[News] How human rights organizations are aiding the Israeli assault on Gaza

[Anti-Imperialist News]

mondoweiss.net
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/how-human-rights-organizations-are-aiding-the-israeli-assault-on-gaza/?ml_recipient=107461595658978447&ml_link=107461488303670340&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2023-12-13&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation>
How human rights organizations are aiding the Israeli assault on Gaza
Lana Tatour
December 12, 2023
------------------------------

On November 26, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Physicians for Human Rights
Israel (PHRI) each published a report. Both reports make serious
allegations against Palestinians, claiming that they have engaged in war
crimes and potentially crimes against humanity. The HRW report, “Findings
on October 17 al-Ahli Hospital Explosion
<https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/11/26/gaza-findings-october-17-al-ahli-hospital-explosion>,”
alleges that the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza was hit by a misfired rocket
by Palestinians on October 17, while the PHRI report, “Gender-Based
Violence as a Weapon of War during the October 7 Hamas Attacks
<https://www.phr.org.il/en/gender-based-violence-eng/>,” accuses Hamas of
committing sexual violence, including rape.

To be clear, sexual violence and rape allegations during October 7 should
be investigated. Guided by antiracist and feminist commitments, I assert
that perpetrators of gender-based violence must be held accountable.
Victims, all victims — including Palestinians who are subjected to sexual
violence — deserve justice. The victims at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital
deserve justice, too. But this is not what these reports do.

A close reading of these reports shows that neither meets the best practice
standards of human rights reporting and research in the industry, which HRW
and PHRI tend to uphold. This time, however, the two organizations have
knowingly applied a different and significantly lower threshold of evidence
with regard to Palestinians. These reports are based on speculations rather
than evidence
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/findings-without-evidence-human-rights-watchs-report-on-the-al-ahli-hospital-attack/>
and a flawed methodology that amounts to unethical conduct. Neither of the
reports provides reliable or sufficient evidence to substantiate the
serious allegations they make.

While the headlines and executive summaries of the reports are conclusive,
in the reports, one can find disclaimers where the organizations
effectively admit that the reports are inconclusive. HRW, for example,
writes that a “full investigation is needed” into the Al-Ahli explosion.
Likewise, PHRI writes that the report “does not attempt or aim to meet
legal thresholds” — a caveat they do not include in any of their other
reports, including reports dealing with gender-based violence.

HRW and PHRI are respected in the human rights community and would have
never published reports with such a weak evidentiary basis if the object of
investigation was Israel. The unethical conduct of HRW and PHRI is made
possible by anti-Palestinian racism. These reports represent and feed into
a global context of white supremacy, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian
racism. These organizations know that when it comes to Palestinians, they
will not face serious scrutiny or demands for accountability by Western
governments, media, and civil society.

The reports cannot be viewed in isolation from current events, and they
dangerously feed into the orchestrated propaganda campaigns that Israel is
running, which aim at dehumanizing Palestinians as a means of deflecting
attention from and justifying the genocide in Gaza.

In what follows, I scrutinize each report in detail to demonstrate where
they fall short of human rights reporting standards.
*Timing *

HRW and PHRI’s engagement with international law has always taken a liberal
and narrow approach, often ignoring context and politics. One significant
example is the HRW Apartheid report
<https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution>,
which ignores the root cause of apartheid in Palestine — the racial
ideology of Israeli settler colonialism. Instead, they see all parties as
equal, drawing a symmetry between “parties to a conflict” (as they see it)
regardless of power relations.

The timing of the release of the reports should be understood within this
context of refusal and erasure. On November 26, when the reports were
published, more than 12,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza by Israel,
and 4,000 more were estimated to be trapped under the rubble. More than
half of the population was already displaced and denied access to water,
food, and medicine.

Instead, these organizations chose to invest their time, resources, and
capital in making Palestinians — who are massacred and starved on a daily
basis — a target. Since October 7, HRW has published two reports on
Palestinian atrocities and has also sent a team to Israel to investigate
allegations of sexual violence, while PHRI has published a report about
Hamas attacks on health facilities in addition to their current report.

HRW’s report on Al-Ahli Hospital came out as Israel declared war on the
health sector in Gaza as one of its main military objectives
<https://twitter.com/middleeasteye/status/1729225625943027931?s=12>. Israel
has denied the entry of medicine and other medical equipment and has been
systematically targeting ambulances and medical teams and bombing
hospitals, including Al-Ahli, Al-Shifa, the Indonesian hospital, al-Awda,
the cancer hospital, and other hospitals, taking most of Gaza’s hospitals
out of operation. The bombing of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, which is run by the
Anglican church, has served, according to the Palestinian surgeon Ghassan
Abu Sitta
<https://twitter.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1729163515917680909?s=20>, as a
“litmus test for what they had planned to do to the rest of the health
system.”

