letter yesterday on Facebook — today followed by an English translation — the private company suppressed the Dance Insider’s Facebook account, after more than 10 years. Facebook’s banning of the Dance Insider for sharing a simple letter of thanks from the students of the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp to the growing numbers of students on campuses around the world protesting Israel’s war on Gaza and calling for their universities to divest from businesses implicated in the war and break ties with Israeli universities came a day after the U.S. Congress passed a bill widening the federal definition of anti-Semitism, prompting Jerry Nadler, the most senior Jewish member of Congress, to warn, as Democracy Now reported, “This bill threatens to chill constitutionally protected speech. Speech that is critical of Israel alone does not constitute discrimination. The bill sweeps too broadly.” In Paris, meanwhile, six students at the prestigous Political Science University responded to the school administrator’s refusal to even discuss the possibility of severing ties to four Israeli universities by going on a hunger strike. —  Paul Ben-Itzak

(First posted on the web site of the Jewish Union for Peace in Paris and, like the image above, on the website of the Friends of the Freedom Theatre of Jenin in the Palestinian territories illegally Occupied by Israel since 1967. To translate into English, click the Google translation button at the right. To listen to a Democracy Now interview with Freedom Theater artistic director Ahmed Tobasi, including on how the theater was raided and he jailed and beaten by the Israeli military after they raided the theater, click here. )

Les étudiants DU THÉÂTRE DE LA LIBERTÉ,
aux étudiants DES ÎLOTS DE LIBÉRATION

AUX ÉTUDIANTS DE LA RÉSILIENCE ET DU COURAGE

Au cœur de l’adversité, là où les ténèbres de l’injustice s’étendent, vos voix s’élèvent comme des signaux d’espoir, perçant l’obscurité avec une détermination inébranlable.

À chaque pas, à chaque mot prononcé, vous incarnez l’esprit de solidarité et de défi.

Vous êtes les architectes du changement, les défenseurs de la vérité et les gardiens de la liberté dans votre pays.

Des couloirs des universités aux rues emplies de chants, vos actions font écho à la résilience d’un peuple qui aspire à la justice et à la libération.

Votre solidarité ne connaît pas de limites, elle traverse les frontières et surmonte les clivages, unissant les cœurs dans une lutte commune pour la dignité et l’égalité.

En tant qu’étudiants palestiniens, se formant au rythme des défis du Théâtre de la Liberté dans le camp de réfugiés de Jénine, nous sommes émus par votre soutien inébranlable à notre cause.

Votre solidarité transcende les distances, donne vie à nos espoirs et à nos rêves d’un avenir meilleur.

Ensemble, nous nous dressons contre l’oppression, l’injustice et les forces qui cherchent à nous faire taire.

Avec chaque manifestation, chaque acte de solidarité, nous affirmons notre humanité partagée et notre engagement à construire un monde où la justice prévaut.

Merci, chers étudiants, pour votre détermination, votre générosité et votre soutien indéfectible.

Ensemble, nous avançons, sans nous décourager, vers un avenir où régneront la liberté et la paix.

Avec gratitude et en solidarité,

LES ÉLÈVES DU THÉÂTRE DE LA LIBERTÉ
CAMP DE RÉFUGIÉS DE JÉNINE, PALESTINE

English version (translated by Paul Ben-Itzak):

From the students of the Freedom Theater
To the students in the Iles of Liberation

To the Students of Resilience and Courage

In the heart of adversity, there where the shadows of injustice are spreading, you lift your voices like signals of hope, piercing the obscurity with an unshakeable determination.

With each step, with each word pronounced, you embody the spirit of solidarity and defiance.

You are the architects of change, the defenders of truth and the guardians of liberty in your countries.

From the hallways of the universities to the streets filled with chants, your actions echo the resilience of a people who aspire to justice and liberation.

Your solidarity knows no limits, it crosses frontiers and rises above the cleavages, uniting hearts in a common fight for dignity and equality.

As Palestinian students, training ourselves to the rhythm of the challenges of the Freedom Theater in the Jenin refugee camp, we are moved by your unshakeable support for our noble cause.

Your solidarity transcends distances, gives life to our hopes and our dreams of a better future.

Together, we stand up against oppression, injustice, and the forces which search to silence us.

With every demonstration, with every act of solidarity, we affirm our shared humanity and our commitment to building a world where justice triumphs.

Merci, dear students, for your determination, your generosity, and your unwavering support.

Together, we’ll move forward, without being discouraged, towards a future where freedom and peace reign.

With gratitude and in solidarity,

The students of the Freedom Theater of the Refugee camp of Jenin, Palestine

White-out conditions: UN agency refuses request to share war photos by Gaza photo-journalists (revised and updated with news of Paris student victory & more)

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak

“…. bombardments which have caused 29,000 deaths in Gaza according to the minister of health of Hamas who, in the absence of journalists on the ground, is the only source we can cite.”

— “Culture Monde,” France Culture public radio, February 27, 2024

“Every single time I walk one step in Gaza, I always imagine myself being blown up by an unmanned drone or by an F-16 missile or by a quadracopter or by whatever weapon that is used by Israel. Every time I’m walking and every single home I pass by, I feel that this home might be targeted, and I might be ending up dying and killed under the rubble of that house….”

— Akram al-Satarri, Gaza-based journalist, reporting live from Rafa on Democracy Now, February 15, 2024. (For Akram al-Satarri’s latest report on DN, click here.)

“There are no journalists in Gaza.”

— “Culture Monde,” France Culture, February 23, 2024

“It was really important to elevate the stories coming from Palestinian photo-journalists, who are the only window into what is going on in Gaza…. It’s one thing to say there’s a war and it’s horrible, and it’s another thing to see an image of a child being pulled out from the rubble. It really hits you differently. It was really important to elevate the stories coming from Palestinian photo-journalists, who are the only window into what is going on in Gaza.”

— Charlotte Cans, head of photography at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which recently culled work from 14 Palestinian photo-journalists in Gaza, each of whom was asked to share one image “capturing the devastation of the Gaza Strip over the past six months” for the Gaza Collective Photo Essay project, speaking on Democracy Now, April 19, 2024

“Unfortunately, we’ll have to decline on this one. Arrangements for publication in various countries have already been made, and we have to respect those.”

— Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, responding to the Dance Insider’s request to furnish photos and text from the Gaza Collective Photo Essay project to share with its international audience in 165 countries.

“Since October 7, we have documented a plethora of violations committed, first by Hamas and then by the Israeli authorities. But in particular, the Israeli authorities have been — … have committed an extraordinary amount of violations of international law, the indiscriminate and targeted bombing of civilians. We know now that there are at least 30,000 of them that have been killed. 70 percent of the infrastructure of Gaza has been destroyed. I’m talking civilian infrastructure — schools, hospitals, cemeteries, cultural institutions. We know that there has been the highest number of journalists killed in any conflict, the highest number of humanitarian workers killed in any conflict. We know that famine is being used as a weapon of war. We know that collective punishment has been waged against the Palestinian people. And we also know of… clear evidence of extrajudicial killings, as highlighted by the discovery of those mass graves, that are coming on top of all the detentions and use of torture and ill-treatment. So, the scale of the violations committed over the last six months is unprecedented. And I want to insist on that. It is unprecedented. The harm to civilians is unprecedented.”

— Agnès Callamard, Secretary General, Amnesty International, April 25, interviewed by Democracy Now, April 25

A genocide is being committed in front of the eyes of the entire world. Last time we claimed we did not know. This time we cannot make that excuse.

Governments or politicians in at least three countries (ironically including Germany, which brought us the last century’s worse genocide) and university presidents across the United States are trying to suppress legitimate, peaceful, and burgeoning contestation of that genocide, in the case of the universities including by sending in police and suspending students, often by mischaracterizing as “anti-Semitic” any criticism of Israel (including by Jews) and the defending of the worth of the lives of the 34,000 Palestinians, the majority civilians including at least 14,000 children, which have been taken by Israel (including some under an artificial intelligence abetted tuerie, as the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham has revealed, in which Israel has expanded its own collateral damage allowance to as many as 300 civilians for one targeted Hamas commander*) over the past six months in retaliation for Hamas’s October 7 massacre of 1400 people and the right to food and medicine of the two million still living which Israel by its blockades continues to subject to famine, disease, and amputation, illegally using starvation as a weapon of war. In Berlin earlier this month, police raided and shut down a conference on Palestine and banned a former Greek finance minister participating in the conference from Germany. In France, the University of Lille cancelled a conference on Palestine co-organized by the country’s second largest political party (reportedly because of an objectionable poster for the event which called to free Palestine and painted the entire territory of Israel and Palestine green, admittedly an objectionable message because it can be interpreted as calling not only to free occupied Palestine but for the obliteration of Israel); when the Insoumis (Unsubmissive) party found another location for the conference, the government (via the local prefecture, which reports to the Interior ministry) then tried to ban the event from taking place anywhere in the northern city on the basis of its potentially “troubling public order,” only to be over-ruled by the courts. At least one animator on French public radio, meanwhile, has maligned an Insoumis candidate for the upcoming European parliamentary elections, Rima Hassan, as being “controversial,” by all appearances (because they rarely cite specific evidence) for the sole reason that she is Franco-Palestinian. When Hassan tried to bring up the genocide that Israel is “plausibly” committing in Gaza according to the International Court of Justice, an interviewer on the public radio chain France Inter cut her off by declaring (inaccurately given the ICJ ruling) “there is no consensus on that word.”

At Columbia University, where Jewish Voice for Peace (whose courageous young members given the potential suspension they face are driven, if you believe French public radio, not by their consciences but Maoist nostalgia or generalized “Wokeism”) has been banned, just days after kow-towing to radical Congressional representatives in a performance that conjured the ghosts of the Kefauver and House UnAmerican Activities Commissions of the late 1940s and 1950s, the university president sicced the New York Police Department on a peaceful student encampment in support of Gazans by invoking a “clear and present danger,” language straight out of the Red Scare (and a threat quickly debunked by an NYPD patrol chief who found the demonstrators peaceful and cooperative), this in a citadel of intellectual inquiry that should stand for the opposite of everything McCarthyism represented, and has been suspending students and kicking them out of campus housing, leaving them to fend for themselves in a city where it’s impossible to find housing.

At the University of Southern California, meanwhile, authorities cancelled a commencement speech by pro-Palestinian Valedictorian Asna Tabassum, citing the same concerns (safety; since when did these citadels for learning decide that healthy, rigorous debate is not safe? Not safe to the manufacturing of consent for genocide, perhaps.) as the French prefecture which tried to impeach the Lille conference. In Jerusalem, meanwhile, Israeli police arrested internationally renowned Palestinian-American feminist scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who had earlier been suspended by Hebrew University before being restored.

In France, with the exception of the latest discovery in Gaza of more than 300 bodies in a mass grave on the grounds of one of the many hospitals deliberately destroyed by Israel, public radio continues to ignore all but the occasional anecdotal story coming out of Gaza (with the exception of the increasingly rare reports from Radio France’s intrepid Ramallah correspondent Alice Froussard and the from Paris interviews by the chain’s former Jerusalem correspondent Etienne Monnet, both an oases of objectivity in the Radio France universe when it comes to covering Israel and Palestine), largely relying on the Israeli version of events, always attributing casualty figures to “Hamas” or “the Islamist movement of Hamas” or, at best, the “health ministry linked to Hamas,” rarely pointing out that the UN and other international authorities typically confirm these figures, lately modifying the occasional canard that the figures can’t be verified because “there are no journalists in Gaza” to “there are no Occidental journalists in Gaza,” effectively (if unintentionally) negating what the International Court of Justice has declared a “plausible” genocide by negating the messengers, here because they’re not European; if you’re not white (or in any event don’t come from the Occident), you’re not right. (In recent weeks, Radio France seems to have all but stopped reporting the casualty figures, which now stand at 34,000, not counting the 7,000 still buried under the rubble of homes and other buildings destroyed by Israel.) Never mind that as many as 130 journalists have lost their lives covering the war in Gaza, at least 79 of them deliberately targeted by Israel according to an investigation (already dated) by the Palestinian Journalists Association, often killed with their families in their homes when Israel bombs them. (For more on how the racial regard has figured into the consent that has been manufactured — my terms, not hers — for this genocide, with less mainstream alarm over lost Brown Palestinian lives than White Ukrainian lives, to the same form of state terror ((ditto; the latter observation is mine, not necessarily hers)), my colleague Susan Abulhawa’s March 6 comments on Democracy Now upon returning from a stay in Gaza are instructive. “The food that does come… into Rafa, is primarily canned food,” Abulhawa, an acclaimed Palestinian-American novelist and executive director of Playgrounds for Palestine, explained to Amy Goodman. “And most of it — I’ve seen it and tasted it myself — has clearly been sitting on shelves for decades. And all you can taste… is the rancidity, the metallic taste of the can…. People … plan their days around trying to get to a single bathroom that’s shared by hundreds of other families. They try to do their best with hygiene, but it’s impossible. And when … people succumb to living in filth… I think maybe people in the West… have this impulse thought that most Black and Brown people… live like this. So it’s a little humiliating to have to explain that we don’t actually live in filth. And it’s degrading, beyond anything you can imagine, to be forced to live like this months on end, to have no way to protect your children, no way to give them hope, no way to calm their fears.” Abulhawa’s comments implicating the bias of the racial regard when it comes to Black and Brown people might also apply to French public radio’s coverage of Israel’s attacks on people waiting for food in the context of Israel’s illegally using famine and starvation as a weapon of war by blocking most food shipments from entering Gaza; when they are covered at all, they are sometimes characterized as food riots gone bad or, at best, food riots followed by bloodbaths. White people wait for food; Black and brown people riot for it and trample each other to get it — the savages.)

In this context, then, one might think that when 14 Palestinian journalists risk their lives to attempt to capture these ongoing war crimes; when an agency of the United Nations organizes an exhibition of their work; when the director of the exhibition, interviewed in Paris (thus in a country where, like Germany, those who organize and speak out against this genocide — even and up to the leader of the country’s second largest party — risk to be repeatedly calumnied on the mainstream media as anti-Semites) vaunts the “importance” of “elevat(ing) the stories coming from Palestinian photo-journalists, who are the only window into what is going on in Gaza..,” you’d think that her organization would welcome a request by a 26-year-old France based international cultural-political journal like the Dance Insider, directed by a veteran Jewish-American journalist who previously wrote for the New York Times, Reuters, and others to furnish some of those images and texts so that they could be shared with the DI’s culturally and politically informed audience, a readership which stretches across 165 nations.

Instead, the Dance Insider’s request was refused, and we have an international, public, publicly funded organization, an agency of the United Nations, shutting the window to this eye-witness testimony of a crime.

Instead, you have this publicly funded United Nations agency refusing to share the photos and accompanying texts provided by the 14 Palestinian journalists who risked their lives to take those photos, thus effectively stifling those journalists by refusing to distribute those images and texts beyond a handful of unidentified media with whom it has “already made arrangements,” its spokesman responding to the DI’s request as follows: “Unfortunately, we’ll have to decline on this one. Arrangements for publication in various countries have already been made, and we have to respect those.” (Those publications presumably including Rolling Stone, whose presentation was preceded by a disclaimer that essentially demeaned the work of the journalists who had risked their lives to get it as biased and which surely sent Hunter S. Thompson spinning in his grave.)

In other words, in a mainstream media and campus climate where this story or this perspective is constantly being downplayed, dismissed, deformed, denigrated, censored, negated, or simply ignored — notably by the mainstream media, including where I live — we have a public, publicly funded institution playing the exclusivity game. I have been a cultural editor and journalist for more than 40 years, working with hundreds if not thousands of artistic, governmental, and social institutions, and this is the first time anyone has refused to send me photos for a public exhibition or essay; the first time anyone has played the exclusivity game (here, not just with art but with photos whose wider dissemination could save lives). This agency possesses eye-witness testimony of war crimes (at least that’s my deduction based on the events in question, given that they’re refusing to share the photos with us) collected by brave journalists who risked their lives to do so and whose very existence is being effectively negated (“there are no journalists in Gaza”) by the mainstream press in the country in which we would be publishing them, and they are playing the exclusivity game, in our case with a journal based in France, where this information is simply not getting out. (French public radio has not said a word about this important exhibit at least that I’ve heard; perhaps not surprising here as it contradicts its narrative that “there are no journalists in Gaza,” assumedly unnegating the genocide by unnegating the messenger.)

We at the Dance Insider have been trying to do our small part, in this context of White-out Mainstream Media Conditions, to get this information out. We won’t win any awards for this coverage. (If anything, as a Jew shouting “GENOCIDE” in a contemporary political landscape where pronouncing that word in connection with Israel lays one open to charges of anti-Semitism — as another Jewish journalist, the New Yorker’s Masha Gesen, has revealed — I personally expose myself, even if the risk is nothing compared to that being taken by those 14 journalists in Gaza, by the Susan Abulhawas and the many Palestinian, Palestinian-American, Palestinian-British, Palestinian-Canadian, and other journalists and doctors and other humanitarian workers who have travelled to Gaza to bear witness or try to salve the damage being inflicted by Israel largely with American bombs, or by those brave young women and men across campuses in the United States to whose ranks were added, last night, the students of the University of Political Science n Paris.)

