Evidence of Israeli genocide keeps stacking up
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The reports keep rolling in. The leaders of the world's most powerful states just roll their eyes. Those who dare to speak out get hammered.
The stack of evidence of Israeli war crimes, crimes against humanity and, yes, genocide against Palestinians grows thicker by the day. UN agencies, human rights groups, doctors, aid agencies and other professional outfits have overloaded our inboxes with heavily footnoted, weighty reports.
Last week, the UN Human Rights Council's Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the conflict contributed a 49-page report into the mix. It covered sexual and gender-based violence carried out by Israeli forces and settlers.
It shakes up the narrative of the Western establishment. Anti-Palestinian groups want the focus to be solely on Israeli victims of sexual crimes — those carried out by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023. This has to change. The huge number of Palestinian women killed undermines Israeli claims that their operations were targeted. October 2023 may have been the deadliest month for Palestinian women ever recorded, with 1,213 killed. Children make up a third of all casualties, women another third. These percentages are much higher than in the 2008-09 conflict, the report argues, because of Israel's far greater use of heavy air bombardment.
Prominent Israeli figures are not ashamed of sharing genocidal views, including against Palestinian women. Take Eliyahu Yosian, a commentator from the Misgav Institute for National Security, who told Israeli TV that, in Gaza, 'the woman is an enemy, the baby is an enemy and the pregnant woman is an enemy.' This alone should be punishable as incitement under the Genocide Convention.
Prominent Israeli figures are not ashamed of sharing genocidal views, including against Palestinian women
Chris Doyle
The report also covers another aspect of genocide, namely the intent to impose measures intended to prevent births within the group. To back this up, the report covers the shelling of an in vitro fertilization clinic in December 2023. Israeli commanders knew the purpose of the clinic.
The report also details the remarkable number of Israeli strikes on maternity wards —part of the broader Israeli decimation of the Palestinian healthcare system in Gaza. As one Palestinian doctor told me: 'Not only do you not want to get sick in Gaza, you do not want to get pregnant.' Giving birth without proper medical facilities has become so dangerous that many women opt to risk giving birth at home. Because of Israel's policy of starvation as a weapon of war, women and newborns are typically malnourished and many women say they cannot produce milk to breastfeed.
Nobody needed Nostradamus-like powers to predict the Israeli leadership's reaction. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired off his usual fusillade of condemnation so fast that it is doubtful he got past the first page of the report, if he looked at it at all. This was 'an anti-Israel circus.' As for the UN Human Rights Council, Netanyahu fumed that it 'has long been exposed as an antisemitic, corrupt and pro-terror body that has no legitimacy.' He was not so critical last June, when the same UN body produced an excoriating report on the Oct. 7 attacks, including Hamas' use of sexual violence.
Netanyahu rejects the UN report as blood libel. Listen to him and practically the whole world is antisemitic. The Israeli PM has called the UN a 'house of darkness' and a 'swamp of antisemitic bile.' US student protests are antisemitic. The International Criminal Court chief prosecutor Karim Khan was described as one of 'the great antisemites in modern times.' Netanyahu said: 'The antisemitic decision of the international court in The Hague is a modern Dreyfus trial, and it will end the same way.' In fact, he also accused the ICC of antisemitism back in 2019.
One group Netanyahu is quiet about is what can be called the antisemites for Israel — those who indulge in anti-Jewish hatred and conspiracies but support Israel.
The grotesque way unevidenced smears of antisemitism are hurled at entire institutions to intimidate and distract from the reality of Israel's war crimes and genocide has to be challenged. Genuine antisemitism is rising but what Netanyahu et al are doing undermines that cause.
Netanyahu rejects the UN report as blood libel. Listen to him and practically the whole world is antisemitic
Chris Doyle
The challenge is to ensure the overwhelming deluge of evidence of genocide counts — a tough ask given the tidal wave of career-ending pile-ons against those in power who dare to utter the 'G' word.
The eminent genocide scholar William Schabas, who lost family in the Nazi Holocaust, summed it up perfectly: 'One day, Western countries will all recognize what happened in Gaza as a genocide. It will be like apartheid South Africa, when the West stayed silent for decades and then suddenly grew conscious when they think it is safe to.'
Those who are prepared to stand up and be counted should be honored. The legions of politicians, advisers and officials who know the truth but cower in fear must step forward. A day of reckoning will come when those who have been complicit in Israel's crimes will be held to account. It is time to be on the right side of history.
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