Palestinian civil society groups responded to the HRW report — and rightly
so — with outrage. The BDS movement pointed out
<https://x.com/BDSmovement/status/1729559412258271298?s=20>: “The content
and timing point to political motivation, not human rights advocacy.
US-based HRW has yet to take meaningful action to stop the Gaza Genocide or
call for a ceasefire”. Similarly, a collective statement
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/11/palestinian-civil-society-organizations-deplore-premature-human-rights-watch-report-on-al-ahli-hospital-strike/>
of two dozen organizations stated that “at a time when public trust in
independent fact-finding institutions is of paramount importance, this HRW
report weakens the credibility of human rights organizations and places
Palestinian lives at risk.”

The timing for the report of PHRI is no better. In mid-November, Israel
launched a well-orchestrated international campaign
<https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/cnn-report-claiming-sexual-violence-on-october-7-relied-on-non-credible-witnesses-some-with-undisclosed-ties-to-israeli-govt/>,
claiming that Hamas systematically used rape as a weapon of war on October
7. Netanyahu <https://x.com/Heidi__Matthews/status/1732197900547915938?s=20>
himself has used allegations of sexual violence to dehumanize Palestinians
as enemies of civilization and appealed to “civilized leaders, governments,
nations” to support Israel’s war on Gaza.

As part of this campaign, Israel’s foreign ministry announced that it would
leverage the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against
Women on November 25 to boost its campaign. PHRI released its report on
November 26.

Israel’s propaganda campaign is not about seeking justice for victims who
deserve justice. In fact, Israel is ranked last
<https://www.ynet.co.il/news/article/byvzw0yln?utm_source=ynet.app.ios&utm_term=byvzw0yln&utm_campaign=general_share&utm_medium=social&utm_content=Header>in
the OECD index for equality between men and women and is currently widely
distributing guns to citizens, a move that women’s groups have warned puts
women at risk of domestic violence. Israel’s sudden concern for women is
not about caring for their well-being and rights but about weaponizing
women’s bodies in order to justify war crimes, crimes against humanity, and
genocide.
*Decontextualized and racist framing*

Israel is doing all in its power to destroy everything in Gaza that can sustain
human life <https://x.com/j_e_s_s_whyte/status/1731783214715560003?s=20>
with the aim of making it uninhabitable. It is eliminating and destroying
everything: the people, the health sector, infrastructure, universities,
mosques, churches, libraries, houses, residential towers, bakeries,
markets, grocery shops, municipality buildings, archives, cultural centers,
schools, entire neighborhoods, and refugee camps. Yet, the two
organizations refuse to engage with mounting evidence of genocide and
ethnic cleansing, and HRW is yet to call for a ceasefire.

During the current phase of the genocidal campaign, the two organizations
have refused to locate Gaza within the broader history and present of
settler colonialism in Palestine and, importantly, within Israel’s goals of
making Gaza uninhabitable and expelling its residents.

They published their reports while Israeli leaders were calling for and
carrying out another Nabka. This includes Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu,
who instructed his Minister of Strategic Planning, Ron Dermer, to explore
ways to “thin out”
<https://www.israelhayom.co.il/magazine/hashavua/article/14889801> the Gaza
population to the possible minimum.

These reports serve the liberal obsession of HRW and PHRI for appearing
objective by focusing on “Palestinian atrocities” in order to appeal to and
appease Israeli and Western liberal audiences. But releasing these reports
should be understood as more than just a cynical well-calculated move.
Rather, they reflect an exceptionalist viewpoint, where violence against
Israelis is considered unconscionable, barbaric, and monstrous, while
Israeli violence against Palestinians is described in sanitized and cold
terms. Palestinians, as non-white, are treated as statistical and
common-sense figures of suffering, displacement, dispossession, and death,
while Israelis, due to their proximity to whiteness, are seen as
common-sense figures of life. Palestinian death is unfortunate — Israeli
death is unacceptable.

However, the questionable timing and framing of both reports that play into
narratives Israel is promoting to assist its campaign in Gaza are not the
only issues with these reports. A specific analysis of each one also shows
how they fail to meet the professional standards of the human rights
community.
*HRW: Undermining Palestinian testimonies, ignoring credible evidence *

The HRW report into the Al-Ahli hospital strike decontextualizes the attack
from the ongoing Israeli violations against the hospital, ignores
Palestinian accounts of the bombing, and disregards other credible
investigations into the events of October 17.