We don’t to it because it’s pleasant for a Jew to accuse a so-called Jewish state of committing genocide. (En passant, amen to Naomi Klein’s admonition at this week’s Sidewalk Seder in Brooklyn near the home of Senator Charles Schumer, as reported on Democracy Now, that it’s time for Jews to stop worshipping the false idol of Zionism.) We do it because it is our role — our job — as journalists (as journalist-activists if you prefer) to avert the public, to sound the alarm, so that the universities will have the information needed to determine whether it is time divest from Israel, so that the politicians will disarm the Israeli killing machine, at a time when all but 19 of 100 senators voted last weekend to send Israel $14 billion more in arms (at least $9 billion of that illegally, as dissenting, and Jewish, senator Bernie Sanders pointed out, given that Israel is using American arms to prevent the distribution of American humanitarian aid).

And now this publicly funded, United Nations agency tells us, when we try to help them get out the information these 14 Palestinian journalists risked their lives to obtain, that they can’t provide the photos and texts provided by these brave journalists because “arrangements have been made.”

As a public, publicly funded agency — as an agency of the United Nations — they do not have that right. They do not have the right to refuse to share these images with all but a favored few. They do not have the right to hoard evidence as if it were bon-bons, to be parceled out to their chou-chous. They do not have the right to restrict distribution of potential evidence of war crimes (again, as they won’t provide them to us, I haven’t seen the actual photos and am going by their description on Democracy Now), thus throttling the voices of these eye-witnesses by playing personal favorites.

They — a public, publicly funded agency of the United Nations, whose mandate includes the protection of civilian populations in times of war — do not have the right to treat potential evidence of war crimes against a civilian population as private property to be doled out to personal favorites, particularly when that evidence is provided by journalists on the ground who risked their lives to get it, and particularly in France, where the mainstream media is effectively justifying its relentless favoring of the Israeli perspective on events (a predelection which began long before October 7)** with the false narrative that “there are no journalists in Gaza,” effectively negating the genocide by negating the messenger, even as 130 journalists in Gaza have sacrificed their lives trying to get the story out, with at least 79 of them deliberately targeted by Israel, which has also wiped out the families of at least one prominent al Jazeera journalist.

This United Nations agency has done Yeoman’s work by collecting the photographs and texts of some of those brave journalists. Now it needs to complete the job by sharing this eye-witness testimony of war crimes as broadly as possible. It does not have the right to hoard this evidence. This evidence — this temoignage — does not belong to them. It belongs to the world.

*For an article published in April in the Israeli magazines +972 and Local Call, Avraham writes, “… In order to assassinate Ayman Nofal, the commander of Hamas’s Central Gaza Brigade, a source said the army authorized the killing of approximately 300 civilians, destroying several buildings in airstrikes on Al-Bureij refugee camp on Oct. 17, based on an imprecise pinpointing of Nofal. Satellite footage and videos from the scene show the destruction of several large multi-storey apartment buildings.”

** French young people, at least, aren’t duped. Students at the University of Political Science in Paris (who apparently don’t listen to French public radio, where the theories of Gil Capel — who, thinking he knows better than the 15 international judges of the International Court of Justice, claims South Africa’s accusations that Israel is committing genocide are driven by rank anti-Colonialism — are given free reign) this morning ended their three-day occupation of a school facility, inspired, they say, by the movement on American, British, and Irish campuses (variously dismissed by at least two French public radio hosts as “pro-Hamas” and “Woke-ist”, although this appears to be shifting if Gallagher Fenwick’s commentary of this morning is any indication), after Sci-Po administrators agreed to meet in five days to consider student demands that the university come out with a clear position on Gaza and stop collaborating with Israeli univerisities (at a time when Israel has levelled all universities and a majority of schools in Gaza as well as killed prominent academics in what Palestinians accurately describe as a “scholasticide.”).

Anatomy of a Genocide

Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese*
(Advanced unedited version, pulled from United Nations web site)
March 25, 2024
(Original: English)

(Advanced unedited version of report scheduled to be presented to the Human Rights Council of the United Nations, 55th session, February 26 – April 5, 2024 under Agenda item 7: Human Rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories, and puilled from the UN website here: The numbers within the text refer to footnotes, here reproduced at the end of the report.)

(Dance Insider editorial comment and introduction: In pursuance of its 25-year-old mission to tell stories not told elsewhere and give a voice to the voiceless, the DI today publishes, in its entirety, the advanced unedited version of “Anatomy of a Genocide,” the report produced — and thoroughly sourced — by Francesca Albanese, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. On February 25, 2024, a month before this report was published, 25-year-old United States Air Force serviceman Aaron Bushnell proclaimed, before burning himself to death in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C.: “Many of us like to ask ourselves: ‘What would I do if I was alive during slavery? Or the Jim Crow South? Or apartheid? What would I do if my country was committing genocide?’ The answer is, You’re doing it. Right now.” You said you didn’t know. Now you know. What are you going to do about it? — Paul Ben-Itzak .)

(DI editor’s note: The following report was submitted before Monday’s Israeli airstrike killing six international workers with the charity Chef José Andrés’s World Central Kitchen and their Palestinian driver after they had left a warehouse in Deir al-Balah, where they had just unloaded 100 tons of food they had brought to the Gaza Strip from Cyprus to help avert an imminent famine. The aid workers were driving in a clearly marked convoy branded with the charity’s logo according to numerous reports, and had, according to World Central Kitchen, coordinated in advance regarding the convoy with the Israeli military. Quoted on Democracy Now, U.N. coordinator for the Occupied Palestinian Territory Jamie McGoldrick said, “This is not an isolated incident. As of [March 20], at least 196 humanitarians had been killed in the Occupied Palestinian Territory since October 2023. This is nearly three times the death toll recorded in any single conflict in a year.” )

Summary

After five months of military operations, 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 percent of residential areas have been destroyed. Eighty percent of the whole population has been forcibly displaced. Thousands of families have lost loved ones or have been wiped out. Many could not bury and mourn their relatives, forced instead to leave their bodies decomposing in homes, in the street or under the rubble. Thousands have been detained and systematically subjected to inhuman and degrading treatment. The incalculable collective trauma will be experienced for generations to come.

By analysing the patterns of violence and Israel’s policies in its onslaught on Gaza, this report concludes that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met. One of the key findings is that Israel’s executive and military leadership and soldiers have intentionally distorted jus in bello principles, subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.

Introduction

In this report, Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 (“oPt”), addresses the crime of genocide as perpetrated by the State of Israel (“Israel”) in the oPt, specifically in the Gaza Strip, since 7 October 2023. As Israel prohibits her visits, this report is based on data and analyses from organisations on the ground, international jurisprudence, investigative reports and consultations with affected individuals, authorities, civil society and experts.

2. The Special Rapporteur firmly condemns the crimes committed by Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups in Israel on 7 October and urges accountability and the release of hostages.1 This report does not examine those events, as they are beyond the geographic scope of her mandate.2 Nor does it examine the situation in the West Bank, including east Jerusalem.
3. Since it imposed the siege on Gaza in 2007, which tightened the closure imposed since 1993, Israel, the occupying power, has carried out five major assaults before the present one.
4. By Day 9, this assault had already caused more deaths (2,670)3 than Israel’s previous deadliest war against Gaza, in 2014 (2,251)4. Only a fraction of the mass killing, severe harm and ruthless, life-threatening conditions inflicted on Palestinians over the following five months of assault can be captured in this report.
5. UN independent experts,5 scholars,6 and states,7 including South Africa before the International Court of Justice (“ICJ”),8 have warned that acts committed in this latest onslaught may amount to genocide. The ICJ found a plausible risk of “irreparable prejudice” to the rights of Palestinians in Gaza, a protected group under the Genocide Convention,9 and ordered Israel, inter alia, to “take all measures within its power” to prevent genocidal acts, prevent and punish incitement to genocide, and ensure urgent humanitarian aid.10
6. In its defense, Israel has argued that its conduct complies with international humanitarian law (“IHL”).11 A key finding of this report is that Israel has strategically invoked the IHL framework as “humanitarian camouflage” to legitimize its genocidal violence in Gaza.
7. The context, facts and analysis presented in this report lead to the conclusion that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating Israel’s commission of genocide is met. More broadly, they also indicate that Israel’s actions have been driven by a genocidal logic integral to its settler-colonial project in Palestine, signalling a tragedy foretold.

II Contextualizing Genocide

A. Genocide as inherent to settler-colonialism

8. Genocide, as the denial of the right of a people to exist and the subsequent attempt or success in annihilating them, entails various modes of elimination.12 Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide”, observed that genocide is “a composite of different acts of persecution or destruction”,13 ranging from physical elimination to the “forced disintegration” of a people’s political and social institutions, culture, language, national sentiments and religion.14 Genocide is a process, not an act.15
9. Genocidal intent and practices are integral to the ideology and processes of settler-colonialism,16 as the experience of Native Americans in the U.S., First Nations in Australia or Herero in Namibia illustrates. As settler-colonialism aims to acquire Indigenous land and resources, the mere existence of Indigenous peoples poses an existential threat to the settler society.17 Destruction and replacement of Indigenous people become therefore ‘unavoidable’ and take place through different methods depending on the perceived threat to the settler group. These include removal (forcible transfer, ethnic cleansing), movement restrictions (segregation, largescale carceralization), mass killings (murder, disease, starvation), assimilation (cultural erasure, child removal) and birth prevention.18 Settler-colonialism is a dynamic, structural process and a confluence of acts aimed at displacing and eliminating Indigenous groups, of which genocidal extermination/annihilation represents the peak.19

B. Palestine and the context of genocide

10. Historical patterns of genocide demonstrate that persecution, discrimination and other preliminary stages prepare the ground for the annihilation stage of genocide.20 In Palestine, displacing and erasing the Indigenous Arab presence has been an inevitable part of the forming of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’.21 In 1940, Joseph Weitz, head of the Jewish Colonization Department stated: “there is no room for both peoples, together in this country. The only solution is Palestine without Arabs. And there is no other way but to transfer all of them: not one village, not one tribe should be left.”22
11. Practices leading to the mass ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s non-Jewish population occurred in 1947–1949, and again in 1967, when Israel occupied the West Bank, east Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip with mass displacement of hundreds of thousands, killings, destruction of villages and towns, looting and the denial of the right to return of expelled Palestinians.23
12. Since 1967, Israel has advanced its settler-colonial project through military occupation, stripping the Palestinian people of their right to self-determination.24 This has resulted in the segregation and control of Palestinians, including through land confiscation, house demolitions, revoked residencies and deportation.25 Punishing their indigeneity and rejection of colonization, Israel construed Palestinians as a ‘security threat’ to justify their oppression and “de-civilianization”, namely the denial of their status as protected civilians.26
13. Israel has progressively turned Gaza into a highly controlled enclave.27 Since the 2005 evacuation of Israeli settlers (which Israel’s current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu strongly opposed),28 Israel’s settler movement and leaders have framed Gaza as a territory to be “re-colonized” and its population as invaders to be expelled.29 These unlawful claims are integral to the project of consolidating the “exclusive and unassailable right of the Jewish people” on the land of “Greater Israel”, as reaffirmed by Prime Minister Netanyahu in December 2022.30
14. This is the historical background against which the atrocities in Gaza are unfolding.

III Legal Framework

15. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (“the Convention”) codifies genocide as an international crime the prohibition of which is a non-derogable peremptory norm (jus cogens). The erga omnes obligation to prevent and punish genocide binds all states under both the Convention and customary international law and requires them all to prevent and prosecute genocidal acts.31 Genocide cannot be justified under any circumstances, including purported self-defence.32 Complicity is expressly prohibited, giving rise to obligations for third states.33
16. The ICJ and the International Criminal Court (“ICC”) have jurisdiction over the crime of genocide,34 and so do State domestic courts. Prior to the establishment of the ICC, ad hoc international criminal tribunals advanced their interpretation of what constitutes genocide,35 its intent and required evidence.36

A. Constitutive elements of genocide

17. The Convention codifies genocide as “any of the [specified] acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.”37 Accordingly, the crime of genocide comprises two interconnected elements:
    (a) The actus reus: the commission of any one or more specific acts against a protected group, namely:
    (i) killing members of the group;
    (ii) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
    (iii) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
    (iv) imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
    (v) forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.38
    (b) The mens rea: the intent behind the commission of one or more of the above-mentioned acts that must be established, which includes two intertwined elements:
    (i) a general intention to carry out the criminal acts (dolus generalis), and
    (ii) a specific intention to destroy the target group as such (dolus specialis).39
18. Both components must be satisfied for conduct to legally constitute genocide.40 The perpetrator’s intent to destroy the group in whole or in part distinguishes genocidal acts from other international crimes.41 Specific intent may be established by direct evidence, e.g. statements by high command or official documents, or inferred from patterns of conduct.42 In the latter case, the patterns of conduct or the manner in which the acts are perpetrated must be such that they “only point to the existence of such [genocidal] intent”,43 and the existence of intent results in “the only inference that could reasonably be drawn.”44
19. Evidence of the result is required to establish the commission of three of the underlying acts (killing, inflicting harm and transferring children).45 For the remaining two acts (inflicting conditions calculated to destroy the group and preventing births), the evidentiary threshold requires proof of an intent to achieve a given outcome, rather than its achievement.46 Accordingly, if displacement, ethnic cleansing or mass deportation are perpetrated with the requisite intent to destroy the protected group as such, this may amount to genocide.47 Similarly, these displacement actions can also be evidence of specific genocidal intent.48

B. State Responsibility and Individual Criminal Liability

20. The crime of genocide gives rise to both individual and State responsibility. The Convention stresses the need for individual accountability before domestic or international courts,49 regardless of any official role held by the perpetrator.50 Individual criminal liability arises from direct involvement in committing, attempting, conspiring, directly and publicly inciting, planning, instigating, ordering and aiding and abetting (complicity in) genocidal acts, requiring a specific intent to contribute to the destruction of the target group.51 This implies knowledge of the possibility that an act will result in destruction of the group in whole or in part.52 Genocide gives rise to State responsibility when an individual has committed genocide exercising state authority; in this case the individual’s conduct is attributable to the State.53

IV. Genocidal Acts in Gaza

21. Genocidal acts can include deliberate actions or omissions, including the failure to protect the group from harm.54 The evidence presented in the following sections suggests Israel has committed at least three of the acts proscribed in the Convention.

