On the Escalation in Israel-Palestine, Daily Brief October 9, 2023

Their atrocities do not justify your atrocities. The brutality of their war crimes does not lessen the brutality of your war crimes. Their inhumanity drives your inhumanity which drives their inhumanity further, on and on until the world around you burns to the ground and beyond.

The civilian toll from fighting in Israel-Palestine at the weekend has been devastating, even by the appalling standards of the decades-long conflict.

This latest round of extreme violence began on Saturday, when Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups breached the fences separating Gaza and Israel. They attacked nearby Israeli communities, infiltrated homes, apparently shot civilians en masse, and took scores of Israeli civilians as hostages into Gaza. They also reportedly launched more than 3,000 indiscriminate rockets towards Israeli population centers.

By Sunday, attacks by Palestinian armed groups had killed more than 677 Israelis and foreign nationals, including civilians, according to Israeli sources cited by the United Nations. Subsequent Israeli airstrikes on Gaza left at least 413 Palestinians dead, the Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza reported. Mass violence is continuing as I write, and the civilian death toll keeps rising.

Of course, everyone realizes this conflict did not start at the weekend, however unprecedented the current levels of violence.

Israeli authorities have systematically repressed Palestinians for decades and since 2007 have imposed a crushing closure on Gaza’s population. Gaza – a 40-by-11 kilometer (25-by-7 mile) strip of land – has essentially been an open-air prison for more than 16 years.

What’s more, Palestinians in the Occupied Palestinian Territory have recently faced perhaps unprecedented repression. During the first nine months of 2023, Israeli authorities killed more Palestinians in the West Bank in 2023 than in any year since such UN records began in 2005.

As of October, the number of Palestinians being held in Israeli administrative detention without charges or trial based on secret information reached a 30-year-high.

The Israeli government’s systematic oppression in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, coupled with inhumane acts committed against Palestinians as part of a policy to maintain the domination by Jewish Israelis over Palestinians, amount to the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution.

However, does this years-long, inhuman repression justify brutal attacks by Palestinian armed groups? No. Never. It may be part of the background, but it is not an excuse.

The deliberate targeting of civilians by Palestinian armed groups, their indiscriminate attacks, and their taking of civilians as hostages amount to war crimes under international humanitarian law. On Saturday, Israel’s energy minister announced Israeli authorities would no longer provide electricity to Gaza’s 2.2 million residents. This and other punitive measures against Gaza’s civilian population would amount to unlawful collective punishment, which is also a war crime.

I know partisans in this conflict will accuse me of “bothsidesism” here, but this is the way international law is supposed to work. The laws of war apply to all sides in a conflict.

The real problem – the reason this conflict goes on an on – is that those laws are not applied in reality. It’s the same with standards of international law in general, including respect for fundamental human rights. People keep committing serious crimes on all sides, and perpetrators keep getting away with it.

During prior rounds of hostilities, Human Rights Watch documented serious violations of the laws of war by Israeli forces and by Palestinian armed groups.

Israel has repeatedly carried out indiscriminate airstrikes in past conflicts in Gaza that killed scores of civilians – wiping out entire families – and strikes that targeted civilians or civilian infrastructure, including destroying high-rise Gaza towers full of homes and businesses, with no evident military targets in the vicinity. Palestinian armed groups have launched thousands of indiscriminate rockets that violate the laws of war and amount to war crimes. Human Rights Watch has for years called for Palestinian armed groups to cease these unlawful attacks, including in a recent exchange of letters with Hamas authorities.

It’s hard to see how the cycles of violence in Israel-Palestine – brutality repaid with brutality, again and again – will ever end without justice for crimes like these.

In 2021, the prosecutor of International Criminal Court (ICC) opened a formal investigation into serious crimes committed in Palestine, which is a member of the ICC. The current fighting highlights the urgent need for the prosecutor to accelerate their investigation into serious crimes by all sides.

The sooner governments around the world understand that justice is essential to peace and the sooner they make justice their top priority for the region, the sooner there might be some hope these horrors will end.