HRW did not visit the Al-Ahli Hospital site, nor did it have access to the
shrapnel, and was unable to make a “conclusive identification of the
munition.” Yet it pointed accusatory fingers towards Palestinians, basing
its determination on “the sound preceding the explosion, the fireball that
accompanied it, the size of the resulting crater, the type of splatter
adjoining it, and the type and pattern of fragmentation visible around the
crater are all consistent with the impact of a rocket.”

Hamas <https://x.com/Qudsn_Brk/status/1729138097122914578?s=20> stated that
it would welcome HRW into Gaza and would cooperate with an independent
investigation and share the evidence they have once the genocide is over,
and conditions allow. HRW refused to wait even though nothing in this
report was urgent nor represented an original investigation.

Consistent with racist attitudes towards “the natives,” HRW failed to
consider the many testimonies that emerged in the following days from
medical staff, including doctors and ordinary citizens who were sheltering
in the hospital. HRW did not reach out to the director of the hospital
<https://twitter.com/asadabukhalil/status/1732145299022590079?s=12>, nor
did it contact the doctor who received Israeli orders for evacuation.
Moreover, when the report mentions Palestinian sources (without actually
bothering to speak to these sources), it questions their credibility. For
example, “The Archbishop of the Episcopal Church of Jerusalem and the
Middle East said that on October 14, 15, and 16, Al-Ahli hospital received
at least three phone warnings to evacuate, *though he did not provide
details about the source or content of the warnings*.”

This refusal to give due weight to the Israeli bombing of Al-Ahli Hospital
on October 14, nor to the threats that Israel made against the hospital,
decontextualizes the eventual incident of October 17.

HRW also ignored available and credible investigations: the first
<https://twitter.com/ForensicArchi/status/1724525673325199410?s=20> by
Forensic Architecture, Al-Haq, and Earshot, and the second
<https://twitter.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1715240460594123085?s=20> by Al
Jazeera, which contradicted their findings.

Forensic Architecture
<https://x.com/ForensicArchi/status/1724525673325199410?s=20>, Al-Haq, and
Earshot conducted a 3D reconstruction and trajectory analysis of two
publicly available videos — one broadcasted by Israel’s Channel 12
<https://x.com/ForensicArchi/status/1724525687069925887?s=20> and the
second aired by Al Jazeera — which the Israeli government claims show that
it was a misfired rocket that hit the Al-Ahli Hospital.

About the first video, Forensic Architecture writes
<https://x.com/ForensicArchi/status/1724525687069925887?s=20>: “This is
another case of incorrect location and incorrect timing: the video
documents an explosion which occurred 24s before the Al-Ahli blast, and
over 1km away. ” About the Al Jazeera
<https://x.com/ForensicArchi/status/1724525684226249157?s=20>video, they
write: “Our analysis suggests the missile originated outside Gaza near a
reported ‘Iron Dome’ launch site & exploded at a height of 5km, 5.7km from
the hospital. Any freefalling debris from the explosion would have taken at
least 30s to reach Al-Ahli—but the blast occurred just 8s later.”

Israel has based its accusations on the Al Jazeera video. In response, the Al
Jazeera digital investigations team
<https://x.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1715240460594123085?s=20> conducted an
in-depth analysis of this video, in addition to other videos from multiple
sources, and created a detailed, second-by-second timeline of the events.
They identified the rocket that was launched from Gaza, the rocket in
question. The same rocket is also seen in the Israeli video. Al Jazeera’s
live feed shows that the same rocket was intercepted and was destroyed and
broken apart in the sky. According to all feeds and videos analyzed, this
rocket was intercepted and was the last one launched from Gaza before the
bombing of the hospital. Five seconds after that interception, the
investigation shows, an explosion in Gaza can be seen, followed two seconds
later by another, much larger, explosion. This is the strike that hit
Al-Ahli Hospital. Al Jazeera investigations team found no ground to the
Israeli claims that the strike was caused by a failed rocket launch.

HRW does not appear to have reached out
<https://twitter.com/asadabukhalil/status/1732145299022590079?s=12> to Al
Jazeera, even though they refer to their video in the report.