A. “Killing Members of the Group”

22. This act encompasses deaths resulting from direct actions or arising from neglect, including those caused by deliberate starvation, disease or other survival-threatening conditions imposed on the group.55
23. Since 7 October, Israel has killed over 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza, equivalent to approximately 1.4 percent of its population, through lethal weapons and deliberate imposition of life-threatening conditions. By the end of February, a further 12,000 Palestinians were reported missing, presumed dead under the rubble.56
24. During the first months of the campaign, Israel’s army employed over 25,000 tons of explosives (equivalent to two nuclear bombs)57 on innumerable buildings, many of which were identified as targets by Artificial Intelligence.58 Israel used unguided munitions (“dumb bombs”)59 and 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on densely populated areas and “safe zones”.60 In the initial weeks, Israeli forces killed around 250 people daily, including 100 children,61 in attacks obliterating entire neighbourhoods and essential infrastructure.62 Thousands were killed by bombing, sniper fire or in summary executions;63 thousands more were killed while fleeing via routes and in areas declared “safe” by Israel.64 The victims included 125 journalists and 340 doctors, nurses and other health workers (four percent of Gaza’s healthcare personnel), students, academics, scientists and their family members.65
25. Seventy percent of recorded deaths have consistently been women and children. Israel failed to prove that the remaining 30 percent, i.e. adult males, were active Hamas combatants – a necessary condition for them to be lawfully targeted. By early-December, Israel’s security advisors claimed the killing of “7,000 terrorists” in a stage of the campaign when less than 5,000 adult males in total had been identified among the casualties, thus implying that all adult males killed were “terrorists”.66 This is indicative of an intent to indiscriminately target members of the protected group, assimilating them to active fighter status by default.
26. Moreover, Israel’s heightened blockade of Gaza has caused death by starvation, including 10 children daily, by impeding access to vital supplies.67 Lack of hygiene and overcrowded shelters could cause more deaths than bombings,68 having created “the perfect storm for disease”.69 A quarter of Gaza’s population could die from preventable health conditions within a year.70

B. “Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group”

27. This act must involve “a grave and long-term disadvantage to a person’s ability to lead a normal and constructive life”.71 The harm does not need to be permanent or irremediable,72 and can be brought about by various causes as torture, inhuman or degrading treatment,73 sexual violence,74 persecution,75 deportation76 or other conditions “designed to cause victims’ degradation and deprivation of their rights, and to suppress them and cause inhumane suffering and torture”.77
28. Since 7 October, Palestinians have suffered relentless physical and psychological harm. Many have endured violence and deprivation including severe hunger.78
29. Israeli forces have detained thousands of Palestinians, mostly men and young boys, often refusing to disclose their whereabouts.79 Many of them have been severely mistreated, including through torture at times leading to death.80
30. Israel’s lethal weapons and methods have injured seventy-thousand Palestinians, many with agonizing injuries, in some cases leading to long-term impairment or death.81
31. By causing critical shortages of medical supplies, including antibiotics and disinfectants, Israel’s actions resulted in hazardous health procedures, such as amputations without anaesthetics, including on children.82 This has also prevented the administration of life-saving treatment to those with medical conditions, including chronic diseases.83
32. The survivors will carry an indelible trauma, having witnessed so much death, and experienced destruction, homelessness, emotional and material loss, endless humiliation and fear.84 Such experiences include fleeing amidst the chaos of war without telecommunications and electricity; witnessing the systematic destruction of entire neighbourhoods, homes, universities, religious and cultural landmarks;85 digging through the rubble, often with bare hands, searching for loved ones;86 seeing bodies desecrated;87 being rounded up, stripped naked, blindfolded and subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment;88 and ultimately, being starved, adults and children alike.89
33. The savagery of Israel’s latest assault is best illustrated by the torment inflicted upon children of all ages,90 killed or rescued from under the rubble, maimed, orphaned,91 many without surviving family.92 Considering the significance of children to the future development of a society, inflicting serious bodily or mental harm to them can be reasonably “interpreted as a means to destroy the group in whole or in part”.93

C. “Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”

34. This act involves conduct that does not directly kill members of the group, but is capable of leading, through various means, to its physical destruction.94 These may include starving, dehydrating, forcibly displacing the protected group, destroying objects indispensable for their survival, reducing essential medical services to below the minimum requirement,95 depriving of housing, clothes, education, employment and hygiene.96
35. By mid-December, Israel’s bombs and shells had destroyed or severely damaged most life-sustaining infrastructure, including 77 percent of healthcare facilities, 68 percent of telecommunication infrastructure, large numbers of municipal services (72), commercial and industrial sites (76), almost half of all roads,97 over 60 percent of Gaza’s 439,000 homes,98 68 percent of residential buildings,99 all universities, 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries.100 Israel has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, 208 mosques, 3 churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives (150 years of history).101 By the end of January, over one million civilians were forcibly displaced southward, their cities devastated.102
36. Sixteen years of blockade had already transformed Gaza into an isolated, densely populated depleted and nearly “uninhabitable” enclave, when, on 9 October 2023, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, announced a “complete siege (…) no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel”.103 Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Israel Katz (then Minister of Energy) went further: “Humanitarian aid to Gaza? No electrical switch will be turned on, no water hydrant will be opened.”104 Deliberately denying essential supplies to an already besieged population was destined to cause deaths “more silent than those caused by bombs”.105
37. The total siege and near-constant carpet-bombing, along with draconian evacuation orders and ever-shifting ‘safe zones’, have created an unparalleled humanitarian catastrophe. Over 1.7 million Palestinians were displaced and forced into overcrowded UNRWA shelters and cramped quarters in southern Gaza,106 systematically targeted by the Israeli army, and later into makeshift shelters.107
38. Israel’s assault has decimated Gaza’s already fragile healthcare system.108 Hospitals, also sheltering displaced Palestinians, have been overwhelmed.109 By deliberately targeting hospitals,110 air and ground attacks gradually turned them into death zones.111 Israeli soldiers have occupied hospitals,112 encircling them with tanks and (drone-)snipers.113 By 12 February, only 11 of 36 hospitals and 17 percent of primary healthcare centres were functioning, only partially.114 Israeli soldiers have arrested, mistreated and tortured medical staff, patients and displaced people,115 and forced them – even premature babies – out of hospitals, in some cases causing the death of babies.116 The doctors who remained have worked night and day, making “impossible decisions” on patients to treat based on chance of survival.117
39. Ground invasion and aerial bombardment have destroyed agricultural land,118 farms, crops, animals and fishing assets,119 gravely undermining people’s livelihoods, the environment and agricultural system.
40. From 8–21 October, Israel impeded the entry of any aid into Gaza, subsequently allowing woefully inadequate amounts,120 largely confined to the south.121 No fuel supplies were delivered until 18 November.122 In January, Israel-led attacks against UNRWA, the main agency providing a lifeline of support in Gaza, resulted in several States suspending payments to UNRWA, further aggravating the humanitarian situation.123
41. By 7 December, over 90 percent of Gaza residents were suffering from severe food insecurity.124 By February 2024, Palestinians trapped in northern Gaza resorted to animal feed and grass for sustenance,125 with deaths by starvation on the rise.126 Between mid-January and the end of February, the UN recorded numerous attacks against Palestinians seeking aid.127
42. The supply of water was also severely affected.128 Fuel scarcity hampered water sanitation, driving people to use water contaminated by sewage, solid waste and seawater.129
43. The impact of these conditions on children is well-known:130 in Gaza the risk of starvation,131 with thousands suffering from wasting,132 is already a tangible horrific reality.
44. These human-made conditions have put at risk an estimated 50,000 pregnant Palestinian women and 20,000 newborn babies,133 and increased miscarriages by up to 300 percent.134
45. Gaza has been completely sacked. Israel’s relentless targeting of all means of basic survival has compromised the ability of Palestinians in Gaza to live on that land.135 This engineered collapse of life-sustaining infrastructure corresponds to the stated intentions to make Gaza “permanently impossible to live in” where “no human being can exist”.136

V. Genocidal Intent

46. The definition of genocide requires the commission of any of the listed acts with a specific intent. It must be established that the perpetrator, by committing one or more of the prohibited acts, seeks to achieve the total or partial destruction of a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.137 This intent must be established either through direct or indirect evidence.138
47. As genocide is an organized crime, the commission of which invariably implies a collective dimension,139 evidence of a state plan, including through statements and declarations by state officials, is usually decisive in establishing direct intent.140
48. Proof of indirect intent can be inferred from facts or circumstances, including the overall context of the acts or omissions, scale of atrocities, systematic targeting of victims based on their affiliation with a particular group, perpetration of other “culpable acts” directed against the group, or repetition of destructive and discriminatory acts.141 The ICC requires that such facts or circumstances take “place in the context of a manifest pattern of similar conduct directed against the group or… conduct that could itself effect such destruction”.142 International tribunals have also established that indirect intent can consist of a manifest pattern of similar conduct over time.143 The systematicity with which genocidal acts are committed implies a degree of “preconceived plan or policy”.144
49. The nature and scale of the atrocities, if demonstrably capable of achieving the genocidal outcome, are strong evidence of intent.145 The words of state authorities, including dehumanizing language, combined with acts, are considered a circumstantial basis from which intent can be inferred.146 Dehumanization can be understood as foundational to the process of genocide.147 Evidence of context may help determine the intent, and must be considered with the actual conduct: intent should be evident above all from words and deeds, and “patterns of purposeful action”,148 such that no other inference can be reasonably drawn.149
50. In the latest Gaza assault, direct evidence of genocidal intent is uniquely present. Vitriolic genocidal rhetoric has painted the whole population as the enemy to be eliminated and forcibly displaced.150 High-ranking Israeli officials with command authority have issued harrowing public statements evincing genocidal intent, including as follows:
    (a) President Isaac Herzog stated that “an entire nation out there…is responsible” for the 7 October attack, and that Israel would “break their backbone”;151
    (b) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to Palestinians as “Amalek”152 and “monsters”.153 The Amalek reference is to a biblical passage in which God commands Saul “Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass”.154
    (c) Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant referred to Palestinians as “human animals”,155 and announced “full offense” on Gaza, having “released all the restraints”, and that “Gaza will never return to what it was”;156
    (d) IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari stated that focus should be on causing “maximum damage”, demonstrating a strategy of disproportionate and indiscriminate violence;157
    (e) Minister of Agriculture Avi Dichter referred to Israel’s action as “the Gaza Nakba”;158
    (f) Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu called for striking Gaza with “nuclear bombs”;159
    (g) Likud MK Revital Gottlieb wrote on her social media: “Bring down buildings!! Bomb without distinction!!…Flatten Gaza. Without mercy! This time, there is no room for mercy!”.160
51. Such calls for annihilatory violence directed at troops on duty,161 constitute strong evidence of direct and public incitement to commit genocide.162 Decades of discourse dehumanizing Palestinians have prepared the groundwork for such incitements.163
52. Since 7 October, the proliferation of statements inciting genocide have also involved several sectors of Israeli society, religious leaders,164 journalists,165 artists,166 and various professionals (including doctors167 and political commentators168).
53. There is cogent evidence that these statements have been internalized and acted upon by troops on the ground.169 Israeli soldiers have, including on social media channels run by the Israeli military,170 referred to Palestinians as “terrorists”, “roaches”, “rats”,171 and have repeated terms articulated by political leaders, chanting that “there are no ‘uninvolved civilians’”,172 while also calling for the building of settlements in Gaza,173 “occupy[ing] Gaza… wip[ing] off the seed of Amalek”,174 boasting about killing “families, mothers, and children”,175 humiliating detained Palestinians,176 detonating dozens of homes,177 destroying entire residential neighbourhoods,178 and desecrating cemeteries and places of worship.179
54. Israel’s Prime Minister and President have stated that Israel was fighting on behalf of “all civilized states and… peoples”,180 “a barbarism that has no place in the modern world,”181 that they “will uproot evil and it will be good for the entire region and the world”.182 This racist rhetoric echoes that of other colonial powers, and tries to construe Israel’s genocidal violence as legitimate in light of Palestinians’ alleged “barbarian” and “premodern” character.183

VI. Humanitarian camouflage: distorting the laws of war to conceal genocidal intent

55. A core feature of Israel’s conduct since 7 October has been the intensification of its de-civilianization of Palestinians, a protected group under the Convention. Israel has used IHL terminology to justify its systematic use of lethal violence against Palestinian civilians as a group and the extensive destruction of life-sustaining infrastructures. Israel has done this by deploying IHL concepts such as human shields, collateral damage, safe zones, evacuations and medical protection in such a permissive manner so as to gut these concepts of their normative content, subverting their protective purpose and ultimately eroding the distinction between civilians and combatants in Israeli actions in Gaza.184
56. Official statements185 have translated into military conduct that repudiates the very notion of civilian protection. Israel has thus radically altered the balance struck by IHL between civilian protection and military necessity, as well as the customary rules of distinction, proportionality and precaution. This has obscured one cardinal tenet of IHL: indiscriminate attacks, which do not distinguish military targets from protected persons and objects, cannot be proportionate and are always unlawful.186
57. On the ground, this distortion of IHL articulated by Israel as a state policy in its official documents, has transformed an entire national group and its inhabited space into a destroyable target, revealing an eliminationist conduct of hostilities. This has had devastating effects, costing the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, destroying the structural fabric of life in Gaza and causing irreparable harm. This illustrates a clear pattern of conduct from which the requisite genocidal intent is the only reasonable inference to be drawn.187

A. Human Shields and the logic of genocide

58. IHL strictly prohibits the use of human shields.188 Their use constitutes a war crime,189 as it violates the duty to protect the civilian population from dangers arising from military operations.190 When human shields are used, the attacking party must take into account the risk to civilians.191 Indiscriminate or disproportionate harm to civilians remains unlawful and the civilian population can never be targeted.
59. Israel has accused Palestinian armed groups of deliberately using civilians as human shields in previous aggressions on Gaza (including in 2008-09,192 2012,193 2014,194 2021195 and 2022196). It also used it to justify high civilian casualties and attacks against paramedics, journalists and others during the 2018–2019 ‘Great March of Return’.197 UN independent fact-finding missions198 and reputable human rights organizations199 have consistently challenged these allegations, sometimes concluding that evidence of human shields had been fabricated.200 Nevertheless, Israel has used these accusations – sometimes then retracted201 – to justify widespread and systematic killing of Palestinian civilians in its ongoing assault.202
60. After 7 October, this macro-characterization of Gaza’s civilians as a population of human shields has reached unprecedented levels, with Israel’s top-ranking political and military leaders consistently framing civilians as either Hamas operatives, “accomplices”, or human shields among whom Hamas is “embedded”.203 In November, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs defined “the residents of the Gaza Strip as human shields” and accused Hamas of using “the civilian population as human shields”.204 The Ministry defines armed groups fighting from urban areas as deliberately “embedded” in the population to such an extent that it “cannot be concluded from the mere fact that seeming ‘civilians’ or ‘civilian objects’ have been targeted, that an attack was unlawful”.205 Two rhetorical elements of this key legal policy document indicate the intention to transform the entire Gaza population and its infrastructures of life into a ‘legitimate’ targetable shield: the use of the all-encompassing the combined with the quotation marks to qualify civilians and civilian objects. Israel has thus sought to camouflage genocidal intent with humanitarian law jargon.
61. International law does not permit the blanket claim that an opposing force is using the entire population as human shields en bloc. Any such usage must be assessed and established on a case-by-case basis before each individual attack.206 The crime of using human shields occurs when the use of civilians or civilian objects to impede attacks on lawful targets is the result of a deliberate tactical choice, not merely arising from the nature of the battlefield, such as hostilities in densely populated urban terrain.207
62. Nevertheless, Israeli authorities have characterized churches,208 mosques,209 schools,210 UN facilities,211 universities,212 hospitals and ambulances213 as connected with Hamas to reinforce the perception of a population characterized as broadly ‘complicit’ and therefore killable. Significant numbers of Palestinian civilians are defined as human shields simply by being in “proximity to” potential Israeli targets.214 Israel has thus transformed Gaza into a “world without civilians” in which “everything from taking shelter in hospitals to fleeing for safety is declared a form of human shielding”.215 The accusation of using human shields has thus become a pretext, justifying the killing of civilians under a cloak of purported legality, whose all-enveloping pervasiveness admits only of genocidal intent.

B. Turning Gaza as a whole into a ‘military objective’

63. International law stipulates that attacks must be “strictly limited” to those objects which “by their nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military action”, whose “total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization” in the circumstances ruling at the time “must offer a definite military advantage”.216
64. Israel has misused this rule to “militarize” civilian objects and whatever surrounds them, justifying their indiscriminate destruction. According to Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, “many ostensibly civilian objects may become legitimate targets”,217 losing their protection under IHL or become “collateral” damage as a result of Hamas’s choice. Gaza’s civilian population and infrastructure are presented as obstructions positioned amongst, in front of and above targets.218 Instead of abiding by circumstantial status determinations in line with IHL for each attack undertaken, as is required, Israel has characterized the whole territory as a military objective.
65. Protected civilian objects can lose their immunity from attacks if and for as long as they are used by combatants in hostilities. However, Israel considers any object that has allegedly been or might be used militarily as a legitimate target, so that entire neighbourhoods can be razed or demolished under fictions of legality.219 In Israel’s logic, civilian objects, such as houses and apartments, become military objectives by proximity, as if the status of ‘lawful’ target spread through a vicinity by ‘viral contagion’. For example, residential tower blocks, each comprising dozens of floors and hundreds of (functionally separate and autonomously usable) flats, purportedly become military objectives in their entirety if a single flat or room had allegedly been used by armed groups.220
66. Paradigmatic examples are referred to as “power targets”,221 encompassing any civilian object, including residential buildings, under the pretext that “Hamas is everywhere in Gaza”.222 Entire multi-storey buildings have been levelled while full of civilians, knowingly killing hundreds in single strikes.223 The attack on the Al-Taj tower in Gaza City, bombed on 25 October, killed 101 people, including 44 children and 37 women, and injured hundreds.224
67. Israel has thus de facto abolished the distinction between civilian objects and military objectives. In the offensive’s first three weeks, entire residential areas across northern Gaza were erased.225 Meanwhile, neighbourhoods in ‘safe areas’ in the south were already being bombarded.226 By November, the devastation of cities in northern Gaza far exceeded that of Dresden in 1945.227
68. Rationalizing patterns of attacks on civilian objects, knowingly killing civilians en masse, has become a military strategy premised upon probable war crimes presented as IHL-abiding. This strategy reasonably and solely infers a genocidal policy.

