HRW Says Israel's Forced Displacement Of Palestinians Accounts To War Crimes (Image @UNRWA)

Gaza, Palestine: A new report from Human Rights Wing (HRW) has founded that Israeli authorities’ massive and deliberate forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza amounts to a war crime. The international human rights organisation came to the conclusion by analysing satellite imagery, Israeli forced evacuation orders and statements by senior Israeli officials.

The report said that the authorities in Israel are deliberately and permanently making the return to large areas of Gaza effectively impossible for the Palestinian population.

“Israeli forces have destroyed the majority of Gaza’s water, sanitation, communications, energy and transport infrastructure as well as its schools and hospitals” and “systematically razed orchards, fields and greenhouses”, Nadia Hardman, the report author, told journalists in a news conference in advance of the report’s release.

“So much civilian infrastructure has been destroyed that much of Gaza has been rendered uninhabitable”, said Hardman.

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The HRW found that in addition to the widespread destruction carried out by Israeli forces across the Strip, Israel has continued to expand the so-called “buffer zone” by razing large areas of the coastal enclave’s cities, including Rafah, and building Israeli military access roads and structures to make them permanent features in the Palestinian territory.

“A new road constructed by the Israeli military that bisects the north and south halves of Gaza and runs east to west – this Netzarim road, as it’s called, is more than 4km [2.4 miles] wide and at the time of publication keeps expanding towards north Gaza and the south, beyond Wadi Gaza,” said Hardman.

Several Israeli officials have claimed that military “buffer zones” between Gaza and Israel are necessary so that residents in southern Israel can return to their homes without fearing another attack like the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.

Avi Dichter, Israel’s Minister of Agriculture, told reporters on October 19, 2023, that the plan was to create a “margin” around the Gaza Strip that “will be a fire zone. And no matter who you are, you will never be able to come close to the Israeli border”.

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The Human Rights Watch report said that the razing and destruction of the vast majority of Palestinian homes, fields, orchards, wooded areas and infrastructure in these so-called “buffer zones” was “one of the clearest examples of forcible transfer in Gaza”.

Notably, the rights group said that to qualify as a war crime, the forcible transfer of a population must be carried out intentionally. The report’s authors provided almost two dozen statements from senior Israeli ministers supporting the forcible transfer of Palestinians.

The HRW said that the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also made similar remarks, and changed his tone on January 10, 2024, which is a day before Tel Aviv faced allegations of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Netanyahu said, “Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population”.

The report from HRW comes after three Palestinian human rights organisations last month warned that Israel is systematically “emptying northern Gaza of its residents”.

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Residents of northern Gaza are “fearful that if they leave, then they will never be able to return to their homes and lands, as Israel’s plan to resettle through the illegal transfer of its own civilian population and annex northern Gaza is becoming clearer with every day that passes”, said the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Al-Haq and the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, in a joint statement.

During the end of October this year, several Israeli politicians from Netanyahu’s party attended the “Preparing to Settle Gaza” conference, which included practical workshops on establishing new Israeli settlements in the war-torn Gaza Strip, said media report.