The Humanitarian Catastrophe in Gaza

On Friday, Israel began warning more than a million Palestinians who live in the northern Gaza Strip to evacuate their homes. It did so while continuing its bombing campaign, which it says is meant to destroy Hamas, the terrorist group that brutally murdered over thirteen hundred Israelis last weekend. The United Nations has said that a relocation of so many civilians from such a densely populated area is “impossible”; already, more than twenty-four hundred Palestinians have been killed. To help understand the situation in Gaza, I recently spoke by phone with Sari Bashi, the program director at Human Rights Watch. She also co-founded the organization Gisha, which works on human-rights issues in Gaza, and she is currently in the West Bank. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed her specific concerns about Israel’s military action, the challenges of evacuating Gaza, and how human-rights advocates wrestle with different types of atrocities.

This is not the first Israeli incursion into Gaza since Hamas took control of the territory, in 2007. What human-rights norms has Israel observed and not observed in prior incursions?

In prior incursions, the Israeli military engaged in disproportionate and in some cases indiscriminate attacks on civilians. The laws of war require armies to avoid deliberately targeting civilians, and also to avoid attacks that by their nature cannot distinguish between civilians and combatants. In particular, in Gaza, because it’s such a densely populated urban area, when you fire explosive weapons on a massive scale, it’s predictable that civilians will die. It’s predictable that children will die. And that’s what has happened certainly in the last couple of days, but also in most of the rounds of violence that have taken place over the last many years.

What the Israeli government tends to claim about these prior incursions is that they have warned people to disperse from an area beforehand, and moreover that they don’t directly target civilians. Instead, they say that they target Hamas terrorists, and seek to avoid civilian casualties. Do you agree with this, and what have you observed over the past couple of decades?

I disagree. I think in many cases, the Israeli Army has openly targeted civilians; it’s just that they don’t recognize them as civilians. There was an attack on a police station where there were police cadets who were graduating and hundreds of people were killed. This was back in 2008. The fact that these cadets were working for the Hamas-run government does not turn them into combatants. In other cases, the Israeli Army also attacked political leaders of Hamas, which is not allowed by international law in terms of targeting. But I think most of the terrible harm has come from indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks on civilian areas.

There was one military operation where the Israeli government claimed with pride that they had sent messages to one hundred thousand homes in Gaza. This is interesting because that’s about half of the number of households that exist in Gaza. So if you tell people that we’re going to bomb your area, but there’s no safe place to go—that is not considered an effective warning. And even if you warn civilians, if they don’t leave because they can’t or won’t, you’re not allowed to target them. And, in terms of the disproportionality of the attacks, we’ve seen a number of attacks that rise to the level of war crimes because the Army was bombing such densely populated cities and areas where civilian deaths, and the deaths of children, were expected. And that’s a pattern that we’ve seen over and over again, I’m sorry to say.

Now to be clear, militants in Gaza—including Hamas and Islamic Jihad—are clearly engaging in war crimes because they are firing indiscriminate rockets at Israeli towns and cities. It is not hard to see that those are war crimes because they’re directly targeting civilians. The Israeli government uses a lot more obfuscation, but I can’t say that they’ve been respecting the laws of war, and the terrible, terrible deaths and injuries and destruction of homes and schools and clinics in Gaza is an indication that they have not been following the laws of war.

You’ve been involved in Gaza for almost two decades—how has the humanitarian situation there changed or worsened? Obviously there’s been a blockade for much of that time.

The Gaza Strip was carved out after the 1948 war, and it led to a situation where you had hundreds of thousands of refugees living in a very densely populated area. Gaza is 2.2 million people, seventy per cent of them are refugees, and nearly half of them are children. And, for the last sixteen years, they’ve been subject to a punishing situation where the Israeli government has closed the crossings into and out of Gaza, restricted the movement of goods in and out, and allowed people to travel only for what it calls “exceptional humanitarian circumstances.”

So the economy in Gaza has taken a nosedive. Unemployment is approaching fifty per cent. The G.D.P. per capita is lower than it was in 1994. People in Gaza can’t leave for study, or for jobs. They can’t have people come in for work or other kinds of opportunities, and eighty per cent of the population is dependent on humanitarian assistance. The situation has narrowed the horizons of young people in particular. It’s a very young population, and it’s difficult to travel abroad. Most of them have never even left the Strip. They’re not able to visit relatives, in some cases, immediate family members in the West Bank or in Israel. Young people have not been allowed to travel to Palestinian universities in the West Bank. It’s a situation that cannot be ignored as one of the drivers of the current violence.

During prior incursions, Israel has said that it was going into Gaza to destroy Hamas or to weaken Hamas. This operation seems much larger. What are your specific concerns about it, and how does it sit on a continuum with past actions in Gaza?

This past week has been unprecedented. The attacks that Hamas and other armed groups in Gaza launched on Israeli civilians on Saturday are unlike anything in Israeli history. We’re talking about fighters coming, kidnapping children, kidnapping older people, kidnapping babies, burning families out of their homes, engaging in a massacre at an outdoor dance party, so that hundreds of Israeli civilians were killed. We’ve never had that. And the Israeli response in terms of its warfare on Gaza is also unprecedented.

The Israeli government has blocked supplies of food, electricity, fuel, and water to the 2.2 million residents in Gaza. [On Sunday, the White House said that Israel has turned the water back on in southern Gaza.] They have declared that they’ve asked the people in the north—half of the population—to evacuate to the south. That’s a million people. They’ve done that under circumstances in which there’s no safe place to go to, and many people can’t evacuate. You have the elderly, and you have people with disabilities. You have people who are hospitalized.

But none of this has a precedent. In the past, the Israeli government has said that they’re allowing humanitarian supplies in; now they have openly said they are engaging in collective punishment against the people of Gaza, and that they are going to deprive the civilian population of supplies as a way of punishing Hamas and Islamic jihad.

You mentioned the order to evacuate. Putting aside the specifics of this conflict, what is the humane way to deal with civilians in war zones?

So the laws of war require, assuming the circumstances permit, that warring parties give effective advance warning of attacks that could affect the civilian population. In order for a warning to be effective, it has to take into consideration the timing of the warning, and the ability of civilians to leave the area. If you don’t give them adequate time, it’s not considered effective. But civilians who do not evacuate, either because they can’t or they choose not to, do not become legitimate targets. They are still fully protected by international humanitarian law. So even after warnings have been given, the Israeli Army still has to take all feasible precautions to protect civilians and their property in the so-called evacuation zone.

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