It is a sad world we live in. An absurd one also. We witness the slaughter and forced displacement of a people, we know it is happening, yet we have to prove it according to a man made law that has become holier than scripture and more useless. The legal semantics that are being debated are infuriating. Some call them war crimes, some call them crimes against humanity, some say it is genocide. I stand at the bifurcation of definitions, hopeless. Does it matter ? Does it really matter to qualify the horror inflicted on human beings in order to be able to condemn it ? Well, in order to condemn it in a legal frame, yes. There is an absurd need to define what constitutes a genocide in order to hold those who orchestrated it accountable. Before We delve into what the UN special Rapporteur on Palestinian occupied territories from 1967, Francesca Albanese, has put in her report; I want to say it once and for good: It doesn’t fucking matter . If a state commits genocide, the tragedy has already taken place. Instead of trying to punish the criminals, We must stop them while they are doing it , because hell, we are watching them do it, waiting for them to finish it, then, maybe, we will catch a few of the government officials, and file ICC cases against them. They will never be arrested, maybe, in the best case scenario, they will be impeached, replaced and voilà, JUSTICE.
The Anatomy of a Genocide is a report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967. The document is 25 pages long. It details the conditions and evidence of Genocide according to International Humanitarian Law and organisations reporting from the ground in the Gaza enclave. I have highlighted and simplified key elements and reorganized them in a proto-human language.
We keep hearing the word genocide repeated by some activists, journalists and politicians and denied firmly by others. Countries like south africa accused Israel of Genocide in front of the International court of Justice. Nicaragua has accused Germany of aiding in Genocide in front of the ICJ too. People nicknamed Joe Biden Genocide Joe and Ghali said “stop al genocidio” in Sanremo festival.
On the other hand, you have major media outlets including but not limited to the New York times, CNN , the Guardian, BBC who are calling what is happening in Gaza a war. Some of them even call it “the Israel Hamas War”.
You have politicians, journalists, public figures and celebrities making statements that entail the following phrases “Israel has the right to defend itself” “Hamas is using Palestinians as human shields” “what is then a proportional response?” “We support Israel” etc…
So what is Genocide and what is terminology so important ?
Disclaimer:This reorganization, simplification doesn’t change the contents of the report. MOST OF THE CONTENT IS COPIED VERBATIM. It has been rearranged, shortened and reorganized for clarity purposes.
1.Useful definitions
War: following Clausewitz, is the destruction by one armed actor of an armed enemy, its power and its will to resist. Genocide is the destruction by an armed actor of an unarmed social group, its power and its will to resist.
The Principles Of Jus In Bello: The rules of just conduct within war fall under the two broad principles of discrimination and proportionality. The principle of discrimination concerns who are legitimate targets in war, whilst the principle of proportionality concerns how much force is morally appropriate.
As ethnic cleansing has not been recognized as an independent crime under international law, there is no precise definition of this concept or the exact acts to be qualified as ethnic cleansing.
War crimes were defined in 1949 in the Geneva Conventions and other protocols. They are serious violations of the laws and customs of war and international armed conflict, and they can be committed against either combatants or civilians. One aspect of this is the use of disproportionate force—that the extent of the harm done to civilians should be proportionate to your military goals. It could also be other things, such as the maltreatment of prisoners of war.
Crimes against humanity do not have a U.N. resolution, but they were defined by the Rome Statute, which is now the basis for the International Criminal Court. It mentions the extermination or other crimes against civilian populations, and it does not have to happen in war, whereas war crimes obviously have to happen in the context of war.
Genocide: the Genocide Convention of 1948, on which it’s based, defines genocide as the “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” Genocide is the attempt to destroy the group and not the individuals in that group. ‘It can be accomplished by killing members of the group. It can also be accomplished by other means such as starving them or taking away their children, or something that will bring about the extinction of the group rather than killing its individuals.’