C. Indiscriminate killing as “collateral damage”

69. Israel has also sought to provide legal cover for indiscriminate attacks by misusing the notion of ‘collateral damage’,228 unlimitedly expanding what can be considered ‘incidental civilian harm’. Examples of indiscriminate attacks include attacks that by any methods or means strike multiple lawful targets at once in areas with high concentrations of civilians or civilian objects. To justify killing members of the protected group, Israel has defended such actions as causing only incidental harm to civilians, proportionate to concrete and direct military advantages anticipated.229
70. Invoking the concept of ‘proportionate collateral damage’ to knowingly shell large numbers of members of the protected group, Israel asserts that when attacks result in more collateral damage than expected, this does not necessarily indicate a violation, since “compliance is conduct-oriented, not result-oriented”.230
71. However, in all attacks launched against residential towers231 without warnings, extensive civilian harm has been anticipated as the main outcome. The Al-Taj building was full of families at the time of the 31 October strike, which must have been anticipated as certainly killing or injuring all the civilians living there.232 The fact that so many people were killed was entirely predictable – hence at least indirectly intended – as is evident from the images that the Israeli military itself published.233 The attack on the Jabalia refugee camp on 25 October killed at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, and injured a further 280.234 Israeli military personnel affirmed that the target was one Hamas commander in an underground base.235
72. For a proportionality assessment to be lawful, the principle of distinction must first be respected, otherwise the civilian harm anticipated from an attack ceases to be an incidental, unintended consequence of the attack itself.236 While both indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks appear to have been committed systematically and repeatedly throughout the latest Israeli campaign,237 the fact that both types of unlawful attacks have been consistently deemed by Israel as lawful suggests that it operates under a policy of condoning mass killing.
73. Under IHL, the concrete and direct military advantage expected from a single attack must be weighed against the foreseeable incidental harm to civilians and civilian objects. However, in its strained proportionality assessments, Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs states that “military advantage […] may refer to the military advantage anticipated” not from a specific military action but “from an operation as a whole”,238 alluding to the overall purpose of the war.239
74. Israel’s proportionality assessments have flouted legal requirements by defining military advantage, in each attack, in relation to the destruction of the whole Hamas organization both politically and militarily.240 It is manifestly illegal to declare as a war aim the destruction of the other side’s political capacity (particularly in the context of a 56-year military occupation which deprives the occupied population of its right to self-determination). But when such an overall ‘political’ war purpose is taken as the value against which proportionality is to be measures in relation to anticipated harm to civilians, there is virtually no magnitude of expected civilian harm that could ever be considered “excessive” so long as the unlawful political objective, as defined by the attacker, is not met. In this context, the indiscriminate killing of protected persons and destruction of protected objects will always be represented, by the attacker, as “proportionate” incidental harm despite its manifest illegality.241
75. Presenting indiscriminate lethal violence against the protected group as a ‘proportionate means’ to pursue the war aims points to an intent to target the Palestinian population as a whole, consistent with the genocidal statements announcing the campaign. In other words, Israel appears to represent itself as conducting a ‘proportionate genocide’.

D. Evacuations and safe zones

76. Under IHL, parties to the conflict must evacuate the civilian population and remove civilian objects from the vicinity of military objectives.242 Evacuations are admissible, as long as they do not displace the protected persons outside the occupied territory; evacuated persons must be transferred back to their homes as soon as hostilities in the area in question have ceased.243 The displaced, wounded and sick should be protected through the creation of “hospital and safety zones” – also called “safe areas” or “safe zones” – which shall “be far removed from military operations” and established through agreement between the parties.244
77. The mass evacuation order of 13 October – when 1.1 million Palestinians were ordered to evacuate northern Gaza in 24 hours to Israeli-designated “safe zones” in the south245– was communicated through at least 23 different airdropped leaflets, social media postings,246 text messages247 and recorded phone messages.248 Instead of increasing safety for civilians, the sheer scale of evacuations amidst an intense bombing campaign, and the haphazardly communicated safe zones system, along with extended communications blackouts,249 increased levels of panic, forced displacement and mass killing.250
78. Immediately after the 13 October evacuation orders and the transformation of southern Gaza into an ostensible “safe zone”, Israel illegally categorized the inhabitants of northern Gaza who had remained (including the sick and wounded) as “human shields”251 and “accomplices” of terrorism.252 This policy points to the intention by Israel to ‘transform’ hundreds of thousands of civilians into ‘legitimate’ military targets or collateral casualties through impossible-to-follow evacuation orders.253 The mass evacuation order included a staggering 22 hospitals in the area,254 putting at risk more than 2,000 patients and displaced people sheltering in the hospitals, and depriving those remaining of life-sustaining services.255
79. The erasure of civilian protections in the evacuated area was combined with indiscriminate targeting of evacuees and inhabitants of the areas designated as safe zones. Since the beginning of its assault, Israel has perfidiously bombarded the designated ‘safe’ areas causing significant casualties.256 Of the roughly 500 2,000-pound bombs dropped by Israel in the first six weeks of hostilities, 42 percent were deployed in the designated safe zones in southern areas.257 Israel targeted southern Gaza also with other munitions from air, sea and land, causing large-scale destruction of civilian areas in the “safe zones”.258
80. By 28 October, two weeks after Israel’s mass evacuation order, about 38 percent of killings in Gaza occurred in the declared safe areas south of Wadi Gaza.259 By 20 November, 34 percent of all Palestinians killed in Gaza were in this area,260 and by 22 January, 42 percent were located in the area, which by then held the majority of the Gaza population.261 Simply put, “safe areas” were deliberately turned into areas of mass killing.
81. Similar patterns emerge from Israel’s militarization of the “humanitarian corridors” it instructed the population to use in order to evacuate and reach the safe areas. In contrast with the humanitarian rhetoric through which these “safe routes” were announced,262 these corridors were systematically and perfidiously targeted by bombardment, shelling and sniper fire,263 becoming ‘death corridors’. Israel set up checkpoints for facial scans and identity checks, where fleeing Palestinians were often detained and later mistreated and tortured.264
82. By the end of November, the Palestinian death toll reached 15,000.265 Responding to mounting international criticism, the Israeli military reconfigured its evacuation mechanisms, introducing a new “humanitarian” tool: the “evacuation grid”.266 The army published on social media a grid map dividing Gaza into 600 blocks and indicating areas to be “evacuated” and “safe” areas.267 The system – introduced when the army had cut off Gaza from all forms of communication268 – threw residents into panic, increasing the level of chaos and, subsequently, the number of deaths.269 From early December, Israel routinely ordered Palestinian civilians in the areas south of Wadi Gaza to move to new zones designated as safe according to the grid. Immediately afterwards, the army targeted these “safe zones”.270
83. From the end of December to February, Israel intensified its offensive in the ‘safe areas’ of Al Muwasi and Rafah, which were sheltering the majority of the displaced population.271 These assaults continued even after the ICJ ordered Israel to “take[s] all measures within its power” to prevent genocide.272 Instead, by February Israel had killed a further 3,135 Palestinians, many of whom while seeking refuge.273
84. By the beginning of February, 1.4 million Palestinians had been displaced to Rafah, rendering that governorate the most overcrowded in Gaza with “an average density of over 22,200 per square kilometre, five times its pre-conflict levels”.274 Continuous bombardment of these “safe areas” targeted premises hosting displaced people275 and medical facilities.276
85. Just as the evacuations and safe zones were being implemented, high-ranking Israeli officials advocated for settler colonial replacement. Israel’s Prime Minister advocated for ethnic transfer;277 Israel’s Finance Minister expressed support for expelling two million Palestinians from Gaza;278 Israel’s Minister of National Security declared the war to be an opportunity to “concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza”, while other cabinet ministers advocated to “resettle”279 Palestinians into the Sinai,280 Western countries,281 and elsewhere.282 Israel’s Minister of Communications revealed that the expulsion of the evacuated Palestinians outside Gaza was discussed “at government meetings”.283 On 12 January, a conference for the re-colonization of Gaza and the expulsion of Palestinians was attended by Israeli ministers.284
86. The pattern of killings of civilians who evacuated to the south, in combination with statements of some senior Israelis declaring an intent to forcibly displace Palestinians outside Gaza and replace them with Israeli settlers, lead to reasonably infer that evacuation orders and safe zones have been used as genocidal tools to achieve ethnic cleansing.

E. Medical Shielding

87. A final layer of Israel’s “humanitarian camouflage” concerns its efforts to provide legal cover for systematic attacks against medical facilities and personnel, causing the progressive collapse of Gaza’s healthcare sector.285 Targeting medical facilities while accusing the enemy of shielding within them had already been employed by Israel as a strategy of “medical lawfare” in previous wars.286 In the current assault, Israel has invoked this legal strategy to justify genocide through the complete destruction of life-sustaining infrastructure.287
88. Civilian healthcare is specially protected under international law: there is a high threshold for the protected status of civilian medical units to be lost.288 International law protects hospitals while prohibiting their use for military purposes or as shields for military activities, such as positioning military targets in their proximity.289 Since the beginning of the hostilities, Israel has framed Gaza’s hospitals as Hamas “headquarters”290 and spaces used for shielding military activities,291 aiming to blur the distinction between civilian and military objects, transforming hospitals into “hospital shields”,292 and legitimizing the destruction of Gaza’s entire healthcare sector.293
89. In November 2023, Al Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza was hosting tens of thousands of displaced people – when it was besieged and invaded.294 On 27 October, the Israeli military published a 3D video representing the hospital’s underground as a complex network of tunnels functioning as a “Hamas command centre”.295 On 2 November, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a legal document designating the hospital as a military centre concealing military assets.296 The hospital was then placed under siege and invaded in mid-November, with Israel accusing Hamas of using medical personnel as “human shields”.297 After days of attacks, the hospital was turned into a “death zone”;298 five newborn babies and 14 patients were injured;299 at least 31 people were killed,300 and parts of the hospital turned into mass graves.301
90. Media reports challenged Israel’s allegations that Hamas were using hospitals as shields, asserting that there was no evidence to suggest that the rooms connected to the hospital had been used by Hamas; the hospital buildings (contrary to Israeli military 3D images) were found not to be connected to the tunnel network; and there was no evidence that the tunnels were accessible from the hospital wards.302 In addition, Israeli army reportedly rearranged weaponry at the Al Shifa before news crews visits303, raising further suspicions of fabrication after the Israeli army had claimed that a “list of terrorists” it had found in another Gaza hospital–the Al Rantisi–turned out to be a calendar of the days of the week in Arabic.304 Whether or not Israel’s accusations of hospital shielding at Al Shifa were true – but still remain to be proven –, the civilians in the hospitals should have been protected and not subjected to siege and military attack.
91. That the intent behind Israel’s “humanitarian camouflage” in this instance can only be characterized as genocidal is clear for two reasons. First, Israel was aware of the large-scale destruction of the healthcare system since the World Health Organization had reported in mid-November that a “public health catastrophe” was developing in Gaza, with 26 of 35 hospitals no longer operational due to Israel’s bombing and siege.305 Second, Israel knew that its military operation was resulting in a significant number of wounded.306 Physical trauma constitutes the most predominant cause of excess mortality in Gaza.307 It was predictable that forcibly suspending services at the largest hospital in Gaza would seriously harm the prospects for survival of the injured, the chronically ill and newborn babies in incubators. Therefore, by targeting Al Shifa Hospital, Israel knowingly condemned thousands of sick and displaced people to preventable suffering and death.308
92. The reliance on the strategy of treating hospitals as medical shields, disregarding their function as indispensable hubs of societal survival for the thousands injured and many more seeking shelter, exposes yet another aspect of the genocidal logic underpinning Israel’s military strategy.

VII. Conclusions

93. The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel’s assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group. This report finds that there are reasonable grounds to believe that the threshold indicating the commission of the following acts of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza has been met: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to groups’ members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part. Genocidal acts were approved and given effect following statements of genocidal intent issued by senior military and government officials.
94. Israel has sought to conceal its eliminationist conduct of hostilities sanctioning the commission of international crimes as IHL-abiding. Distorting IHL customary rules, including distinction, proportionality and precautions, Israel has de facto treated an entire protected group and its life-sustaining infrastructure as ‘terrorist’ or ‘terrorist-supporting’, thus transforming everything and everyone into either a target or collateral damage, hence killable or destroyable. In this way, no Palestinian in Gaza is safe by definition. This has had devastating, intentional effects, costing the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians, destroying the fabric of life in Gaza and causing irreparable harm to its entire population.
95. Israel’s genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler colonial process of erasure. For over seven decades this process has suffocated the Palestinian people as a group – demographically, culturally, economically and politically –, seeking to displace it and expropriate and control its land and resources. The ongoing Nakba must be stopped and remedied once and for all. This is an imperative owed to the victims of this highly preventable tragedy, and to future generations in that land.

VIII. Recommendations

96. The Special Rapporteur urges member states to enforce the prohibition of genocide in accordance with their non-derogable obligations.309 Israel and those states that have been complicit in what can be reasonably concluded to constitute genocide must be held accountable and deliver reparations commensurate with the destruction, death and harm inflicted on the Palestinian people.
97. The Special Rapporteur recommends that member states:
    (a) Immediately implement an arms embargo on Israel, as it appears to have failed to comply with the binding measures ordered by the ICJ on 26 January 2024, as well as other economic and political measures necessary to ensure an immediate and lasting ceasefire and to restore respect for international law, including sanctions;
    (b) Support South Africa having resort to the UNSC under article 94(2) of the UN Charter following Israel’s non-compliance with the above-mentioned ICJ measures;
    (c) Act to ensure a thorough, independent and transparent investigation of all violations of international law committed by all actors, including those amounting to war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide, including:
    (i) cooperating with international independent fact-finding/ investigative and accountability mechanisms;
    (ii) referring the situation in Palestine to the ICC immediately, in support of its ongoing investigation;
    (iii) discharging their obligations under the principles of universal jurisdiction, ensuring genuine investigations and prosecutions of individuals who are suspected of having committed, or aided or abetted, in the commission of international crimes, including genocide, starting with their own nationals;
    (d) Ensure that Israel, as well as States who have been complicit in the Gaza genocide, acknowledge the colossal harm done, commit to non-repetition, with measures for prevention, full reparations, including the full cost of the reconstruction of Gaza, for which the establishment of a register of damage with an accompanying verification and mass claims process is recommended;
    (e) Within the General Assembly, develop a plan to end the unlawful and unsustainable status quo constituting the root cause of the latest escalation, which ultimately culminated in the Gaza genocide, including through the reconstitution of the UN Special Committee against Apartheid to comprehensively address the situation in Palestine, and stand ready to implement diplomatic, economic and political measures provided under the United Nations Charter in case of non-compliance by Israel;
    (f) In the short term and as a temporary measure, in consultation with the State of Palestine, deploy an international protective presence to constrain the violence routinely used against Palestinians in the occupied Palestinian territory;
    (g) Ensure that UNRWA is properly funded to enable it to meet the increased needs of Palestinians in Gaza.
98. The Special Rapporteur calls on the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights to enhance its efforts to end the current atrocities in Gaza, including by promoting and accurately applying International Law, notably the Genocide Convention, in the context of the oPt as a whole.

• The present report was submitted to the conference services for processing after the deadline so as to include the most recent information.

Footnotes

(Damce Insider editor’s note: In the pdf of the Advanced Unedited Version of “Anatomy of a Genocide” posted on the United Nations web site March 25, the footnotes are given on the same page as the footnoted references. Given the onerous reading this might present in an unpaginated Web reproduction of the report, we’ve made the decision to list all footnotes at the end of the article here. Given the onerous editorial task hyper-linking each of the 309 references might present, we’ve made the additional decision to simply copy the entire links; readers interested in accessing the source documents and videos may need to do the same. PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO A MALFUNCTION WITH WORDPRESS THAT IS BEYOND THE DI’s CONTROL, FOR FOOTNOTES 70 THROUGH 177 WORDPRESS HAS ADDED TWO ADDITIONAL DIGITS BEFORE THE ACTUAL FOOTNOTE NUMBERS.WORDPRESS HAS ALSO ADDED CAPRICOUS INDENTATIONS AT VARIOUS POINTS.)

