A report on the human rights situation in Gaza
It was 93 degrees in Gaza on Wednesday, and the best that most survivors of Israel’s war there could manage was to find shade under a tent. The Israeli air force, unchallenged by anti-aircraft defenses, has damaged or destroyed 92 percent of the territory’s homes and apartment buildings, leaving the Palestinian survivors of the war lucky, but surely not grateful, to have a tent over their heads.
The Israeli bombing of Gaza has now gone on for more than thirty months. It began immediately after Hamas’s attack on Israel of October 7, 2023. Hamas’s goal was to snatch vulnerable Israeli soldiers as hostages. The gates separating Israel from south Gaza were down and hundreds of frustrated Gazans, who had been suffering in a subjugated society for decades, poured into Israel seeking revenge. Both US and Israeli intelligence services had warned for months that Hamas was planning a major assault inside Israel, but those reports, which included translated US intercepts of communications from Hamas training sites and reached senior levels of the Israeli government, were ignored or not believed.
More than 1,200 Israelis, including young attendees of an all-night rave near the border with Gaza, were murdered on October 7, and 250 men and women, many of them serving in the Israeli military, were taken hostage. Unanswered questions remain today about the ignored intelligence warnings and the slow response of the Israel Defense Forces.
There were a few Americans with military and intelligence ties to Israel who tried and failed in those early days to stop Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu from his all-out bombing response. One American thought was to convince Hamas, whose senior officers planned the attack, to turn over the leaders to stand trial. It was a nonstarter for both parties. Netanyahu had moved closer to the extreme right out of political necessity and took up a policy of all-out retaliation. He was then on trial on corruption charges that, as it was reported at the time, were more than convincing. But under Israeli law as long as he was prime minister he could stay in office if convicted and delay going to prison by appealing the verdict. It has been no secret in Israel that avoiding prison was one of his motives in turning to collective punishment from the air in Gaza. The war delayed the trial and kept him in office. Two US presidents, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, have done nothing to restrain the Israeli prime minister, and supported and supplied him in the war.
The IDF now controls close to 60 percent of Gaza. Hamas is still alive and still a threat, if a much subdued one. The Palestinian survivors living in tents fight the elements, with more available food than earlier in the war but still lacking health care and decent sanitation. They are under the watch and control of the IDF, who shoot to kill if a Palestinian father or son, even one searching for firewood, strays even a few feet from the constantly narrowing borders of the tent camps.
I’ve been watching the mainstream coverage of Gaza since the beginning of the war. The stagnant situation there has inevitably become a humdrum story for the Western media unless a stray bomb wipes out a family or a widely publicized plan by a member of the Trump family emerges to turn Gaza, once the Palestinian issue is resolved—no specifications about that—into a $25 billion luxury resort and skyscraper business complex. Sometimes there is a flash of coverage when, as happened last month, Al-Jazeera reported the torture by a group of Israeli soldiers of an 18-month old Gazan boy. Cigarette burns and nail punctures were part of an effort to get the child’s father to confess to unspecified actions. (It should be noted here that the US and international press corps has been thoroughly reporting on the increasing violence against Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli settlers, their murder and seizure of long-held Palestinian property, all with the IDF looking on.)
I have previously reported on the remarkable work of Francesca Albanese, an Italian legal scholar who is now in her second three-year tour as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Gaza and the West Bank. She does not mince words when it comes to the continuing escalation of torture and mistreatment of the Palestinians.
“Torture has always been a central feature of the dispossession of Palestinians by Israel,” Albanese writes in her current report, which was released on March 23. Since the Hamas attack in October of 2023: “Israel has employed torture on a scale that suggests collective vengeance and destructive intent. . . . The escalation of torture in Israeli detention centers is a coordinated plan” that has been coordinated by Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s minister of national security. Albanese finds that since the October 7 attack, “the systematic torture of Palestinians has been an integral component of the settler-colonial genocide perpetrated by Israel, functioning as an instrument of annihilatory violence directed at the Palestinians as a people. When torture is perpetrated across an entire territory, against a population as such and sustained through policies that destroy the conditions of life, the genocidal intent is apparent.”
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