2.Genocide is not an act, it is a process
-Genocide VS Ethnic cleansing : In ethnic cleansing you want to move people from a territory that you want, and then they can go wherever they want. In a genocide, you target the group never mind where they are. Ethnic cleansing does not have a clear definition in international law, and it comes under various other categories of crimes against humanity. There’s no convention on ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing usually or often is a preliminary act in the process of genocide (i.e the genocide of the Herero, starting in 1904, and the genocide of the Armenians, starting in 1915…)
-The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide 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. Genocide cannot be justified under any circumstances, including purported self-defence. Complicity is expressly prohibited, giving rise to obligations for third states.
3.Constitutive elements of genocide
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.”Accordingly, the crime of genocide comprises these 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.
(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).
-The perpetrator’s intent to destroy the group in whole or in part distinguishes genocidal acts from other international crime
-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.
-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,regardless of any official role held by the perpetrator.
-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
-Genocidal acts can include deliberate actions or omissions, including the failure to protect the group from harm.
-Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group: “This act must involve “a grave and long-term disadvantage to a person’s ability to lead a normal and constructive life”. The harm does not need to be permanent or irremediable,and can be brought about by various causes as torture, inhuman or degrading treatment, sexual violence, persecution,deportation or other conditions “designed to cause victims’ degradation and deprivation of their rights, and to suppress them and cause inhumane suffering and torture”.
“Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”
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.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 depriving of housing, clothes, education, employment and hygiene.
4.The Genocidal process In Palestine:
-These include removal (forcible transfer, ethnic cleansing), movement restrictions (segregation, large scale incarceration), mass killings (murder, disease, starvation), assimilation (cultural erasure, child removal) and birth prevention.
------For the past 75 years of occupation, the occupying state of Israel has engaged in forcible transfer , settler colonialism, mass killings, sieges on medecine, food, drinkable water. It engaged in activities that facilitate cultural erasure like the appropriation and destruction of cultural symbols
“In Palestine, displacing and erasing the Indigenous Arab presence has been an inevitable part of the forming of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’”
-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.”
-”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.”
-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.
-Israel’s army employed over 25,000 tons of explosives (equivalent to two nuclear bombs) on innumerable buildings,
- Israel used unguided munitions (“dumb bombs”) and 2000-pound “bunker buster” bombs on densely populated areas and “safe zones”. In the initial weeks, Israeli forces killed around 250 people daily, including 100 children…
-70% 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…. implying that all adult males killed were “terrorists”. This is indicative of an intent to indiscriminately target members of the protected group, assimilating them to active fighter status by default.
-Death by starvation, including 10 children daily, by impeding access to vital supplies.Lack of hygiene and overcrowded shelters could cause more deaths than bombings… “the perfect storm for disease”. A quarter of Gaza’s population could die from preventable health conditions within a year
--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.”
-Israeli forces have detained thousands of Palestinians, mostly men and young boys, often refusing to disclose their whereabouts. Many of them have been severely mistreated, including through torture at times leading to death.
-. 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.
-By causing critical shortages of medical supplies, including antibiotics and disinfectants, Israel’s actions resulted in hazardous health procedures, such as amputations without anesthetics, including on children. This has also prevented the administration of life-saving treatment to those with medical conditions, including chronic diseases.
-The survivors will carry an indelible trauma, having witnessed so much death, and experienced destruction, homelessness, emotional and material loss, endless humiliation and fear…
-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 , commercial and industrial sites , almost half of all roads, over 60 percent of Gaza’s 439,000 homes, 68 percent of residential buildings, all universities, 60 percent of other educational facilities, including 13 libraries.Israel has also destroyed at least 195 heritage sites, 208 mosques, 3 churches, and Gaza’s Central Archives (150 years of history). By the end of January, over one million civilians were forcibly displaced southward, their cities devastated
-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.
-By 12 February, only 11 of 36 hospitals and 17 percent of primary healthcare centres were functioning, only partially. Israeli soldiers have arrested, mistreated and tortured medical staff, patients and displaced people, and forced them – even premature babies – out of hospitals, in some cases causing the death of babies. The doctors who remained have worked night and day, making “impossible decisions” on patients to treat based on chance of survival
-Ground invasion and aerial bombardment have destroyed agricultural land, farms, crops, animals and fishing assets, gravely undermining people’s livelihoods, the environment and agricultural system.