1 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/10/israeloccupied-palestinian-territory-un-experts-deplore-attacks-civilians#:~:text=%E2%80%9CThis%20amounts%20to%20collective%20 punishment,amounts%20to%20a%20war%20crime.%E2%80%9D
2 https://undocs.org/Home/Mobile?FinalSymbol=A%2F77%2F356&Language=E&DeviceType= Desktop&LangRequested=False para 4
3 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-9
4 https://www.ochaopt.org/data/casualties
5 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/11/gaza-un-experts-call-international-community-prevent-genocide-against
6 https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/statement-of-scholars-7-october/ Scholars
7 https://www.oic-oci.org/topic/?t_id=40224&t_ref=26858&lan=en, https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240208-pre-01-00-en.pdf; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoQeOsgs0Dc; https://au.int/ar/node/43236
8 https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240111-ora-01-00-bi.pdf
9 Ibid, Preliminary-Measures-Judgement, 26 January 2024, para. 54
10 Ibid, paras. 77–86
11 Ibid, https://www.icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/192/192-20240112-ora-01-00-bi.pdf 12 January 2024, paras. 6, 37; https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/generalpage/swords-of-iron-faq-6-dec-2023/en/English_Documents_Hamas-Israel Conflict 2023 – Some Factual and Legal Aspects – Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2 NOV 2023).pdf

