UN Commission Finds Israel Guilty of Crimes Against Humanity
Palestinian girls in Bureij Refugee Camp in Gaza on June 16, 2024. (Majdi Fathi / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
A new report by a UN commission finds that Israel intended to murder civilians en masse, inflict wide-scale civilian destruction, and collectively punish Palestinians in Gaza — holding them hostage to its political aims.
The UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory issued its “first in-depth investigation into the events that took place on and since 7 October 2023.” The report holds the Israeli occupation responsible for the ongoing catastrophic situation in Gaza. But it also alludes to the possibility that October 7 is a watershed moment for even harsher Israeli occupation unless international law is urgently implemented.
While both Hamas and Israel are found to have committed war crimes (including sexual violence), Israel is also sanctioned for committing “crimes against humanity of extermination, gender persecution targeting Palestinian men and boys, murder, forcible transfer, and torture and inhuman and cruel treatment.”
In clear and deliberate violation of international law, Israel intended to commit these crimes: to murder civilians en masse, inflict wide-scale civilian destruction, and collectively punish and dehumanize Palestinians in Gaza. Palestinians were murdered. They didn’t die as collateral damage or as unintended victims of Israeli military operations, but as Israel’s deliberate targets.
Such widespread and systematic destruction of whole neighborhoods in Gaza is consistent with the application of the Dahiya doctrine to Gaza, in which civilian infrastructure is deliberately destroyed as part of a strategy of collective punishment, reminiscent of Israel’s war on Lebanon in 2006.
The commission does leave the question of genocide for the ongoing investigation of the International Court of Justice to adjudicate. But it nevertheless accuses Israel of holding the whole civilian population in Gaza hostage to achieve its declared political and military aims. If Israel has falsely and persistently accused Hamas of employing “human shields” since 2008, the UN has yet again found that, in practice, it is Israel that employs this illegal tactic. Indeed, when opponents of the West take hostages, officials and mainstream media dub them terrorists. By violently punishing Palestinian civilians to achieve its political aims, Israel employs a textbook case of terror.
As stated in the Oxford Open Letter on the Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza as early as October 20, 2023: to think that the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas justify the humanitarian crisis currently unfolding in Gaza is to indulge a central tenet of terrorism — that all citizens must pay for the misdeeds of their governments — as well as terrorism’s central practice: collective punishment. As shown by investigative journalist Yuval Abraham, Israel does in fact use such terror tactics systematically in Gaza.
In addition to retribution, Israel has also weaponized aid as part of its war on Gaza and employed starvation as a weapon of war. The commission identified “an intention to instrumentalize and weaponize the provision of necessities, to hold the population of the Gaza Strip hostage to achieve political and military objectives, including the forced displacement of civilians from northern Gaza Strip and the release of Israeli hostages.”
While basic subsistence necessities are blocked by military siege, the “high acute food insecurity” is “the compounded result of the destruction and prevention of local food production, including agriculture, fishing and baking.”
Essential Palestinian human needs are callously violated and degraded by Israel, with the result that: “As of March 2024, the situation is continuing to deteriorate; 1.1 million people face catastrophic levels of food insecurity.” A policy of deliberate mass dehumanization of Palestinians is identified here.
If this is not damning enough, the report accuses Israel not only of failing to protect its citizens on October 7, 2023, but, through its illegal occupation, for being ultimately responsible for the root cause of violence in Israel-Palestine. This explanatory context is crucial.
