Column — Human Rights Watch: Israel's Extermination and Genocide in Gaza

By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan “Water is Life” became the anthem of the water protectors protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline in and around the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota in 2016. Now, a cruel negative variant of that phrase applies to Gaza: “No water is death.” Two million Palestinians trapped in Gaza have been subjected to an Israeli military assault for close to 14 months, including the purposeful denial of water. On Thursday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) issued a damning, 184-page report on this manufactured water crisis, titled, “Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water.” The report details how Israel has systematically deprived water to Palestinians in Gaza, and quotes Israeli officials who, in their own words, define this crime as official policy. Former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, for example, said on October 9th, 2023, two days after Hamas’s attack on southern Israel, “We are imposing a complete siege…No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel – everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and must act accordingly.” The Israeli military dutifully followed its orders, so much so that, on November 21st of this year, the International Criminal Court in The Hague issued arrest warrants for Gallant and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for crimes against humanity and war crimes. “What that statement of his [Gallant] and statements by other senior Israeli leaders in positions of control and command in the Israeli army over this issue of denial of access to water, their statements are evidence of an intent, and they were also carried out by the military and by the authorities,” Bill van Esveld, HRW’s acting Israel and Palestine Associate Director, who helped produce the report, said on the Democracy Now! news hour. “It’s not just they said something and it sounds bad. What they said was actually what they did. That’s extremely serious, and that is part of what led us to the conclusion of extermination. That is a crime against humanity, of deliberately causing mass death. One of the ways that can be committed is by depriving people of what they need to stay alive, such as water.” van Esveld went on to explain HRW’s damning conclusion, accusing Israel of genocide: “Extermination is the same act as one of the acts of genocide listed in the Genocide Convention and indeed in the International Criminal Court statute on its article on genocide, deliberately inflicting conditions of life on people calculated to bring about the destruction of that group.” HRW has made this charge only three times previously in its almost 50 year history, as van Esveld explained: “it is not an accusation that we level lightly…We accused the Myanmar military of genocidal acts against the Rohingya in 2017 and we found full blown genocide against the Kurds in Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign in Iraq in the 80s and we found genocide also in Rwanda.” The report details the many ways that Israel denies water, from its intentional destruction of water infrastructure, holding tanks, pipelines and desalination plants, to actively blocking donated water tanker trucks from entering the Gaza Strip. “The results are horrifying,” van Esveld said. “The lack of water kills you in a million different ways.” Babies die of dehydration, others die after unwashed wounds become infected, all while over a quarter of a million people suffer from skin diseases caused by the inability to bathe. While HRW’s report focuses specifically on the denial of water, their conclusion mirrors one made more broadly two weeks ago by Amnesty International when it became the first major international human rights organization to accuse Israel of genocide in Gaza. “It’s a damning indictment of the United States’ failure to stop Israel’s violation,” Budour Hassan, an Amnesty International researcher, said on Democracy Now! when Amnesty’s report was released. “If there is any country that has the capacity, the power and the tool to stop this genocide, it’s the United States. Not only has the United States failed to do so, it has consistently awarded Israel. It has consistently continued to flout the United States’ own laws in order to continue giving Israel the weapons — the very same weapons that are used by Israel to commit the genocide in Gaza.” Efforts to halt US support for Israeli atrocities in Gaza continue. Palestinian American Ahmed Moor and others recently sued the US State Department and Secretary of State Antony Blinken for failing to enforce the Leahy Law, prohibiting military aid to foreign military units accused of human rights violations. “The basic conditions of life in Gaza aren’t being met,” Moor told Democracy Now!, “[a] policy that our government is supporting.” The people of Gaza need a permanent ceasefire now, an end to the flow of US arms to Israel, and a massive flow of clean water and humanitarian aid.