In relation to the size of the crater, HRW writes: “This crater size is
inconsistent with the point detonation of a large, air-dropped bomb with a
high-explosive payload.” Francesco Sebregondi
<https://x.com/FSBRG/status/1714609431877431713?s=20>, a researcher and
architect and a former investigator at Forensic Architecture, has addressed
the weakness of this claim. Sebregondi states that while 1-ton bombs would
usually create a large crater, other missiles “also used by IDF, would not
leave a considerable crater.” HRW report does not consider this option
seriously. Further, Sebregondi states
<https://x.com/FSBRG/status/1714609459333333058?s=20> that the likelihood
that a Palestinian rocket could have caused all this damage is “extremely
low.” What is clear, he adds, is that no conclusive determination could be
drawn based on the size of the crater.
*PHRI: Reciting Israeli propaganda *

The first thing that human rights lawyers, practitioners, experts,
researchers, and students are taught is to question information coming from
governments, conduct independent research, and verify and assess the
credibility of the sources they use before making serious allegations of
war crimes and crimes against humanity.

PHRI failed each of these basic requirements in its report.

A careful read of all the sources cited in the report shows that all of
them, with one exception, are predominantly from media outlets (Israeli and
international), and others are from civil society initiatives with strong
government links. In an interview with the New Yorker
<https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-hamas-used-sexual-violence-on-october-7th>,
Hadas Ziv, the director of ethics and policy at Physicians for Human Rights
Israel (the irony is hard to miss) and a co-author of the report, said: “We
haven’t interviewed actual witnesses.” While it is understandable that it
is too soon for survivors to be interviewed, it is not clear why witnesses
who were already interviewed by the media were not interviewed.

Essentially, the report is a recap and repackaging of on-and off-the-record
briefings and parliamentary presentations made by Israeli government
officials. The information included in the sources that they rely on is
either explicitly or easily traced back to the Israeli government,
especially the Prime Minister’s office and Israeli police. The report
includes no indication of independent verification of evidence or an
independent investigation by PHRI. This is in sharp contradiction to their
own methodology in previous reports, including reports dealing with sexual
and gender violence. Further, I could not find a single report published by
PHRI in the past that draws exclusively on media sources.

PHRI’s decades of work should have taught them well that the Israeli
government has a long record of dishonesty, manipulation, and fabrication.
A recent high-profile example is Israel’s denial that a sniper killed the
Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in Jenin in May 2022. This has
also been the case since October 7, when the Israeli government has
repeatedly spread misinformation and outright lies about, for example, 40
beheaded babies, the presence of a Hamas “command and control” center under
Al-Shifa hospital, and more. Still, this time around, PHRI found it
appropriate to publish a report that relies on information traced to the
Israeli government.

Below are examples of PHRI’s unprofessional conduct in the report:

   1. The report relies on the testimonies aired by CNN
   <https://edition.cnn.com/videos/world/2023/11/16/the-lead-israel-investigates-sexual-violence-claims-on-october-7-jake-tapper.cnn>
   dealing with sexual violence by Palestinians on October 7. An investigative
   piece that appeared in Mondoweiss
   <https://mondoweiss.net/2023/12/cnn-report-claiming-sexual-violence-on-october-7-relied-on-non-credible-witnesses-some-with-undisclosed-ties-to-israeli-govt/>
   shows CNN’s failure to adhere to professional and ethical journalism
   standards in this report. Every single witness and “expert” that CNN aired
   was proven to either be lacking in credibility or have ties to Israeli
   government officials and institutions.


   1. The report includes testimony by a Zaka volunteer, which was aired on
   Kan Darom Radio about “the dissection of a pregnant woman’s abdomen and the
   stabbing of the fetus.” This story was later reported
   <https://www.haaretz.co.il/news/politics/2023-12-03/ty-article-magazine/.premium/0000018c-2036-d21c-abae-76be08fe0000>
   to be a fabrication.


   1. PHRI refers to the “Civil Archive for the Documentation of Crimes
   Committed Against Women by Hamas,” a body headed by Cochav Elkayam-Levy.
   The credibility of this Commission and of Elkayam-Levy are both
   questionable. Elkayam-Levy, who has become the main spokesperson of
   Israel’s dehumanization campaign, formerly worked for the Israeli
   government’s Attorney General’s Office in the International Law Department,
   where her job was to provide legal justification for human rights
   violations and crimes committed against Palestinians, and also did some
   work for the National Security team at the Prime Minister’s office.

   Moreover, PHRI cites a webinar
   <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D7tb4zFKdk> hosted by Harvard Medical
   School, during which Elkayam-Levy showed a photo
   <https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1724688009293873502?s=20> claiming
   it showed a woman raped by Hamas at the Nova festival. This photo was
   circulated by the Israeli foreign ministry and was proven
   <https://x.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1724688009293873502?s=20> to be of a
   female Kurdish fighter who experienced sexual abuse. In other words,
   Elkayam-Levy is a mouthpiece for Israeli propaganda.

