Anatomy of a Genocide: Report of human rights in the Palestinian territories [pdf]

Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20240325191441/https://www.ohchr...

This is an excellent report by UN Human Rights Council special rapporteur Francesca Albanese. Despite the subtitle indicating human rights in the Palestinian territories, the report focuses on Israel’s conduct in Gaza and on the crime of Genocide. The report not only demonstrates “there are reasonable grounds to believe” that the threshold for several genocidal acts against Palestinians is met, but recommends actions such as:

- a total arms embargo on Israel,

- for the General Assembly to reject the status quo for the state of Palestine and to dismantle the system of Apartheid,

- for South Africa to pursue compliance at the Security Council as Israel is not following orders from the ICJ ruling,

- for UNWRA founding to be reestablished,

- etc.

In my opinion the most damning part of the report is Chapter VI. “Humanitarian camouflage: distorting the laws of war to conceal genocidal intent” in which Francesca Albanese describes common tropes used to justify Israel’s action (of which I have seen many posts here on HN). For example (subsection A.) how Hamas allegedly uses Human Shields (a war crime) justifies the high civilian casualty rate. Albanese does an outstanding job at deconstructing these tropes, and describing them correctly as not a justification.

> International law does not permit the blanket claim that an opposing force is using the entire population as human shields en bloc. Any such usage must be assessed and established on a case-by-case basis before each individual attack.

> Nevertheless, Israeli authorities have characterized churches, mosques, schools, UN facilities, universities, hospitals and ambulances213 as connected with Hamas to reinforce the perception of a population characterized as broadly ‘complicit’ and therefore killable. [...] Israel has thus transformed Gaza into a “world without civilians” in which “everything from taking shelter in hospitals to fleeing for safety is declared a form of human shielding”.