-These human-made conditions have put at risk an estimated 50,000 pregnant Palestinian women and 20,000 newborn babies,and increased miscarriages by up to 300 percent.
5.Genocidal Intent of Israeli authorities
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. This intent must be established either through direct or indirect evidence.
(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”
(b) Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to Palestinians as “Amalek” and “monsters”. 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”.
(c) Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant referred to Palestinians as “human animals”, and announced “full offense” on Gaza, having “released all the restraints”, and that “Gaza will never return to what it was”.
(d) IDF Spokesperson Daniel Hagari stated that focus should be on causing “maximum damage”, demonstrating a strategy of disproportionate and indiscriminate violence.
(e) Minister of Agriculture Avi Dichter referred to Israel’s action as “the Gaza Nakba”.
(f) Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu called for striking Gaza with “nuclear bombs”
(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!”.
Israel’s Prime Minister and President have stated that Israel was fighting on behalf of “all civilized states and... peoples”,“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”.
6.The weaponization of International humanitarian law
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.
-Indiscriminate attacks, which do not distinguish military targets from protected persons and objects, cannot be proportionate and are always unlawful
-Israel has accused Palestinian armed groups of deliberately using civilians as human shields in previous aggressions on Gaza (including in 2008-09, 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2022). It also used it to justify high civilian casualties and attacks against paramedics, journalists and others during the 2018–2019 ‘Great March of Return’.
- UN independent fact-finding missions and reputable human rights organizations have consistently challenged these allegations, sometimes concluding that evidence of human shields had been fabricated.
-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.
-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.Significant numbers of Palestinian civilians are defined as human shields
- 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.
-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”
-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.
-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. However, All attacks launched against residential towers 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.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. The attack on the Jabalia refugee camp on 25 October killed at least 126 civilians, including 69 children, and injured a further 280. Israeli military personnel affirmed that the target was one Hamas commander in an underground base.
-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.
- 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)
-Under IHL, parties to the conflict must evacuate the civilian population and remove civilian objects from the vicinity of military objectives. 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.
- 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
-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 south– was communicated through at least 23 different airdropped leaflets, social media postings,246 text messages and recorded phone messages. 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, increased levels of panic, forced displacement and mass killing.
-Israel intensified its offensive in the ‘safe areas’ of Al Muwasi and Rafah, which were sheltering the majority of the displaced population.
-Israel’s Prime Minister advocated for ethnic transfer
Israel’s Finance Minister expressed support for expelling two million Palestinians from Gaza;
- Israel’s Minister of National Security declared the war to be an opportunity to “concentrate on encouraging the migration of the residents of Gaza”,
7. Israel’s humanitarian camouflage
Israel made lots of efforts to provide legal cover for systematic attacks against medical facilities and personnel, causing the progressive collapse of Gaza’s healthcare sector.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.
-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. -Since the beginning of the hostilities, Israel has framed Gaza’s hospitals as Hamas “headquarters” and spaces used for shielding military activities, aiming to blur the distinction between civilian and military objects, transforming hospitals into “hospital shields”, and legitimizing the destruction of Gaza’s entire healthcare sector.
-In November 2023, Al Shifa Hospital in northern Gaza was hosting tens of thousands of displaced people – when it was besieged and invaded. 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”.On 2 November, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs published a legal document designating the hospital as a military centre concealing military assets. The hospital was then placed under siege and invaded in mid- November, with Israel accusing Hamas of using medical personnel as “human shields”.After days of attacks, the hospital was turned into a “death zone”;five newborn babies and 14 patients were injured; at least 31 people were killed, and parts of the hospital turned into mass graves.
-. 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.
- In addition, Israeli army reportedly rearranged weaponry at the Al Shifa before news crews visits
-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 incubators. Therefore, by targeting Al Shifa Hospital, Israel knowingly condemned thousands of sick and displaced people to preventable suffering and death
-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.
-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’
-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.
The link for the full report: https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/hrbodies/hrcouncil/sessions-regular/session55/advance-versions/a-hrc-55-73-auv.pdf