Israel’s forced displacement in Gaza amounts to war crime: HRW

Israeli authorities have caused massive and deliberate forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, in what amounts to a war crime, a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) has found.

The international human rights organisation analysed satellite imagery, Israeli forced evacuation orders and statements by senior Israeli officials to show that authorities in Israel are deliberately and permanently making returning 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” report author Nadia Hardman told journalists in a news conference in advance of the report’s release on Thursday.

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

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

A satellite image shows an area the Israeli military has completely razed to cut the Gaza Strip in two and has called the ‘Netzarim Corridor’ [2024 Planet Labs Inc/Handout via Reuters]

“A new road constructed by the Israeli military that bisects the north and south halves of Gaza and runs east to west – this ‘Netzarim Corridor‘ 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 such as the one led by Hamas on October 7, 2023.

Israel’s Minister of Agriculture Avi Dichter 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”.

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.

For example, on April 29, 2024, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, “There are no half measures. [The Gaza cities of] Rafah, Deir el-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has also made similar statements, HRW said, although on January 10, 2024, one day before Israel faced initial hearings on allegations of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, Netanyahu changed his tune, saying: “Israel has no intention of permanently occupying Gaza or displacing its civilian population.”

HRW’s researchers found that Israel’s “clear intent” to forcibly displace Palestinians was also shown in other ways, including through the manner it issued forced evacuation orders.

HRW researcher Gabi Ivens said they analysed and cross-checked dozens of Israeli military demands to evacuate and found the instructions “were unclear, inaccurate and sometimes contradictory, making it extremely difficult for civilians to know where and when to move”.

“Dozens of orders were issued after the time periods specified for safe evacuations had already begun, while others were issued after attacks had already started,” Ivens told journalists.

Israeli resettlement of Gaza

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

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,” the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Al-Haq and the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, said in a joint statement.

Thousands of Israeli settlers previously occupied the Gaza Strip for nearly 40 years, but the settlements were removed in 2005 under then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.

This has not deterred some hardline Israelis from planning to settle the Gaza Strip again.

Daniella Weiss, founder of Nachala, a hardline Israeli settler organisation, speaks during the ‘Preparing to Settle Gaza’ conference in Be’eri, southern Israel, on October 21 [Janis Laizans/Reuters]

At the end of October, several Israeli politicians from Prime Minister 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.

“Gaza is the property of our ancestors since time immemorial. We will not rest until we settle it again,” Limor Son Har Melech, a member of the Knesset from the far-right Otzma Yehudit party, which is part of Netanyahu’s coalition government, said in a post on X, promoting the conference.