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