12. Mohamed Adhikari, ed., Civilian-Driven Violence and the Genocide of Indigenous Peoples in Settler Societies (London: Routledge, 2019), p. 13
    13 Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, (The Lawbook Exchange: 2008), p. 92
    14 Ibid, p. 79
    15 Penny Green et al., Countdown to Annhilation: Genocide in Myanmar, (London: 2015)
    16 Alexander Laban Hinton, “The Dark Side of Modernity: Toward an Anthropology of Genocide”, in Annihilating Difference: The Anthropology of Genocide, ed. Alexander Laban Hinton (University of California Press, 2002), pp. 1-40
    17 Lorenzo Veracini, “Settler Collective, Founding Violence and Disavowal: The Settler Colonial Situation”, Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol. 29, no. 4 (2008), p. 369
    18 Patrick Wolfe, “Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native,” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 8, no. 4 (2006), p. 402
    19 Lemkin, Axis Rule (footnote13), p. 92; Pauline Wakeham, “The Slow Violence of Settler Colonialism,” Journal of Genocide Research, vol. 24, no. 3 (2022), pp. 340-346.
    20 Gregory H. Stanton, The Ten Stages of Genocide, Genocide Watch (1996).
    21 Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (New York, Metropolitan Books, 2020).
    22 Cited in Uri Davis, “Palestine into Israel”, Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 3, no. 1 (Autumn, 1973), p. 89
    23 Salman Abu-Sitta, The Palestinian Nakba 1948: The Register of Depopulated Localities in Palestine (The Palestinian Return Centre, 2000), ch. 15; Minorities at Risk Project, Chronology for Palestinians in Jordan, (2004)
    24 http://www.undocs.org/A/77/35 (2022)
    25 https://badil.org/phocadownloadpap/badil-new/publications/research/working-papers/FT-Coercive-Environments.pdf (2017)
    26 http://www.undocs.org/A/HRC/53/59 paras. 80, 95
    27 Ibid, para. 82
    28 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/aug/08/israel
    29 Nicola Perugini, “Settler-Colonial Inversions: Israel’s ‘disengagement’ and the Gush Katif ‘Museum of Expulsion’ in Jerusalem”, Settler-Colonial Studies, vol. 9.1 (2019), pp. 44-45; Smotrich, https://hashiloach.org.il/israels-decisive-plan/; see https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/otzma-candidate-ben-gvir-calls-to-return-to-gush-katif-584665
    30 https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/netanyahu-set-retake-power-head-far-right-government-2022-12-29/. See also Jewish Nation-State Basic Law of 19 July 2018
    31 M. Cherif Bassiouni, “International Crimes: Jus Cogens and Obligatio Erga Omnes”, Law and Contemporary Problems, vol. 59, no. 4 (1996), p. 68; A/CN.4/L.960/Add.1 (2022), conclusions 5, 17.
    32 William Schabas, Genocide in International Law: The Crime of Crimes (Cambridge: 2009), p.395; A/CN.4/L.960/Add.1 (2022), conclusions 3, 17.
    33 Convention, article III
    34 https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf, article IX; and https://www.icc-cpi.int/sites/default/files/RS-Eng.pdf (1998), article 6
    35 https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/statute-international-tribunal-prosecution-persons-responsible (1993); http://www.undocs.org/S/RES/955(1994) (1994); Prosecutor v. Blagojević and Jokić, IT-02-60-T ICTY, Judgement, 17 January 2005; Prosecutor v. Brdjanin, IT-99-36-T ICTY, Judgement, 01 September 2004; Prosecutor v. Krstić, IT-98-33-T ICTY, Judgement, 02 August 2001; Prosecutor v. Jelisić, IT-95-10-T ICTY, Judgement, 14 December 1999
    36 Prosecutor v. Popović et al., IT-05-88-A ICTY, Appeal-Judgement, 30 January 2015; Prosecutor v. Karadžić, IT-95-5/18-T ICTY, Judgement, 24 March 2016; Prosecutor v. Mladic, IT-09-92-T ICTY, Judgement, 22 November 2017; Prosecutor v. Tolimir, IT-05-88/2-A ICTY, Appeal-Judgement, 08 April 2015
    37 Convention, article II
    38 Ibid; Rome Statute, article 6
    39 Kai Ambos, “What Does ‘Intent to Destroy’ in Genocide Mean?”, International Review of the Red Cross, vol. 91, no. 876 (2009), p. 834
    40 ICJ, Bosnia and Herzegovina v. Serbia and Montenegro, Judgment (2007), paras. 187-188
    41 Prosecutor v. Kupreskic et al., IT-95-16-T ICTY, Judgement, 14 January 2000, para. 636
    42 https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/attach/2023/11/Declaration Expert William Schabas_w.pdf 11 January 24, para. 16
    43 Bosnia v. Serbia (footnote 40), para. 373
    44 ICJ, Croatia v. Serbia, Judgment (2015), para. 148
    45 Schabas, Genocide in International Law (footnote 32), p. 177
    46 Ibid., pp. 177, 192, 195-197; A-G Israel v. Eichmann (1968), para. 196
    47 ICJ, Gambia v. Myanmar, Joint Declaration of Intervention of Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom (2023), paras. 44-47; ICJ, Bosnia v. Serbia, Provisional-Measures-Judgement, 1993, Judge-Lauterpacht, para. 123; and Judgment (2007), para. 190; Prosecutor v. Karadžić and Mladić, IT-95-5-R61 ICTY, Review-of-Indictments, 16 July 1996, para. 94; Prosecutor v. Krstić, IT-98-33-A ICTY, Appeal Judgement, 19 April 2004, para. 31-33
    48 Gambia v. Myanmar (footnote 47), para. 72-74; IT-98-33-A, paras. 31-33
    49 Rome Statute, article 6
    50 Convention, article IV
    51 Convention, article III; Rome Statute, article 25
    52 Prosecutor v. Popović et al., IT-05-88-T ICTY, Judgement, 10 June 2010, para. 1178; IT-98-33-T, para. 595; Ambos, “What Does ‘Intent to Destroy’ in Genocide Mean?” (footnote 39), p. 841
    53 http://www.undocs.org/A/RES/56/83 (2002), article 4; Bosnia v. Serbia (footnote 40), paras. 384, 385-386, 396-400
    54 Prosecutor v. Kambanda, ICTR-97-23-S, Judgment, 04 September 1998, para.39 (ix); Schabas, Genocide in International Law (footnote 32), pp. 177–178.
    55 ICC, Elements of Crimes, (2013), p. 113; Prosecutor v. Krnojelac, IT-97-25-T, Judgement, 15 March 2002, para. 326; Schabas, Genocide in International Law (footnote 32), p. 180
    56 https://www.unrwa.org/resources/reports/unrwa-situation-report-86-situation-gaza-strip-and-west-bank-including-east-Jerusalem
    57 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/11/13/palestine-gaza-west-bank-nakba-displacement-israel-catastrophe/; https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/01/the-gospel-how-israel-uses-ai-to-select-bombing-targets
    58 https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/; Omar Yusef Shehabi and Asaf Lubin, “Algorithms of War: Military AI and the War in Gaza”, Articles of War, 24 January 2024
    59 https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/12/14/israel-unguided-dumb-bombs-gaza/
    60 https://edition.cnn.com/gaza-israel-big-bombs/index.html; https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-bomb-investigation.html
    61 https://www.savethechildren.org.au/media/media-releases/gaza-10000-children-killed-in-nearly-100-days-of
    62 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-72; https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/
    63 https://www.un.org/unispal/document/unlawful-killings-in-gaza-city-ohchr-press-release/; https://www.pbs.org/newshour/world/israeli-strikes-kill-civilians-sheltering-in-northern-gaza-as-assault-on-hamas-intensifies.
    64 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-22; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-45; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/14/gaza-civilians-afraid-to-leave-home-after-bombing-of-safe-routes
    65 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-145
    66 https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/israel-has-killed-over-7000-terrorists-no-deadline-for-gaza-war-national-security-adviser/ 09 December 2023; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-63
    67 https://www.wfp.org/news/preventing-famine-and-deadly-disease-outbreaks-gaza-requires-faster-safer-aid-access-and-more
    68 https://gaza-projections.org/
    69 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MJFBaUXvYU&ab_channel=MiddleEastEye 06 December 2023; https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-war-on-hospitals/ 20 December 2023; https://www.emro.who.int/images/stories/Sitrep_-issue_22.pdf?ua=1 30 . January 2024. (PLEASE NOTE: DUE TO A MALFUNCTION WITH WORDPRESS THAT IS BEYOND THE DI’s CONTROL, FOR FOOTNOTES 70 THROUGH 177 WORDPRESS HAS ADDED TWO ADDITIONAL DIGITS BEFORE THE ACTUAL FOOTNOTE NUMBERS.)
13. . .
14. 70 https://gaza-projections.org/
15. 71 IT-98-33-T, para. 513; Prosecutor v. Krajišnik, IT-00-39-T ICTY, Judgement, 27 September 2006, para. 862
16. 72 Schabas, Genocide in International Law (footnote 32), pp. 182, 184
17. 73 Prosecutor v. Akayesu, ICTR-96-4-T, Judgement, 02 September 1998, para. 503
18. 74 Ibid., para.731; Prosecutor v. Stakic, IT-97-24-T ICTY, Judgement, 31 July 2003, para. 516; IT-95-5-R61, para. 93
19. 75 ICTR-96-4-T, para. 503; A-G Israel v. Eichmann (footnote 46), para. 199
20. 76 ICTY-98-33-T, para. 513
21. 77 Schabas, Genocide in International Law (footnote 32) p. 182 78 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/03/un-experts-condemn-flour-massacre-urge-israel-end-campaign-starvation-gaza
22. 79 https://www.adalah.org/uploads/uploads/Submission_SR_Torture_final-15.2.24.pdf
23. 80 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/02/israelopt-un-experts-appalled-reported-human-rights-violations-against; https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/23/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-palestinian-detainees.html; https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/12/urgently-investigate-inhumane-treatment-and-enforced-disappearance-of-palestinians-detainees-from-gaza; IT-09-92-T, para. 634-691, 835-838, 3451; IT-05-88-T, para. 1097, 1120, 1122, 1177
24. 81 https://www.msf.org/no-safe-place-gaza-people-are-crushed-continuous-bombing; https://amnesty.ca/human-rights-news/israel-opt-identifying-the-israeli-armys-use-of-white-phosphorus-in-gaza/; https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/white-phosphorus
25. 82 https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/01/1145332; https://www.emro.who.int/media/news/risk-of-disease-spread-soars-in-gaza-as-health-facilities-water-and-sanitation-systems-disrupted.html; https://www.savethechildren.net/news/gaza-more-10-children-day-lose-limb-three-months-brutal-conflict
26. 83 https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/12/1145017
27. 84 IT-98-33-T, para 596
28. 85 https://press.un.org/en/2024/sc15564.doc.htm
29. 86 https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/11/10/this-israel-war-has-no-mercy-gaza-civil-rescuers-say
30. 87 https://edition.cnn.com/2023/12/23/middleeast/kamal-adwan-hospital-gaza-israel-abuse-allegations-intl-cmd/index.html
31. 88 https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/22337.html; https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/un-human-rights-office-opt-disturbing-reports-north-gaza-mass-detentions-ill-treatment-and-enforced-disappearances-possibly-thousands-palestinians; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-73; https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-briefing-notes/2024/01/gaza-report-ground
32. 89 https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/30/middleeast/famine-looms-in-gaza-israel-war-intl/index.html
33. 90 https://www.savethechildren.net/news/children-s-mental-health-gaza-pushed-beyond-breaking-point-after-nearly-month-siege-and
34. 91 By January there were 17,000 unaccompanied children, see https://www.unicef.org/sop/reports/ unicef-state-palestine-escalation-humanitarian-situation-report-no17
35. 92 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/29/gaza-children-wcnsf-orphans/
36. 93 Gambia v. Myanmar (footnote 47), para. 39
37. 94 Convention, article II(c); Rome Statute, article 6; ICTR-96-4-T, paras. 505–506
38. 95 ICTR-96-4-T, paras 505–506; Prosecutor v Rutaganda, ICTR-96-3-T, Judgement 06 December 1999 para 52
39. 96 IT-97-24-T, para. 517
40. 97 https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/gaza-destruction-bombing-israel-aa528542
41. 98 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-70
42. 99 https://www.conflict-damage.org/; https://unosat.org/products/3793
43. 100 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-145; https://librarianswithpalestine.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/LAP-Gaza-Report-2024.pdf
44. 101 https://www.ica.org/statement-of-the-international-council-on-archives-on-the-destruction-of-the-central-archives-of-the-municipality-of-gaza/; https://www.aljazeera.com/news/ 2024/1/14/a-cultural-genocide-which-of-gazas-heritage-sites-have-been-destroyed
45. 102 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-107
46. 103 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbPdR3E4hCk 09 October 2023
47. 104 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/12/no-power-water-or-fuel-to-gaza-until-hostages-freed-says-israeli-minister 12 October 2023
48. 105 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/11/israel-must-stop-using-water-weapon-war-un-expert
49. 106 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-108
50. 107 https://www.unocha.org/publications/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-108
51. 108 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/12/gaza-un-expert-condemns-unrelenting-war-health-system-amid-airstrikes; https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2024/01/middleeast/gaza-hospitals-destruction-investigation-intl-cmd
52. 109 https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/destruction-of-medical-infrastructure-in-gaza; https://x.com/UNOCHA/status/1719305737782878629?s=20; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-17; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-24 .
53. 110 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-28; https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/07/gaza-israeli-ambulance-strike-apparently-unlawful; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-35; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-45; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-119
54. 111 https://www.who.int/news/item/18-11-2023-who-leads-very-high-risk-joint-humanitarian-mission-to-al-shifa-hospital-in-gaza
55. 112 https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/destruction-of-medical-infrastructure-in-gaza; https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/14/us/politics/gaza-hospitals-cancer-israel.html; https://shifa.forensic-architecture.org/; https://indonesian.alhaq.org/; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-121
56. 113 https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/14/gaza-unlawful-israeli-hospital-strikes-worsen-health-crisis; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-36; https://www.emro.who.int/images/stories/palestine/WHO_Sitrep_13.pdf?ua=1; https://indonesian.alhaq.org/; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-115; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-87
57. 114 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-128
58. 115 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-73; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-121; https://x.com/HCWWatch/status/1750365056728965214?s=20; https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gaza-doctor-describes-ordeal-detention-2024-02-04/ – :~:text=He%20described%20having%20his%20hands,and%20with%20loud%20music%20blaring.; https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-68513408
59. 116 https://news.un.org/en/story/2023/11/1143497; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-34; https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/03/gaza-premature-babies-dead-nasr/
60. 117 Mohammed Qandil, “Gaza: providing emergency care under fire”, Emergency Medicine Journal (9 February 2024)
61. 118 https://unosat.org/products/3792; https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/18/israel-starvation-used-weapon-war-gaza
62. 119 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-115; https:// http://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-125
63. 120 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-15
64. 121 https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/01/1145557; https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-israels-inspection-process-is-obstructing-aid-delivery;
65. 122 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-43
66. 123 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/02/states-must-reinstate-and-strengthen-support-unrwa-amid-unfolding-genocide
67. 124 https://www.ipcinfo.org/fileadmin/user_upload/ipcinfo/docs/IPC_Gaza_Acute_Food_Insecurity _Nov2023_Feb2024.pdf
68. 125 https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/30/middleeast/famine-looms-in-gaza-israel-war-intl/index.html
69. 126 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-129; https://mondoweiss.net/2024/03/un-expert-israel-is-engineering-famine-in-gaza/
70. 127 https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/un-human-rights-office-opt-un-human-rights-office-strongly-deplores-killing-least-112-palestinians-during-food-aid-distribution-gaza-city-enar
71. 128 https://reliefweb.int/attachments/a4b1eefa-3717-4407-8101-bba6df81f488/Health WASH – Advocacy note on public health catastrophe – Final.pdf
72. 129 Ibid.
73. 130 Gambia v. Myanmar (footnote 47), paras. 40, 42
74. 131 https://www.unicef.org/mena/press-releases/intensifying-conflict-malnutrition-and-disease-gaza-strip-creates-deadly-cycle; https://www.savethechildren.net/news/gaza-time-running-out-reports-emerging-children-dying-due-lack-food-save-children; https://twitter.com/AJEnglish/status/1761601918344790340
75. 132 https://www.wfp.org/news/preventing-famine-and-deadly-disease-outbreaks-gaza-requires-faster-safer-aid-access-and-more
76. 133 https://www.who.int/news/item/03-11-2023-women-and-newborns-bearing-the-brunt-of-the-conflict-in-gaza-un-agencies-warn; https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/12/01/birth-and-death-intertwined-gaza-strip; https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/01/1145677
77. 134 https://twitter.com/CARE/status/1748007265754312767
78. 135 See ICTR-96-4-T, para. 505-506
79. 136 https://www.ynet.co.il/yedioth/article/yokra13625377 10 October 2023; https://balfourproject.org/the-hamas-attack-and-israels-war-on-gaza-a-place-where-no-human-being-can-exist/, 24 November 2023
80. 137 Prosecutor v. Jelisic, IT-95-10-A ICTY, Appeal Judgement, 05 July 2001, para. 46
81. 138 IT-98-33-A, para. 34; IT-99-36-T, para. 704-706
82. 139 IT-98-33-T, para 549; Schabas, Genocide in International Law (footnote 32), pp. 242–243, 250–255
83. 140 IT-95-10-A, para.48; Prosecutor v. Kayishema and Ruzindana, ICTR-95-1-T, Judgment, 21 May 1999, para. 94, 276; Schabas, Genocide in International Law (footnote 32), pp. 245–250, 265
84. 141 IT-95-10-A, para. 47; IT-98-33-A, para. 27, 34-35; T-05-88-T, para. 1178; https://ccrjustice.org/israel-s-unfolding-crime-genocide-palestinian-people-us-failure-prevent-and-complicity-genocide
85. 142 ICC (footnote 55), pp. 6-8
86. 143 Bosnia v. Serbia (footnote 40), para. 373; ICTR-95-1-T, para. 93
87. 144 ICTR-96-4-T, para. 118, 478, 579-580; Schabas, Genocide in International Law (footnote 32), p. 248
88. 145 Prosecutor v. Muhimana, ICTR-95-1B-T, Judgement, 28 April 2005, para. 498; Prosecutor v. Gacumbitsi, ICTR-2001-64-T, Judgement, 17 June 2004, para.253; ICTR-95-1-T, para. 93; Prosecutor v. Seromba, ICTR-01-66-A, Appeal Judgement, 12 March 2008, para. 176
89. 146 http://www.undocs.org/A/HRC/39/64 (2018), para. 85 refers to “broader oppressive context and hate rhetoric; specific utterances of commanders and direct perpetrators; exclusionary policies, including to alter the demographic composition…and the extreme scale and brutality of the violence committed”; ICTR-95-1B-T, para. 496
90. 147 Penny Green and Tony Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption (London: Pluto Press, 2004); Raz Segal, “A Textbook Case of Genocide”, Jewish Currents (13 October 2023). 148 ICTR-95-1-T, para. 93; Prosecutor v. Bagilishema, ICTR-95-1A-T, Judgement, 07 June 2001, para. 63 149 Croatia v. Serbia (footnote 44), para.
91. 148 Bosnia v. Serbia (footnote 40), para. 373
92. 149 Croatia v. Serbia (footnote 44), para. 148; Bosnia v. Serbia (footnote 40), para. 373
93. 150 https://law4palestine.org/law-for-palestine-releases-database-with-500-instances-of-israeli-incitement-to-genocide-continuously-updated/
94. 151 https://www.itv.com/news/2023-10-13/israeli-president-says-gazans-could-have-risen-up-to-fight-hamas 13 October 2023
95. 152 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIPkoDk6isc 28 October 2023
96. 153 https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/christmas-message-from-pm-netanyahu-24-dec-2023 24 December 2023
97. 154 Holy Bible 1 Samuel 15:3
98. 155 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbPdR3E4hCk 09 October 2023
99. 156 https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/gallant-israel-moving-to-full-offense-gaza-will-never-return-to-what-it-was/ 10 October 2023
100. 157 https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/hamas-israel-war-24/briefings-by-idf-spokesperson-rear-admiral-daniel-hagari/october-press-briefings/press-briefing-by-idf-spokesperson-rear-admiral-daniel-hagari-october-10th-morning/ 10 October 2023
101. 158 https://twitter.com/hahauenstein/status/1723441134221869453 11 November 2023
102. 159 https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/far-right-minister-nuking-gaza-is-an-option-population-should-go-to-ireland-or-deserts/ 5 November 2023
103. 160 https://twitter.com/YehudaShaul/status/1714301964886917631 17 October 2023
104. 161 https://law4palestine.org/law-for-palestine-releases-database-with-500-instances-of-israeli-incitement-to-genocide-continuously-updated/
105. 162 Prosecutor v. Muvunyi, ICTR-2000-55A-T, Judgement, 12 September 2006, paras. 502-505; Prosecutor v. Kajelijeli, ICTR-98-44A-T, Judgment,01 December 2003, paras. 851-852; see also https://www.hrw.org/reports/ictr0110webwcover.pdf 2010, p. 64-66, 69-70
106. 163 https://ccrjustice.org/genocide-palestinian-people-international-law-and-human-rights-perspective; Nurit Peled-Elhanan, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education (London: I.B. Taurus, 2012), p.162; see also http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/16/the-language-being-used-to-describe-palestinians-is-genocidal
107. 164 https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-dozens-israeli-rabbis-endorse-bombing-hospitals-enemies 01 November 2023; https://twitter.com/RavOuryCherki/status/1719713406050066491 01 November 2023
108. 165 https://x.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1732639958664356223?s=20 07 December 2023; https://x.com/ jeremyscahill/status/1737489631199850519?s=20 20/12/2023; https://x.com/YehudaShaul/status/1714301988358283769?s=20 17 October 2023; https://twitter.com/dverthaim/status/1710684531114602891 07 October 2023 166 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bnhWYJh8-I. 20 November 2023; https://twitter.com/gilmishali/status/1710653974397780392?s=46&t=JaT3Sau. 07 October 2023; https://twitter.com/YehudaShaul/status/1739641280462815611 26 December 2023.
109. 166 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bnhWYJh8-I. 20 November 2023; https://twitter.com/gilmishali/status/1710653974397780392?s=46&t=JaT3Sau_. 07 October 2023; https://twitter.com/YehudaShaul/status/1739641280462815611 26 December 2023
110. 167 https://www.phr.org.il/en/physicians-call-eng/ 06 November 2023
111. 168 https://www.instagram.com/middleeasteye/reel/C1elfQ7Nqeh/ 30 December 2023; https://x.com/PalestineChron/status/1737491845679128918?s=20 20 December 2023
112. 169 IT-09-92-T, para. 3435; ICJ, South Africa v. Israel (footnote. 8), para. 20-29
113. 170 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2024-02-04/ty-article/.premium/israeli-army-its-admits-staff-was-behind-graphic-gaza-telegram-channel/0000018d-70b4-dd6e-a98d-f4b6a9c00000, 04 February 2024
114. 171 Ibid.; https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/world/middleeast/israel-idf-soldiers-war-social-media-video.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&fbclid=IwAR1KvmIO ixGQNbtAkJRPgU2Y7XyctR5lMWjOxQc6T6la5ODfYWyUT7lBFsA_aem_Aa7puefGHHUwoZuhoXZnJDZJzbGn8LuFsBZh4hLnUDtJN0lcdK2sacwGZKrJ7dGj0HI;%20and%20https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2024-02-04/ty-article/.premium/israeli-army-its-admits-staff-was-behind-graphic-gaza-telegram-channel/0000018d-70b4-dd6e-a98d-f4b6a9c00000, 06 November 2023
115. 172 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb_oBSAZjDs 08 December 2023
116. 173 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/world/middleeast/israel-idf-soldiers-war-social-media-video.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&fbclid=IwAR1KvmIO%20%20ixGQNbtAkJRPgU2Y7XyctR5lMWjOxQc6T6la5ODfYWyUT7lBFsA_aem_Aa7puefGHHUwoZuhoXZnJDZJzbGn8LuFsBZh4hLnUDtJN0lcdK2sacwGZKrJ7dGj0HI;%20and%20https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2024-02-04/ty-article/.premium/israeli-army-its-admits-staff-was-behind-graphic-gaza-telegram-channel/0000018d-70b4-dd6e-a98d-f4b6a9c00000
117. 174 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qb_oBSAZjDs, 08 December 2023
118. 175 https://twitter.com/1717Bazz/status/1712176168823107986 11 October 2023; https://twitter.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1712918166437806294 13 October 2023; https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20231228-israeli-soldier-says-he-possibly-killed-a-12-year-old-girl/ 28 December 2023
119. 176 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-09/ty-article-magazine/.premium/growing-number-of-idf-soldiers-are-documenting-and-posting-their-own-abuse-of-palestinians/0000018b-ae60-dea2-a9bf-fefe96070000 09 November 2023
120. 
     177 https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1737593767752860117 20 December 2023
     178 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/06/world/middleeast/israel-idf-soldiers-war-social-media-video.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&fbclid=IwAR1KvmIO%20%20ixGQNbtAkJRPgU2Y7XyctR5lMWjOxQc6T6la5ODfYWyUT7lBFsA_aem_Aa7puefGHHUwoZuhoXZnJDZJzbGn8LuFsBZh4hLnUDtJN0lcdK2sacwGZKrJ7dGj0HI;%20and%20https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2024-02-04/ty-article/.premium/israeli-army-its-admits-staff-was-behind-graphic-gaza-telegram-channel/0000018d-70b4-dd6e-a98d-f4b6a9c00000, 06 February 2024
     179 Ibid.
     180 https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/pm-netanyahu-meets-with-romanian-pm-marcel-ciolacu-17-oct-2023 17 October 2023
     181 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/opinion/isaac-herzog-israel-hamas-gaza.html?partner=slack&smid=sl-share 03 November 2023
     182 https://twitter.com/Isaac_Herzog/status/1713661051986678189?s=20 15 October 2023
     183 Antony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 55–57, 75
     184 AP-I, articles 48, 51, 52 and 57; Customary IHL, rules 1, 7, 14-15
     185 https://law4palestine.org/law-for-palestine-releases-database-with-500-instances-of-israeli-incitement-to-genocide-continuously-updated/
     186 Customary IHL, rule 12; Luigi Daniele, “A lethal misconception, in Gaza and beyond: disguising indiscriminate attacks as potentially proportionate in discourses on the laws of war”, EJIL: Talk!, blog of European Journal of International Law, 7 November 2023.
     187 Bosnia v. Serbia (footnote 40), para. 373; Croatia v. Serbia (footnote 44), para. 148; ICTR-96-4-T, paras. 579-581; ICTR-95-1-T, para. 93-94; Schabas, Genocide in International Law (footnote 32), p. 248
     188 Customary IHL, rule 97; GCIII, article 23(1); GCIV, article 28; AP-I, articles 12 and 51(7)
     189 Rome Statute, article 8 (2) (b) (xxiii)
     190 AP-I, article 51
     191 Ibid, article 51(8)
     192 https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/015/2009/en/
     193 https://twitter.com/IDF/status/269218659472400384?s=20; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/dec/11/gaza-child-killed-nothing-changed
     194 https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2014/07/israelgaza-conflict-questions-and-answers/; Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, “The politics of human shielding: On the resignification of space and the constitution of civilians as shields in liberal wars”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 34 (2016), pp. 168, 182–183
     195 https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/08/23/gaza-israels-may-airstrikes-high-rises
     196 https://www.amnesty.org.uk/files/2022-10/Gaza Offensive.pdf?VersionId=f4O59c6Vn1FMnx5KvdJbnqVxAhXVvhVR – :~:text=On%205%20August%202022%2C%20Israel,five%20children%20at%20a%20cemetery
     197 Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini. Human Shields, A History of People in the Line of Fire (University of California Press, 2020), pp. 214–216
     198 http://www.undocs.org/A/HRC/12/48 (2009), paras. 449–452
     199 https://www.amnesty.org.uk/files/2022-10/Gaza Offensive.pdf?VersionId=f4O59c6Vn1FMnx5KvdJbnqVxAhXVvhVR – :~:text=On%205%20August%202022%2C%20Israel,five%20children%20at%20a%20cemetery; https://www.hrw.org/report/2009/08/13/white-flag-deaths/killings-palestinian-civilians-during-operation-cast-lead
     200 Law For Palestine, Submission to the ICC [Forthcoming]
     201 http://www.undocs.org/A/HRC/12/48 (2009), paras. 449–452; https://www.amnesty.org.uk/files/2022-10/Gaza Offensive.pdf?VersionId=f4O59c6Vn1FMnx5KvdJbnqVxAhXVvhVR – :~:text=On%205%20August%202022%2C%20Israel,five%20children%20at%20a%20cemetery
     202 https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/generalpage/swords-of-iron-faq-6-dec-2023/en/English_Documents_Israel-Hamas Conflict 2023 – FAQs (Israel MFA, 6.12.23).pdf: FAQs, pp. 2–3
     203 https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/president-herzog-reveals-hamas-captive-taking-handbook-15-oct-2023; https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/10/18/remarks-by-president-biden-and-prime-minister-benjamin-netanyahu-of-israel-before-expanded-bilateral-meeting-tel-aviv-israel/; https://www.gov.il/en/departments/news/1swordsofiron151023; https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/hamas-israel-war-24/briefings-by-idf-spokesperson-rear-admiral-daniel-hagari/october-press-briefings/press-briefing-by-idf-spokesperson-rear-admiral-daniel-hagari-october-10th-evening/
     204 https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/generalpage/swords-of-iron-faq-6-dec-2023/en/English_Documents_Hamas-Israel Conflict 2023 – Some Factual and Legal Aspects – Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2 NOV 2023).pdf: :Key Legal Aspects, 02 November 2023, p. 7, 9
     205 Ibid, p. 2
     206 Stéphanie Bouchié de Belle, “Chained to Cannons or Wearing Targets on Their T-shirts: Human Shields in International Humanitarian Law”, ICRC, vol. 90, no. 872 (2008), pp. 899-905
     207 Ibid., pp. 890-898; R. Geiß and J. G. Devaney, “Zealots, Victims and Captives: Maintaining Adequate Protection of Human Shields in Contemporary International Humanitarian Law”, Israel Yearbook on Human Rights, vol. 47 (2017), p. 11.
     208 https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/20/war-crime-israel-bombs-gaza-church-sheltering-displaced-people – :~:text=War%20on%20Gaza-,Israel%20bombs%20Greek%20Orthodox%20Gaza%20church%20sheltering%20displaced%20people,%27large%20number%27%20of%20people.
     209 https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1727059761466650632?s=20
     210 https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1725683576522334603?s=20
     211 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/israel-photos-hamas-gaza-weapons-un-facilities-including-schools/, 08/11/2023; https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1724002788810600946?s=20
     212 https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/academia-gaza-has-been-destroyed-israeli-educide
     213 https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1725455901824323697?s=20
     214 Gordon & Perugini (footnote 197), pp.159–169; https://blogs.icrc.org/law-and-policy/2021/11/18/proximate-human-shields/
     215 Elyse Semerdjian, “A World Without Civilians”, Journal of Genocide Research, 24 January 2024, p.3
     216 AP-I, article 52 (2); Customary IHL, rule 8.
     217 https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/generalpage/swords-of-iron-faq-6-dec-2023/en/English_Documents_Israel-Hamas Conflict 2023 – FAQs (Israel MFA, 6.12.23).pdf: FAQs, pp. 2, 9.
     218 Ibid., p. 9
     219 https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/generalpage/swords-of-iron-faq-6-dec-2023/en/English_Documents_Israel-Hamas Conflict 2023 – FAQs (Israel MFA, 6.12.23).pdf: FAQs p.14; https://www.maariv.co.il/breaking-news/Article-1044157 admitted neighbourhoods attacked “on a large scale and not in a surgical manner”; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-APSXZy9UI
     220 Declared previously, e.g. https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1393553534218604552?s=20; https://www.justsecurity.org/76657/the-idfs-unlawful-attack-on-al-jalaa-tower/
     221 https://www.israeldefense.co.il/node/37949
     222 https://www.972mag.com/mass-assassination-factory-israel-calculated-bombing-gaza/
     223 Ibid
     224 https://airwars.org/civilian-casualties/ispt0587-october-25-2023/
     225 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/27/gaza-before-and-after-satellite-images-show-destruction-after-israeli-airstrikes
     226 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-bomb-investigation.html
     227 https://www.ft.com/content/7b407c2e-8149-4d83-be01-72dcae8aee7b
     228 Daniele, “A lethal misconception” (footnote 186).
     229 https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/generalpage/swords-of-iron-faq-6-dec-2023/en/English_Documents_Israel-Hamas Conflict 2023 – FAQs (Israel MFA, 6.12.23).pdf: FAQs, pp. 4, 11–13.
     230 https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/generalpage/swords-of-iron-faq-6-dec-2023/en/English_Documents_Hamas-Israel Conflict 2023 – Some Factual and Legal Aspects – Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2 NOV 2023).pdf: :Key Legal Aspects, 02 November 2023, pp. 10.
     231 https://ig.ft.com/gaza-damage/:~:text=The%20bombardments%20have%20destroyed%20livelihoods ,flattened%20or%20suffered%20heavy%20damage
     232 https://airwars.org/civilian-casualties/ispt0783-october-31-2023/
     233 https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1717840051491541077
     234 https://airwars.org/civilian-casualties/ispt0783-october-31-2023/
     235 https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/10/31/wolf-idf-spokesperson-gaza-refugee-camp-airstrike-reaction-vpx.cnn,
     236 Daniele, “A lethal misconception” (footnote 186).
     237 https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/damning-evidence-of-war-crimes-as-israeli-attacks-wipe-out-entire-families-in-gaza/
     238 https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/generalpage/swords-of-iron-faq-6-dec-2023/en/English_Documents_Hamas-Israel Conflict 2023 – Some Factual and Legal Aspects – Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2 NOV 2023).pdf: :Key Legal Aspects, 02 November 2023, p. 10.
     239 https://www.justsecurity.org/90789/israels-rewriting-of-the-law-of-war/3
     240 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jb1krYLPLZI; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yRl-cc-D3w; https://twitter.com/QudsNen/status/1723784790682358189. While such arguments have been tempered over time (see https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/generalpage/swords-of-iron-faq-6-dec-2023/en/English_Documents_Israel-Hamas Conflict 2023 – FAQs (Israel MFA, 6.12.23).pdf: FAQs, p.11-12), action on the ground has remained ruthless; see, among others, the attacks on the Gaza police while assisting food delivery in northern Gaza, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/02/22/gaza-aid-deliveries-looting-police-hamas/
     241 Luigi Daniele, “Incidentally Capsized”, Oxford Journal of Conflict and Security Law, vol. 29, no. 1, forthcoming.
     242 API, article 58(1).
     243 GCIII, article 49.
     244 Ibid.
     245 https://mezan.org/en/post/46293; https://mezan.org/en/post/46287 – :~:text=Al%20Mezan%20Center%20for%20Human,Transfer%2C%20Urgent%20Intervention%20is%20Needed
     246 https://x.com/AvichayAdraee/status/1712846493747495223?s=20; https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/idf-urges-palestinians-to-leave-northern-gaza-strip-by-8-p-m/
     247 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/15/world/middleeast/israel-gaza.html
     248 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67327079
     249 https://content.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Humanitarian-Violence_Report_FA.pdf 07/03/2024, sections 6.1.2 and 6.1.3
     250 https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2024/1/6/safe-zones-israels-technologies-of-genocide
     251 https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/hamas-israel-war-24/war-on-hamas-2023-resources/the-idf-continues-the-effort-to-move-the-residents-of-the-gaza/; https://www.mezan.org/uploads/files/2024/1/17096645765 november.jpeg
     252 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/08/israeli-soldiers-idf-gaza-fighting-disaster-area?CMP=share_btn_tw; https://www.mezan.org/uploads/files/2024/1/1709664576signal-2023-10-22-030620_002.jpeg
     253 Hague Regulations (1907), article 26; AP-I, article 57(2)(c). The term used in these provisions is ‘advance warning’; see Bosnia v. Serbia (footnote 40), para.373.
     254 https://www.emro.who.int/images/stories/palestine/WHO_oPt_Sitrep_6s.pdf
     255 https://www.who.int/news/item/14-10-2023-evacuation-orders-by-israel-to-hospitals-in-northern-gaza-are-a-death-sentence-for-the-sick-and-injured
     256 https://edition.cnn.com/gaza-israel-big-bombs/index.html
     257 Ibid; https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-bomb-investigation.html
     258 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-34; https://sheltercluster.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/public/docs/gsc_opt_gaza strip_damage affected areas_27october2023_a1.pdf?VersionId=bTM7V0miJzKDudKwJL8Dvy1Kdt2uy4kZ; https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/22044.html
     259 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-22
     260 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-45
     261 https://english.elpais.com/international/2024-01-22/25000-deaths-in-gaza-why-the-destruction-of-this-war-exceeds-that-of-other-major-conflicts.html?outputType=amp
     262 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-8; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/14/gaza-civilians-afraid-to-leave-home-after-bombing-of-safe-routes; https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/live-blog/israel-hamas-war-live-updates-rcna120252
     263 https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/pauses-corridors-and-safe-zones-gaza-rhetoric-vs-reality; https://www.ft.com/content/95c5fcf1-c756-415f-85b8-1e4bbff24736
     264 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-35; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-46; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-50; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-105; https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/22452.html
     265 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-53
     266 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/02/israeli-grid-system-makes-life-in-gaza-macabre-game-of-battleships-say-aid-workers
     267 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67630489
     268 https://www.savethechildren.net/news/complete-communication-blackout-four-days-and-counting-makes-aid-distribution-gazanear:~:text=Gaza%2C%2017%20December%202023%20%2D%20The ,Rafah%2C%20says%20Save%20the%20Children.; https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/18/middleeast/gaza-communications-blackout-one-week-israel-hamas-intl/index.html
     269 https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-says-ground-forces-operating-across-gaza-strip-offensive-builds-2023-12-04/
     270 Ibid; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlGmwCMETMs
     271 https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-12-26-2023-698c895797ccb057d13fe4f68690c98b?taid=658b24eaca93ff0001d4103d&utm_campaign=TrueAnthem&utm_medium=AP&utm_source=Twitter; https://www.savethechildren.org/us/about-us/media-and-news/2024-press-releases/gaza-mostly-children-killed-by-israeli-airstrikes-near-al-mawasi:~:text=4%2C%202024)%E2%80%94Fourteen%20people,aid%20agency%20Save%20the%20Children; https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/israelopt-fresh-evidence-probable-war-crimes-israeli-attacks-rafah; https://edition.cnn.com/2024/02/06/middleeast/palestinians-trapped-rafah-israeli-offensive-intl/index.html; https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israel-strikes-rafah-refugee-camp-22-killed-local-health-officials-say-2024-02-12/
     272 South Africa v. Israel (footnote 8), para.86.
     273 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-129
     274 https://www.nrc.no/news/2024/february/gaza-israels-military-operation-in-rafah-would-be-fatal-for-displaced-civilians-and-humanitarian-aid/
     275 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-101?_gl=111oo43s_gaMTExMzc0OTEwNC4xNzA3ODMyMTQ0_ga_E60ZNX2F68*MTcwOTQwMDA0OC42LjEuMTcwOTQwMTEyNi42MC4wLjA.
     276 https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/assessment-israeli-material-icj-jan-2024
     277 https://www.israelhayom.co.il/news/geopolitics/article/15002089; https://www.trtworld.com/middle-east/live-blog-netanyahu-reportedly-pushes-for-voluntary-migration-from-gaza-16382395
     278 https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-minister-calls-voluntary-emigration-gazans-2023-11-14/; https://www.timesofisrael.com/smotrich-doubles-down-on-resettlement-of-gazans-rejecting-us-criticism/
     279 https://www.timesofisrael.com/ministers-call-for-resettling-gazas-palestinians-building-settlements-in-strip/ 01 January 2024
     280 https://www.timesofisrael.com/intelligence-ministry-concept-paper-proposes-transferring-gazans-to-egypts-sinai/
     281 https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid036UqRhgJTnem4PTjwWbfen66cwCGA P4zDQsMhcwuWE7PQ5fMJAeEwpaSYyhnR95Cbl&id=100050298347371&paipv=0&eav=AfaYuQI6JO9t5f79-OwyTkll4XyPbjoOR76oXREbhs_jTghukglHzjJy9kKH7cIrHWo&_rdr; https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-west-should-welcome-gaza-refugees-asylum-seekers-hamas-terrorism-displacement-5d2b5890; https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-in-talks-with-congo-and-other-countries-on-gaza-voluntary-migration-plan/; https://twitter.com/israeltrnsltd/status/1741891754196901934
     282 https://www.timesofisrael.com/israel-in-talks-with-congo-and-other-countries-on-gaza-voluntary-migration-plan/; https://twitter.com/israeltrnsltd/status/1741891754196901934
     283 https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/israeli-cabinet-minister-says-war-will-lead-to-emigration-from-gaza_uk_659fa54de4b0fbd2bc05cc78 11 January 2024
     284 https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-01-28/ty-article/ministers-from-netanyahus-party-join-thousands-of-israelis-at-resettle-gaza-conference/0000018d-512f-dfdc-a5ad-db7f35e10000
     285 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8nyroIlXlM
     286 Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, “Medical Lawfare.” Journal of Palestine Studies. Spring 2024, forthcoming.
     287 Ibid; ; https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/generalpage/swords-of-iron-faq-6-dec-2023/en/English_Documents_Israel-Hamas Conflict 2023 – FAQs (Israel MFA, 6.12.23).pdf: FAQs, 06/12/2023, p. 2, 9, 13, 14.
     288 AP-I, articles 13(1) and 52(3); GCI, article 21; GCIV, articles 18 and 19; AP-II 2, article 11(2).
     289 GCIV, articles 18-19; AP-I, article 12(4).
     290 Hagari, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ggBF9rnBe0
     291 https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/hamas-operations-in-hospitals/
     292 Neve Gordon and Nicola Perugini, “‘Hospital Shields’ and the Limits of International Law”, EJIL 30, no. 2 (May 2019), p. 43.
     293 https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-military-says-hamas-hiding-tunnels-operations-centres-gaza-hospital-2023-10-27/
     294 https://shifa.forensic-architecture.org/; https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-flash-update-16
     295 https://twitter.com/IDF/status/1718010359397634252?s=20
     296 https://www.gov.il/BlobFolder/generalpage/swords-of-iron-faq-6-dec-2023/en/English_Documents_Hamas-Israel Conflict 2023 – Some Factual and Legal Aspects – Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2 NOV 2023).pdf: :Key Legal Aspects, p. 9
     297 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/12/control-of-al-shifa-hospital-in-gaza-is-a-key-israeli-military-and-political-aim
     298 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67462615
     299 https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/too-close-too-cold-premature-babies-grave-peril-gazas-al-shifa-hospital-2023-11-13/
     300 Figures provided by WHO Eastern Mediterranean Region 24 February 2024
     301 https://www.emro.who.int/images/stories/palestine/WHO_Sitrep_13.pdf?ua=1
     302 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/12/21/al-shifa-hospital-gaza-hamas-israel/; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBtJhI1fIw; https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/assessment-israeli-material-icj-jan-2024
     303 https://edition.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-hamas-war-gaza-news-11-18-23/h_1d70c190adde686e6a2b59e963499e82
     304 https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/truth-or-fake/20231116-idf-claims-to-find-list-of-hamas-names-but-it-s-the-days-of-the-week-in-arabic
     305 https://www.emro.who.int/images/stories/palestine/WHO_Sitrep_13.pdf?ua=1
     306 https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-israel-reported-impact-day-40
     307 https://gaza-projections.org/ p. 10
     308 Perugini and Gordon, “Medical Lawfare” (footnote 286)
     309 http://www.undocs.org/a/RES/56/83 (2002), article 31

