Two New Reports on Gaza from Israeli Human Rights Organizations

Read them (PDF)

Lichen on a tree in Bogotá, Colombia. Photo by author, two days ago. It is alive.

Today, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem came out with a report it calls “Our Genocide.” There’s an 8-minute video, a 5-page summary (PDF) and an 88-page full report (PDF). B’Tselem says “the Israeli government has cynically exploited the trauma experienced by many Israelis” on October 7, 2023. It adds that “one crime does not justify another” and that “starvation and destruction have nothing to do with self-defense.”

Also today, Physicians for Human Rights — Israel released a 65-page position paper (PDF) that “documents this assault for what it is: a deliberate, cumulative dismantling of Gaza’s health system, and with it, its people’s ability to survive.” They say it is “not a temporary crisis” but a “strategy to eliminate the conditions needed for life.” It is “not collateral damage” nor “a side effect” but “the systematic creation of unlivable conditions. It is the denial of survivability. It is a genocide.”

These are, according to Common Dreams, the first two human rights organizations within Israel to use the term genocide, although of course “many international human rights groups” have long done so, including “Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch … [and] several bodies within the United Nations.”