[News] New UN report outlines the ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’ in Gaza

[Anti-Imperialist News]

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<https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/new-un-report-outlines-the-anatomy-of-a-genocide-in-gaza/?ml_recipient=117604791361734283&ml_link=117604547484976400&utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_term=2024-04-03&utm_campaign=Daily+Headlines+RSS+Automation>
New UN report outlines the ‘Anatomy of a Genocide’ in Gaza By Jonathan Ofir
<https://mondoweiss.net/author/jonathan-ofir/> April 2, 2024
<https://mondoweiss.net/2024/04/new-un-report-outlines-the-anatomy-of-a-genocide-in-gaza/>
------------------------------

Last week, the UN Special Rapporteur on Occupied Palestinian Territories
Francesca Albanese issued a report
<https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/03/1147976> titled “Anatomy of a
Genocide,” concluding that there are “reasonable grounds to believe” that
the threshold indicating the commission of the crime of genocide has been
met.

Such reports are not usually titled, but the title itself depicts the
nature of what Albanese describes in her immaculate 25-page report. It not
only outlines a textbook case of genocide, with clearly and widely
expressed intent by leaders backed up by clear genocidal actions — it also
describes how Israel has used the language and principles of International
Humanitarian Law (IHL, the laws governing warfare) to conceal the act.

Albanese begins with the historical context of the genocide, even rooted in
Israeli pre-state colonialist intents, and then charts out how Israel has
committed three central facets under the crime of genocide — the killing of
members of a particular group of people, causing bodily or mental harm, and
creating destructive conditions of life. There is also a section concerning
intent that chronicles some of the countless, unambiguous, genocidal
expressions of Israeli leaders.

Then, midway into the report, and constituting almost half of it (points
55-92, out of 97 points), is a section dedicated to the idea of
“Humanitarian camouflage: distorting the laws of war to conceal genocidal
intent.”

This section is subdivided into five central themes:

   1. Human Shields and the logic of genocide
   2. Turning Gaza as a whole into a ‘military objective’
   3. Indiscriminate killing as “collateral damage”
   4. Evacuations and safe zones
   5. Medical Shielding

Albanese demonstrates how the three central principles of IHL —
distinction, proportionality, and precaution — have been subverted by
Israel in an attempt to obfuscate its genocidal acts and to provide a legal
veil for illegal, indiscriminate acts.

“This has obscured one cardinal tenet of IHL,” Albanese writes.
“Indiscriminate attacks, which do not distinguish military targets from
protected persons and objects, cannot be proportionate and are always
unlawful.”

Palestinians have become “decivilianized” in this way:

“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 [Genocide] 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.”

It is chilling to think that Israel’s Defense Minister’s claim that “we are
dealing with human animals and we will act accordingly” (October 9), has
translated into reality in such a way that humans are reduced to conceptual
rubble — dehumanized and decivilainized.

The analysis continues to outline Israel’s subversion of IHL norms,
including concepts like human shields, military objectives, and collateral
damage.
*Human shields*

The history of the general usage of this term as a pretext for
indiscriminate attacks is mentioned, particularly in the 2008-2022
aggressions. But on October 7 this rose to a new level:

“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’… International law does not permit the blanket claim
that an opposing force is using the entire population as human shields *en
bloc*… 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.”
*Gaza as a ‘military objective’*

International law stipulates that attacks must be “strictly limited” to
objects that “must offer a definite military advantage.” But, Albanese
notes, “Israel has misused this rule to ‘militarize’ civilian objects and
whatever surrounds them, justifying their indiscriminate destruction.”
Thus, “Gaza’s civilian population and infrastructure are presented as
obstructions positioned amongst, in front of and above targets… Israel has
characterized the whole territory as a military objective… 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.”
*Indiscriminate killing as ‘collateral damage*‘

Israel seeks to conceal the widescale targeting of civilians as “collateral
damage.” 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.”In other words, Israel says that it
doesn’t mean to kill many civilians — it just occurs despite precautions.
“However,” Albanese writes,

“in 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 seems to assess “proportionality” not only as a question of military
advantage but as a question of destroying Hamas *politically*:

“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)… In other words, Israel appears to represent itself as
conducting a ‘proportionate genocide.’”

*Evacuations and safe zones*

Albanese writes:

“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… 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.”

When the northern residents were evacuated to the south, “Israel illegally
categorized the inhabitants of northern Gaza who had remained (including
the sick and wounded) as ‘human shields’ and ‘accomplices’ of terrorism,”
thereby “turning hundreds of thousands of civilians into ‘legitimate’
military targets or collateral casualties through impossible-to-follow
evacuation orders.”

And the safe zones weren’t safe either:

“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… 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.”