Vote of Shame: Senate, House vote to cut UNRWA funding; Biden signs bill

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak

(Editor’s Note: As Facebook is now censoring all my posts following my posts related to Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, I’ll be posting them here, as I’m able.)

As reported Monday on Democracy Now, President Biden has signed, and 74 senators and 286 representatives — concretely, this means Democrats are also complicit — a spending bill which eliminates funding for the next year to UNRWA, the lifeline to millions of Palestinians particularly in Gaza and the leading agency trying to salve the ongoing damage and famine being inflicted by Israel on a population whose well-being it is charged by international law to protect; this on undocumented conveniently issued charges by Israel (the day after the International Court of Justice ruled it was plausibly committing genocide in Gaza and ordered it to stop) against nine of UNRWA’s 13,000 employees. In casting her no vote — thus, to maintain the funding — New York Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explained:

“If you want to know what an unfolding genocide looks like, open your eyes. It looks like the forced famine of 1.1 million innocents. It looks like thousands of children eating grass as their bodies consume themselves, while trucks of food are slowed and halted just miles away. It looks like good and decent people who do nothing, or too little, too late. It is against United States law to provide weapons to forces who block United States humanitarian assistance. And that is exactly what is happening right now.”

Paxton (and relations) Forever: White Oak Diary or, Past Forward to the Future

By Asimina Chremos
Copyright 2000, 2024 Asimina Chremos

(In honor of Judson co-founder and Contact Improvisation fount Steve Paxton, who died on February 21, the Dance Insider has been revisiting its 25-year archive of exclusive Flash Reviews, Interviews, Jill Johnston Letters, and other reactions to and reflections on the legacy of Paxton and, more broadly, the Judson Church movement and its various satellites and acolytes which revolutionized dance and art beginning in the early 1960s. And we unearthed the following treasure. The beauty of Asimina Chremos’s rhapsody-cum- in the trenches report/review/re-viewed / dispatch here is that, as with most of Chremos’s pieces, she’s not just reviewing a dance performance or even (as here) viewing the (re)construction of an evening of dances from both the stage and the wings (and other vantage points, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise/delight), she’s dancing in the prose itself — or, here, Contact Improvisation dancing in a way that as free-spirited as it may sound, comes out as anything but improvised and as fine as any pre-meditated masterpiece. This Flash Journal was first published on the DI on November 21, 2000. — PB-I)

CHICAGO — Hello, Dance Insiders! I just completed a very intense week as part of the Chicago community cast of Past Forward, the current program being offered by Mikhail Baryshnikov’s White Oak Dance Project. I participated in six shows (I think!) with varying programs. What follows is a diary I attempted to keep on November 11. There was so much, it was such a rich experience; this is just a little random slice of it.

“So, should I put on my ‘Satisfyin’ Lover” clothes?” “We have to ‘Huddle’ in the lobby today.” These are phrases I overhear as I warm up in a studio at the new Dance Center of Columbia College, upstairs from the intimate theater where I will soon be performing in the Saturday matinee.

---

Just came back upstairs after the most sublime “Huddle” in the small dance studio off the lobby. There are several of Chicago’s fiercest improvisers in the 8-member “Red Leather” Huddle/Scramble group (we got to choose nicknames for our groups). Kathleen Maltese, Selene Carter, Tiina Harris. Normally I am in the group nicknamed Rocks, but one of the Red Leatherettes decided being climbed on was not the thing so I volunteered to fill in. The group breathed together, felt solid and serene. Around us I heard the hubbub of the audience filtering in and the ’60s music playing through the sound system. Kind of theme-park goofy, but it sure is fun to improvise to Jimi Hendrix’s version of the National Anthem. The watchers in the room with us were drawn into our energy. Their talking subsided as they were sucked into the quiet earnest sensitivity and effort of our task of huddling together, arms around waists and shoulders, legs in deep supportive wide stance, backs facing out, and one or two people dislodging, climbing over, and rejoining the Huddle. Simone said the other day that in some languages there is no translation for “Huddle” so in those cases she calls it “Mountain.” Huddle is nice because it is a verb and a noun both. Think of mountain as a verb….

Huddling with Red Leather is so different than with Rocks. In Rocks we have newer improvisers, and one more guy. The majority of the community cast is female. The usual John Bergeresque politics, I guess; women are more socialized to “appear.” Anyway, in Rocks we experience more struggle, more work, more fear, more eagerness. I love doing Forti’s pieces. Such lessons in group dynamics and interdependence. Well, I better go check about changing my clothes for what I have to do next. I can’t keep track of what happens when. I have a joke about being a sheep and just waiting for the herd to move me to the next place. Baaa baaa.

---

Okay! I’m out of the black and grey sweatpants Huddle outfit and into my street clothes for Steve Paxton’s walking piece, “Satisfyin Lover.” I’ll wait for Nancy Duncan, who taught us all these works and handles the community cast, to round the 40-some of us up and get us in line to walk down the hall, through the door, down the steps, past the security guard and onto the stage. There’s a whole walking piece prior to the walking piece. Hanging out in the community room listening to the chatter of many voices, and periodically getting in line, is reminding me of kindergarten. This association is helped by the fact that that there’re kids and babies around.

Nancy’s got a rough job, keeping track of all of us. Also, as she admitted to us, there is a great paradox to White Oak. All these “pedestrian” pieces that were once so rebellious, spontaneous, and process-oriented have become products for the semi-formal stagings of Past Forward. There are rather clear parameters for how to walk, stand, sit, climb on the Huddle, Scramble, etcetera. A certain amount of self-conscious decorum seems to be called for that doesn’t seem authentic to the original spirit of the work. But it’s fun anyway.

---

I am #5 in line for “Satisfyin’ Lover.” Why is it called that? Simone says Steve is always creative and unpredictable. She told a story that once she had bought a cabin and was trying to scrape off these shellacked paper bags that covered the floor. She was getting really frustrated. Steve Paxton came in and said something like “Simone, this problem is as good as the next.” We all laughed.

My score is:

Enter when #1 pauses
Walk to 1/5 across stage
Stand 20 seconds
Continue walk to exit.

My experience of doing this simple work so far, just walking on stage and standing and then walking, is that of being exposed. There’s nothing to do but be yourself. A couple of previous performances, I’ve waited for my cue, entered, and then in the middle of counting start to think: did I walk too fast? Nancy asked us to be calm, relaxed…. am I calm? Oops, I’m thinking, not counting…. Breathe, sense the space, I remind myself. I’ve been working in my own work on being aware of space. Here’s a chance to do it. I stand in the black space of the stage and try not to look directly into the light that’s glaring in front of me. People pass by me; I feel as if I am receding. Then I’m done counting and I go. It’s not the same walk I do upstairs to go down the hall, away from so many eyeballs.