   In an interview with Haaretz
   <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-30/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/hamas-campaign-of-rape-against-israeli-women-is-revealed-testimony-after-testimony/0000018c-2144-da36-a1de-6767dac90000>
   newspaper, Elkayam-Levy claims
   <https://twitter.com/thegreenebj/status/1730942034117087366?s=12> she
   does not need to provide evidence, saying: “Am I the one who needs to
   provide evidence for the terrorists’ deeds? What kind of travesty is it
   that they are imposing the burden of truth on me?” She also says that the
   “question of evidence…is completely secondary.”


   1. Another ‘source’ used by PHRI is MEMRI
   <https://www.memri.org/reports/special-announcement-%E2%80%93-hamas-atrocities-documentation-center-hadc>
   — Middle East Media Research Institute, a politically motivated body that
   launched the Hamas Atrocities Documentation Center (HADC). MEMRI’s
   president and founder is Yigal Carmon,
   <https://docs.house.gov/meetings/FA/FA00/20160706/105161/HHRG-114-FA00-Bio-CarmonY-20160706.pdf>
   a retired colonel in the Israel Defense Force intelligence corps who served
   as counter-terrorism advisor to two Israeli Prime Ministers. The report
   does not include any indication of the independent verification of MEMRI’s
   claims.


   1. PHRI draws on media reports to quote testimonies of witnesses who
   have worked at the Shura military base, where the bodies of October 7
   victims were brought. These witnesses claim to have seen signs of rape and
   sexual violence, but PHRI itself says that the witnesses “are not
   professionally trained to determine whether rape had occurred.” This,
   however, did not lead PHRI to make the only acceptable decision that a
   serious human rights organization would make, which is not to include them
   in the report. In other words, what is the point of including this
   information from people who, in your own opinion, have no relevant
   expertise?


   1. PHRI mentions in its report confessions extracted by the *Shabak*
   (Israeli Security Service) — notorious for its torture of Palestinian
   detainees — from Hamas fighters who were caught by Israel on October 7.
   PHRI does mention that the testimonies are likely extracted under torture,
   but still found it appropriate to mention them.

*PHRI’s Jewish-Israeli supremacy *

Israeli human rights organizations, including PHRI, are implicated in the
settler colonial system, and their organizational structure and work are
marked by racial politics. As Haneen Maikey and I previously wrote
<https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel--palestine-rights-groups-prevent-palestinians-framing-their-own-reality>,
“The Israeli human rights sector has a Jewish-Israeli supremacy problem.”
There is a hierarchy between Palestinian and Jewish staff, where senior
positions, including those who write public policy reports and do public
campaigning — are occupied by Israeli Jews. This is also the case at PHRI.

It should, therefore, come as no surprise that, according to anonymous
sources, Palestinian staff at PHRI urged not to publish this report with no
evidentiary threshold, only to be silenced and ignored by Jewish staff.

PHRI chose to publish a report that fails to meet the common ethical
standards of human rights reporting, which they have upheld in the past. It
counted on the credibility, recognition, and respect it enjoys
internationally, which Palestinian staff have played a pivotal role in
building for decades.

This is not to deny sexual violence allegations or to claim that these
should not be investigated. However, as a human rights organization, PHRI
has the responsibility to carry out research ethically and has the duty to
publish credible reports. PHRI could have engaged in a thorough
investigation, as it has done in its other reporting, but it willingly
chose, for politically and racially motivated reasons, to engage in
compromised conduct.

In the rush to please Israeli public opinion, PHRI has abandoned all
ethical and professional standards and has worked in the service of Israeli
propaganda and the racialization of Palestinians, especially men. It is
racism and an ingrained sense of Jewish supremacy — where Jewish victims
are valued more than Palestinian victims — that has allowed PHRI to publish
a report with no evidentiary basis.
*Accountability*

The ask is simple: do not apply a lower threshold of evidence and
questionable ethical standards when it comes to Palestinians. The
methodology should be robust, evidence must be conclusive, and fingers
should not be pointed so easily, especially not at the people who are
undergoing genocide.

HRW and PHRI published unethical reports with a sense of impunity,
violating the basic principle of “do no harm,” which is the bare minimum
expected in the human rights and humanitarian sectors.

Palestinians have been demanding accountability. HRW and PHRI owe
Palestinians answers.
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