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.
My concern is that the Israeli military has been saying, “Well, it’s the fault of Hamas if those people don’t evacuate,” which makes me worry that they then see themselves having a license to harm the civilians in the areas where they haven’t evacuated. [Hamas has told Palestinians not to leave their homes.] And the reality is that Gaza’s main hospital, which is currently coping with more than six thousand people injured just from the last couple of days, is in the evacuation zone. I mean, what do they expect people to do? Do they expect the woman in the I.C.U. bed to evacuate? There are many people who cannot evacuate, and there are many people who choose not to.
For many of the refugees in Gaza, especially the elderly who remember 1948, this feels like a replay of what Palestinians called the Nakba, when they were told to leave or they fled and they were never allowed back. And the fact that the Israeli military has also called upon Egypt to open its border and has called on civilians in Gaza to flee to Egypt just ramps up those fears.
What else is Israel saying about where they can go?
Those who have fled have fled to the south. The Israeli government drew a line at the northern end of Gaza and said, Everything above this line, including Gaza City, including refugee camps that are densely populated, including the main hospital, everything above this line, you have to leave. Many people are terrified, and they’ve fled to relatives, and to homes in the southern part of Gaza. Many people cannot flee. I hope very much that the Israeli Army understands the fact that they gave people a warning that would be very difficult, and in some cases impossible, to heed, but it does not remove their responsibility to take all possible precautions not to harm civilians.
The Israeli President, Isaac Herzog, responded to a question on Friday and said that, “It’s not true, this rhetoric about civilians being not aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up, they could have fought against the evil regime which took over Gaza in a coup d’état.” How much is this in conflict with international law—the idea that civilians take some responsibility for the political situation that they find themselves in?
International humanitarian law prohibits punishing people for acts that they did not commit. In this case, punishing civilians for the actions of Hamas. So when the President says that, it’s particularly disturbing because nearly half of the people in Gaza are children, so they’re the ones being punished for the acts of adult fighters. International law is very clear about that. Collective punishment is unlawful. You are allowed to target fighters. You may not punish the civilian population by depriving them of basic goods, and there are specific prohibitions against using starvation as a method of warfare. Israel also has positive obligations to facilitate humanitarian assistance for people in Gaza who need it. So the Israeli military has an obligation to proactively insure that civilians and Gaza are adequately supplied and to facilitate all humanitarianism. Instead, it is deliberately blocking that humanitarian aid, including food and water.
Israel has said that Hamas uses civilians as shields. Is that a war crime?
Yes, we have serious concerns about Hamas and other fighters not taking adequate measures to protect civilians. So when they store weapons in civilian areas, when they concentrate fighting activities in densely populated civilian areas, they are putting civilians at risk, and that is a violation of international law. When they do that, it does not give the Israeli government the right to then disregard its obligation to avoid disproportionate or indiscriminate harm to those civilians.
You said you were in the West Bank when we started our phone call. What are your concerns about the West Bank over this next period of time as we see the increased bombardment of Gaza?
So even before this week, there has been an escalation in violence in the West Bank, primarily Israeli soldiers and settlers attacking Palestinians and some incidents of Palestinian gunmen attacking Israelis, both soldiers and civilians. Part of the concern is that Netanyahu’s government has not only not shown any willingness to rein in violence by Israeli settlers but has actually backed acts of violence by Israeli settlers against Palestinians. That all creates a powder keg under the current circumstances. In the past week, there’s been an uptick in violence with some people shot and killed, and other attempted attacks. And my concern is that it’s going to get worse as the situation in Gaza gets worse, and the Israeli government is particularly uninterested in deëscalation. So a lot of people are worried here.
Do you see Israel and its behavior in Gaza as outside the norm of how democratic countries like the United States engage in war? And by norm I don’t mean to imply that it is an acceptable norm. But do you feel that Israel is actually outside of that norm?
There are some countries who have democratic elections who are engaging in horrific war crimes, and there are some countries that are quite repressive politically, but they don’t violate the laws of war. The only norm I recognize is the norm that all the countries in the world have signed up for, which is international humanitarian law. The way that something becomes a binding requirement under the laws of war is that almost every country in the world says this is a binding requirement. So almost every country in the world agrees that you are not allowed to target civilians, and that custom of not targeting civilians is how that became a rule.
I would say that unfortunately, the Israeli government has been committing crimes against humanity in the form of apartheid and persecution, which are part of the root causes of this violence. And that underlying oppression is part of the root causes of this violence. And I say that without justifying any of the violence.
A lot of the rhetoric in the United States has been about Hamas being at a different level of barbarity than Israel because of the brutality of the massacre we saw last weekend, and the feeling, widely expressed across the American political spectrum, that Israel doesn’t engage in those sorts of acts. At the same time, Israel has probably already killed more people and more civilians and more children in their response than Hamas did last weekend. I’m curious how you try to keep both of those thoughts in your head: how torturing or killing civilians and children intentionally is a uniquely awful thing, but, at the same time, Israel has also engaged in illegal behavior that’s going to lead to more people being killed.
International-law obligations are nonreciprocal. If the other side commits war crimes, that doesn’t mean you can commit war crimes. We don’t make comparisons between different kinds of war crimes. Hamas killing civilians deliberately on a massive scale, taking civilians hostage, and even threatening to execute civilians—those are war crimes. That doesn’t justify the Israeli government committing its own war crimes. And I’m very concerned.
Let me say this a different way: our job at Human Rights Watch is to try to hold open a very narrow space where universal principles of humanity and human dignity are maintained no matter who you are. And I’m worried that the United States is appropriately condemning the horrific acts committed by Hamas on Saturday, but is then forgetting that those same principles of protecting civilians also apply to the Israeli military operation in Gaza.
I think that you’ve tried to walk an interesting line in this conversation, because it seems like you’re trying to make people aware of past actions. You’ve talked about the Nakba and people fleeing and being scared of history repeating itself, and about what happened last weekend. You’ve mentioned that Israel has some responsibility for the long-term situation on the ground in the West Bank and Gaza. But at the same time you are saying that from a human-rights perspective, in some sense, that’s all irrelevant, and that people have the responsibility to live up to human-rights obligations regardless of what’s happened in the past.
Absolutely. And, to be fair, I can understand that people look at the horrific acts of Saturday in southern Israel and they feel angry. But if they try to connect with why they’re feeling angry, they’re feeling angry because children were targeted. They’re feeling angry because elderly people were kidnapped. They’re feeling angry because civilians were harmed and basic principles of human decency were flouted. And so the response should not be to flout basic principles of human decency and protections of civilians on the other side. It shouldn’t be this difficult to say that, but it is. And I guess I would encourage people to think about whether the “They’re worse than we are” argument is particularly constructive or morally sound.
Or, perhaps, even if it’s morally sound, it still might not be constructive right now, because we all still need to follow the same universal ideas in our behavior.
And those universal ideas include very strong standards of nonreciprocity. You do not get to target civilians because somebody else has targeted civilians. It’s nonreciprocal because your obligations are to the civilians. It’s not a deal between fighters. It’s a deal with humanity. ♦