“Simply put,” Albanese summarizes, “safe areas” were “deliberately turned
into areas of mass killing.”

This has been a tool of ethnic cleansing:

“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.”

*Medical shielding*

This point sends a chill down the spine, as Gaza’s largest hospital,
al-Shifa has now been reduced to burned rubble
<https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2024/4/1/the-destruction-of-gazas-al-shifa-hospital>,
with bodies strewn across the area, following Israel’s recent two-week-long
siege.

“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,” writes Albanese.

This is not the first time Israel accused Hamas of using hospitals as
“Hamas headquarters,” but “in the current assault, Israel has invoked this
legal strategy to justify genocide through the complete destruction of
life-sustaining infrastructure.”

Israel was widely challenged on its former assault on the al-Shifa hospital
in November.

“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. In addition, the Israeli army
reportedly rearranged weaponry at al-Shifa before news crews visits,
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.”

The level of the Israeli propaganda would be something to laugh about (and
was widely mocked) if it weren’t so deadly serious. Even if one were to
take these repeated allegations at face value, Israel behaved illegally:

“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.”

This lack of protection for civilians was itself genocidal:

“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. Second, Israel
knew that its military operation was resulting in a significant number of
wounded. Physical trauma constitutes the most predominant cause of excess
mortality in Gaza. 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.”

*Conclusions* and recommendations

“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,” Albanese concludes.

“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”.

This goes back to the first Nakba of 1948:

“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.”

The last two points (96-97) of the report are about what we — the
international community — can, and indeed *must* do, to avert this genocide.

“The Special Rapporteur urges member states to enforce the prohibition of
genocide in accordance with their non-derogable obligations. 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.”

The means at our disposal:

   - To “immediately implement an arms embargo on Israel… as well as other
   economic and political measures necessary to ensure an immediate and
   lasting ceasefire… including sanctions.”
   - Support South Africa’s case at the ICJ charging Israel with Genocide.
   - Ensuring a “thorough, independent and transparent investigation” of
   war crimes and crimes against humanity, including international
   fact-finding missions, referring to the International Criminal Court,
   applying universal jurisdiction.
   - That Israel and other states that are complicit in the genocide commit
   to non-repetition and pay the full cost of reconstruction in Gaza.
   - To address the root causes through the UN, also through reconstitution
   of the UN Special Committee against Apartheid.
   - In the short term, to deploy “an international protective presence to
   constrain the violence routinely used against Palestinians in the occupied
   Palestinian territory”.
   - To secure UNRWA, the UN Palestinian refugee agency (which has been
   under a defunding assault in recent months due to an Israeli propaganda
   campaign).

Finally, Albanese 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.” That is, to
see the genocide of Gaza not merely as a local matter, but as a genocidal
assault on all Palestinians, also beyond Gaza’s geographical confines.
International r*esponses*

Israel’s initial, knee-jerk response
<https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/26/un-expert-accuses-israel-of-several-acts-of-genocide-in-gaza>
was to describe the report as an “obscene inversion of reality.” The
problem is, that Albanese has used about half of her meticulous report to
document how it is precisely Israel that is inverting reality — through the
mentioned twisting of IHL terms — to justify and continue its genocide.

The U.S., for its part, chose to avoid the subject by shooting the
messenger — hiding behind regurgitated, false allegations
<https://mondoweiss.net/2022/12/un-special-rapporteur-facing-smear-campaign-for-calling-out-israeli-settler-colonialism-and-apartheid/>
of Albanese as an antisemite — as State Department Spokesperson Matthew
Miller did
<https://twitter.com/tparsi/status/1773067834081390666?t=Y8PjIsn-3krpNg0rJdBJnQ>
in response to a question on the matter:

“We have for a longstanding period of time opposed the mandate of this
Special Rapporteur, which we believe is not productive. And when it comes
to the individual that holds that position, I can’t help but note a history
of antisemitic comments that she has made, that were reported.”

But many other countries, particularly Arab ones as well as other global
south countries, rallied behind
<https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240326-countries-at-un-rally-behind-expert-who-accused-israel-of-genocide>
Albanese and affirmed the seriousness of her report. At the UN presentation
of the report last week, Israel and the U.S. boycotted the event. The EU,
for its part, called for “proper and independent investigations on all
allegations,” alas recognizing “Israel’s right to self-defense.”

“Self-defense,” it bears mention, is no excuse for genocide, and the reason
why one purportedly goes to war has no bearing on how one conducts it. So
the EU is avoiding the issue, in a perhaps less visible manner than Israel
and the U.S.

“Israel has destroyed Gaza,” said the Special Rapporteur. It’s not
incidental, it’s not a natural disaster — it’s genocide. Now it’s only down
to those who accept this awful truth and those who hide from it.
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