---

The Red Leather group just came upstairs, breathing a little hard and a little sweaty, from doing the Scramble on stage with the company. There have been issues about White Oak dancers being hit or tromped on by community members and the whole thing seems a little tense, the company doesn’t want to do a warm-up Scramble with the community and they also don’t want to Scramble with both groups. So Red Leather gets to do it every time. The politics are such that there’s a slight vibe about the Community Slobs vs. the Precious Dancers. The Community people are afraid of damaging the Dancers. It’s kinda weird. But everyone who just came upstairs from doing it looks exhilarated. Anyway, someone is saying “When they called 9 1/2 (the cue to end the Scramble), there was such a rush of desire, everyone wanted to burst in and shift the flow.” “It flared before it quelched.”

More people around me are talking about their experience of Landscaping in the lobby. “Landscapes” is another of Forti’s scores. Albert, who teaches African Dance to kids and seniors (Ghanean, I think), is saying that it reminds him of the game of statues.

---

It’s our break between the matinee and the evening show. I take the somewhat longish walk through the cold wind and light snow to a cafe where I can be alone and write. I seem to have stumbled on Goth social hour. What’s funny is with my blue hair and the clothes I chose this morning, I sort of fit in. No one here knows I am a refugee from the museum of postmodern dance. How many people here know who Mikhail Baryshnikov is? I wonder. Probably a lot, even Goth kids. He’s pretty famous. People have asked me what is it like to see him; Is it intense for me because I was a little ballerina wannabe when Misha was in his balletic prime? and so on. Am I starstruck? He’s just a person, I find myself replying. He participates in the work just like the rest of us. He is friendly and reserved. It’s the nature of the work itself to remove the glamour from the situation. Yvonne Rainer’s “No Manifesto” (No to spectacle, virtuosity, seduction of the audience by the performer…) resonates.

Waiting downstairs in my Nana’s black dress to go onstage for Deborah Hay’s “Exit,” I took occasion to read a copy of a review that is posted on the wall, by Clive Barnes, in the New York Times and dated January 11, 1966. It’s a scathing pan of new works by David Gordon, Yvonne Rainer, Steve Paxton, et. al. Calling them immature and terrible, cringing at painter Robert Rauschenberg’s un-dancerly appearance; I don’t recall much of the descriptive and derogatory language, but there was one phrase that sticks in my mind: “blissfully boring.” Maybe old Clive did “get it” despite his irritation and disappointment. By taking away costumes, makeup, virtuosity and spectacle and so on, the artists of the Judson movement left us with the boring bliss of existence. Standing on stage, walking around. Stripped of profound mythic hopes, heroic future-oriented striving, poetic memory- driven expressiveness, or godlike willful creativity and forceful manifestation. Human.

I love performing “Exit.” I learn something new every time about time and memory and experience. It’s a simple score about walking towards the future and stopping to look back at your past, progressing along a diagonal from downstage right to upstage left, all to the highly emotional Barber String Quartet. My mother was one of the first people to hear that piece at a concert at Antioch College. That must’ve been in the early ’60s or late ’50s. I need to ask her about what it was like to hear that for the first time. I love the silent moment in the music. It reinforces that idea that looking into your future is like falling into a void. Like my favorite cinematic image at the end of Kurusawa’s “Ran,” when the blind man is standing on the edge of the cliff.

There is a live video feed of the stage to a TV set in the community room. However, one of the juiciest parts of this whole White Oak deal for me is sneaking onto the catwalk to watch the show in the theater. I’m becoming fascinated by the group dance Whizz and developing a deep curiosity about Deborah Hay through what I’ve experienced with White Oak. Dancers Manu and Raquel told me about their initial hesitation in working with Hay: She was so wacky, giving them directions like “invite being seen” and “collapse the live space” to develop the movements that would take them from one spatial pattern to another. There’s a gentleness, a flickering, twitching transparency to “Whizz.” I especially enjoyed watching Manu perform in this today. By talking to her I got the impression that she’s skeptical, still, about Hay’s work and process. But Manu’s sparkling awareness was very present and compelling; she at times wore a wry expression I read as acknowledgment of the lightness, the subtle humor of the situation; or maybe it was pure irreverence!

Okay, I found out I’ve crashed a gathering of Goth website organizers. It’s such an e-world, Dance Insiders!

My mind flashes to the flashy metallic pants the dancers wear in a trio from Trisha Brown’s “Foray Foret.” What a gorgeous piece! It’s delicious, I was telling the dancers. Like candy, Raquel said. But it’s a healthy dance! said Simone in her enthusiastic way. I tried to get Raquel to show me a move from it, a deceptively difficult transition from a downward-dog type of thing with one leg in the air to a headstand. I’m still figuring it out. Raquel, Roz and Michael bring a weighted, heavy fluid quality to Brown’s choreography that is really different from the slippery weightlessness I recall from seeing this piece done by Brown’s company. It’s funny how the word transparency keeps coming up for me in thinking about these choreographers.

I was lucky to hear Misha, Simone, and David Gordon converse about Trisha Brown the other night, sharing anecdotes about what a wild and fearless improviser she used to be back in the day. Gordon told a story about how he once bought three frilly dresses at a thrift store and brought them to rehearsal. Trisha, he said, put a long prom gown on over her t-shirt and sweatpants and ran across the floor and right up the wall, where she flourished the hem of her gown and said “Look, I’m a girl!” before coming down. This came out after Misha was saying that Brown is so specific in her choreography, so exacting now. Time passes, things change, sometimes a lot!

I’d better get back to the theater and start getting ready to “Landscape” and “Huddle in the Lobby” for the evening show. My landscape partner, Fish, says he feels like a mime. I struggle with inviting being seen.

Post-modern classics: In Paxton ‘Bound’ and Jingju Peking Circus ‘Women Generals,’ a tale of two countries’ attitudes towards dance preservation

Jurij Konjar in Steve Paxton’s “Bound.” Nada Zgank photo copyright Nada Zgank and courtesy Theatre de la Ville.

By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2015, 2019, 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak

(Editor’s Note: To celebrate the life and work of Steve Paxton, who passed away February 21, the Dance Insider today re-publishes the following review and exclusive interview of the co-founder of the Judson Church movement and forefather of the Contact Improvisation universe the last time we saw him in Paris. First published on the DI on October 26, 2015. Special thanks to dance insider E.Z. for the sad news tip. For more on Steve Paxton, see today’s re-publication of the Jill Johnston Letter.)

PARIS — What do the aesthetics of Steve Paxton and the Peking Opera have to do with each other? When performed by, respectively, Jurij Konjar and the Jingju Theatre of Beijing, as they were last week at the Theatre de la Ville – Abbesses and the Theatre de la Ville Sarah Bernhardt, virtuosity and engagement. For the full story, please click here.

The Johnston Letter, Volume 1, Number 7: Baryshnikov Dancing Judson (Juxtaposed with Dalí Dancing at the Art Institute)

By Jill Johnston
Copyright 2001 Jill Johnston

(Editor’s Note: To celebrate the life and work of Steve Paxton, who passed away February 21, the Dance Insider today re-publishes this Jill Johnston Letter from Jill Johnston, who was there at the birth, and which includes some reflections on vintage Paxton as performed at Judson. This article originally appeared in the December 2001 issue of Art in America and is reprinted by permission of Art in America and the author.  A special tip of the DI beret to dance insider E.Z. for the sad news tip. For more on Steve Paxton, including the DI’s exclusive 2015 interview in Paris, please click here. )

I went to see Mikhail Baryshnikov and his White Oak Dance Project at the Brooklyn Academy of Music the week of June 4 because the work of seven so-called Judson choreographers was featured. The program was called “Past Forward,” meaning that post-Judson work by the choreographers, up in fact to the present, was included. I often put myself out to see the work of my time, or work by those of my time as it keeps evolving (or not), generally seeing little else. As a true old-timer, I tend to believe that all that came after is crap. In the case of the Judson revolution in dance-making, I may actually be right. Oh, I know there are individually brilliant works around, and of course there have been for years. But it takes a group to make a revolution. And revolutions happen probably only once or twice a century. And for those of us leavened on the art of revolutionary times, there can never be anything like it again. Not unless it comes again. And the 1960s will never come again. For the full Letter and the Dali art, please click here.

The Chevalier de la Barre, 2/22/2024: Appease the genociders and pass them more ammunition: Say it ain’t so, Joe

by Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2024 Paul Ben-Itzak

“I’m an American doctor who went to Gaza; what I saw wasn’t war, it was annihilation.”

— Dr. Irfan Galaria, writing in the Los Angeles Times

Late last week, as the world was learning of the discovery of the body of a five-year-old Palestinian girl in a car entoured by the bodies of five relatives, several meters from the lifeless bodies of the two Red Crescent paramedics dispatched, with Israeli approval, to rescue her, all apparently killed by Israeli shelling and bombing, and less than two weeks after the world heard the girl’s 15-year-old cousin pleading with a Red Crescent dispatcher to send help as an Israeli tank bore down on the car until the girl screamed amidst the rat-a-tat-tat of Israeli gunfire followed by a harrowing silence as well as the dispatcher’s subsequent conversation with 5-year-old Hind as she pleaded for three hours for help to come, an overwhelming majority of 77 United States Senators including all but two Democrats and Independent Senator Bernie Sanders voted to send Israel $14 million more worth of arms, effectively enabling a rogue state which has already killed nearly 30,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians including at least 12,000 children — 5,000 since the International Court of Justice ordered it to stop on January 26 and not counting 6,000 buried under the rubble of buildings leveled by Israel — to keep on killing with effective impunity. (Indeed, the mainstream media, at least here in France, has devoted more air time over the past week to playing Where’s Navalny’s body? than it has over the past 130 days interrogating the fate of those 6,000 civilians. And the one public radio report on Israel’s assassination of Hind and her relatives practically made it sound like they were just caught amidst the tank fire, victims of a perpetrator-less tragedy rather than having been targeted as all the evidence suggests.) And Tuesday, just days after the Israeli army besieged, bombed the fourth floor of, forcibly evacuated, kidnapped many of the medical staff of, and cut electricity at the largest hospital in Southern Gaza thus causing between two and eight Intensive Care Unit patients to suffocate to death when their oxygen supply was cut off, and with one of six Palestinian children starving to death and 2.2 million people facing imminent famine according to the World Health Organization, Joe Biden once again vetoed a United Nations Security Council resolution that would have ordered an immediate cease-fire, stopped the carnage, and let substantive humanitarian aid in.

Now, before we go on, I want to ask you to just stop, close your eyes, make them the eyes of a 5-year-old child trapped in a car with the dead bodies of five relatives including her 15-year-old cousin, and imagine what it is like staring at the monstrous machine eyes of their assailant, a tank intent on killing you. I don’t know about you, but when I was five years old, my mother was walking me to Alvarado Elementary School in San Francisco’s Noe Valley, the face of authority was not a tank firing bullets at me and my family, it was Miss Stettner, in her high boots and with her long black hair and Karen Valentine dimples, drawing pictures and forming letters on a blackboard and opening my mind up as her smile held me mesmerized, and I still had 57 years of education and teacher crushes ahead of me. And unlike the Palestinian boy who turned up at a Gaza hospital recently with enough of his leg blown away that you could see the bones after Israel bombed the school with UNITED NATIONS written on it where his family had taken refuge thinking they’d be safe, killing the rest of his family as the boy recounted to the American plastic surgeon who tried to treat him (sterile instruments and instruments period are at a minimum at Gaza’s few remaining functional hospitals, with Israel blocking all but a trickle of deliveries of medical and food supplies; the doctor, interviewed on Democracy Now, said he witnessed hundreds of trucks lined up on the Egyptian side of the Rafa border waiting to get in), when I was 14, I was insulting my own nose as Cyrano and wooing Naomi Woolf’s Roxanne in a drama class at Hoover Junior High School. When I was little more than 15, the age of Hind’s sister before Israel nipped her life out as it was budding, I was not screaming as faceless Jewish soldiers were firing real bullets at me determined to kill me until I could scream no more, I was offstage with the rest of the cast of “The Diary of Anne Frank,” crying over our imagined deaths at the hands of an imaginary Gestapo as the final scene — Otto Frank returning to the Secret Annex after the war to discover his daughter’s journal so that he could share its lessons with the world — played out, little imagining that 46 years later the roles would be reversed, with Jewish soldiers hunting down and killing in their homes, their schools, their hospitals, their mosques and their churches another Semitic people, thus crapping on Anne Frank’s most important legacy: Never again and putting to the test her most enduring precept: “In spite of everything, I still believe that people are good at heart.”

Even for those of us who have observed Israel’s arrogant comportment with the Palestinians subject to its rule and ongoing defiance of international law over the years, particularly in Gaza (where this is not the first time it has killed civilians) and to a lesser extent in the West Bank which like Gaza it has illegally occupied for 57 years, Israel’s vicious, merciless, genocidal acts — by the evidence, those doing the killing and those directing them do not see Palestinians, even children, as human beings — over the past four months, as it over-avenges Hamas’s equally (in degree and dehumanizing optic if not in scale) vicious and inhuman massacre of 1200 people and kidnapping of more than 200 surpasses what History has shown us Man is capable of doing to his fellow man, at least since 1945, as Israel continues to bank on and abuse the latitude accorded it in the United States and Europe and among many Jews because of the last Holocaust to perpetrate another genocide.

Because I have been watching this, watching Israel’s human rights abuses, watching the growth of an Apartheid state which treats people as lesser citizens and human beings because of their race, watching its bombing of civilians in Gaza and Lebanon for 18 years, I have long been liberated from the blinders which have made so many Jews refuse to see — to believe — what Israel has become because it is a Jewish state or because they feel we need a Jewish State to protect us from the next Holocaust, refuse to believe the next genocide could be generated by an allegedly Jewish state. In this respect I am not disillusioned that a “Jewish” state could do this because I stopped believing in the intrinsic morality of such a state just because it lays claim to that appellation a long time ago.

I am, however, disillusioned by Joe Biden, who has singularly (well, not so singularly as all that; he had a little help from his secretary of state and those Democratic and Republican senators who voted to keep the bombs coming) destroyed any residue of the belief I once had in the ability and inkling of my country, globally, to be a force for good, a moral beacon. (There are too many good Americans, including Palestinian and Jewish Americans — as there are Israelis, including journalists, members of parliament, and conscientiously objecting soldiers, and of course Palestinians — trying to counter their president’s effective enabling of genocide for me not to believe in our individual power to still do good.)

For despite Anita Hill, despite his approval as a senator of George Bush’s illegal and bloody invasion of Iraq, until he continued sending arms to Israel in the face of this imminent and now in process genocide and blocking any efforts to stop this carnage, I had still believed that Joe Biden was essentially a decent man, a confirmed and sincere anti-racist who cared as much about Black and Brown (including Arab) lives as he does about white (Ukrainian) lives. And despite Iraq, despite Vietnam, despite Cambodia, despite Chili, despite Iran (where we instigated the overthrow of a democratically elected government in the 1950s), despite Kissinger and all the war crimes in which he implicated us, I still believed that my country could be a moral beacon for the world.

But my country’s conduct here, its continued and persistent effective fueling of Israel’s genocide in Gaza and in the face of Israel’s deliberate enfeebling of hospitals (another tool of genocide) and killing of medical workers and journalists, our continued blocking of efforts by the rest of the world to stop the killing and start substantially funneling in the humanitarian aid, our increasingly brazen cynicism — State Department spokesman Matt Miller telling reporters that the U.S. had confidence in an Israeli investigation of 5-year-old Hind’s killing; if I had a shekel for every time Israel announced it was investigating itself for killing civilians, including Palestinian-American journalists killed by Israeli snipers despite being clearly identified as Press and American defenders of Palestinian homes being leveled by Israeli tractors, and never followed through, I’d be able to found my own Jewish state — for me my country’s ongoing support of this rogue state despite its genocidal rampage is worse than a tragedy. It’s a moral abdication.

And it’s appeasement. It’s appeasement of a genocidal state which, unlike even Germany, which by setting up the model concentration camp of Theresienstadt, where Jews were allowed to create an orchestra and which the Red Cross was invited to tour (Israel, by contrast, is killing Red Crescent workers, 14 to date according to a spokesman for the organization, as well 100 UNRWA employees according to UNRWA), at least indicated it knew that what it was doing would be looked at as wrong by other nations and tried to gloss it over by presenting a counter-image, however false, Israel — which as opposed to conjuring Theresienstadt has resurrected the Warsaw Ghetto, as Masha Gessen has pointed out — doesn’t seem to care what the rest of the world thinks of its atrocities, a law upon itself, here enabled by the sheriff.

As to why that sheriff is allowing Israel to get away with it, if Joe Biden and those 77 senators thinks it’s because if they cut off Israel’s arms supplies and stopped blocking UN efforts to impose a cease-fire and let substantial humanitarian aid in they’d lose the Jewish vote, they haven’t been paying attention to what’s been going on on American college campuses, and they must think very little of our own moral values, to believe that we would countenance a genocide because this time around the genociders happen to be wearing Mogen Davids on their tanks.