TPC Staff
The Palestine Chronicle / December 7, 2024
“The enormous amount of evidence I have seen, much of it referenced later in this document, has been enough for me to believe that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza.”
An Israeli historian has concluded that Israel is committing genocide in its war on Gaza and compiled an online database of evidence of the atrocities committed over the past year in the besieged enclave.
“I, Lee Mordechai, a historian by profession and an Israeli citizen, bear witness in this document to the situation in Gaza as events are unfolding,” Lee Mordechai, an associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, states in the Summary of his report titled ‘Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War’.
“The enormous amount of evidence I have seen, much of it referenced later in this document, has been enough for me to believe that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian population in Gaza,” Mordechai continues.
The English translation of the latest updated version of the report, dated December 5, 2024, is 124 pages and contains over 1,400 footnotes “referencing thousands of sources, including eyewitness reports, video footage, investigatory materials, articles and photographs,” according to Haaretz.
“The evidence I have seen and discuss indicates that one of Israel’s very likely objectives is to ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip, whether in part or in total, by removing as many Palestinians as feasibly possible,” Mordechai says.
Haaretz says the report “constitutes the most methodical and detailed documentation in Hebrew (there is also an English translation) of the war crimes that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza.”
The online report includes sections titled ‘The Massacre of Palestinians,’ ‘Causing Deaths of Civilian Populations,’ ‘Dehumanization,’ ‘Ethnic Cleansing,’ ‘Hostages,’ ‘The West Bank,’ The Media and Propaganda’ and ‘US Involvement.’ Mordechai also has a featured section on the second raid of the al-Shifa Hospital in March 2024, the US Campus Protests from April to May 2024, and the North Gaza Operation, dated October to December 2024.
Horrific footage, testimony
Mordechai says the “dehumanization of Palestinians is now normative, pervasive and obvious in many hundreds images and videos, almost all of which were uploaded by IDF soldiers to social media.”
These videos and images, the report says, “present shooting civilians waving white flags, abuse of individuals, captives and corpses, gleefully damaging or destroying houses, various structures and institutions, religious sites and looting of personal belongings, as well as randomly firing their weapons, shooting local animals, destroying private property, burning books within libraries, defacing Palestinian and Islamic symbols (including burning Qurans and turning mosques into dining spaces) and declaring a new Nakba.”
One video, for example, the report says “shows tens of Palestinian captives from Gaza sitting in a bus tied up and with their eyes covered. An Israeli soldier then demands that they praise his family and state that they want to become slaves to his family ‘forever and ever’.”
Another testimony of a Gazan doctor states that “the detained director of Al-Shifa medical complex was made to crawl like an animal, had a chain placed around his neck and was told to eat from a bowl like a dog.”
A Gazan detainee said that “IDF soldiers placed women detainees from Gaza in the men’s section while being completely naked, and cut the hair of some of the women detainees.”
A detained Gazan woman recounted her story, says the report, “about the abuse and humiliation she suffered during her own detainment, during which she was separated from her little children and IDF soldiers beat her on multiple occasions as well as threatened to bury her alive.”
Another documented case is of a Palestinian woman who claimed that the Israeli soldiers “carved a Star of David on her husband’s back during his time in detention.”
One soldier “filmed a dog eating the corpse of a Gazan, exclaiming that it “took [the corpse of] the terrorist apart”, then moved his camera to discuss the beauty of the view and the sunset.”
Mainstream media propaganda
Mordechai says the situation “has been made possible through the strong support of most mainstream media in Israel as well as the West, primarily in the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany.”
He notes that from the beginning of the war, “Israel has waged an information campaign that emphasized the horrors of the Oct. 7 attacks with both reliable and unreliable factual claims, limited information flows from Gaza, discredited critical voices outside Israel, and curtailed domestic discourse to rally the Israeli public around the war.”
“As a result, Israeli media and discourse remain predominantly and uncritically pro-war, with many institutions and individuals self-censoring,” he adds.
Mainstream media outlets in the US “share much of this approach,” in Mordechai’s view.
He says in-depth investigations “of the Israeli smear campaign against UNRWA and the persistent doubts towards the Palestinian death counts reveal that both are cases of unfounded propaganda.”
“All of the above normalizes Israeli violence and actions by portraying them as legitimate, deflects attention away from the reality in Gaza, and contributes to the de-humanization of Palestinians,” the historian emphasizes.
US support
“America’s almost complete support has been fundamental for Israel’s conduct of the war,” he notes, adding that this support “took the form of military aid, the deployment of US military and other assets, ironclad diplomatic support, especially at the United Nations, and the release of Israel from mechanisms of US oversight and serious accountability.”
The historian concludes that the US’s “more critical” remarks toward Israel have led to “almost no changes” in its policy towards Israel.
‘Dehumanization’ of Palestinians
Mordechai says Israel’s highest state officials led the “dehumanization” of Palestinians, and it continues to be supported through the state infrastructure and military.
“Israeli discourse has de-humanized Palestinians to such an extent that the vast majority of Israeli Jews supports the aforementioned measures,” he notes.
“Speaking about Palestinians in genocidal language is legitimate in Israeli discourse. The de-humanization results in widespread abuse of, and violence towards, detained Palestinians and Gazan civilians and their property, all with almost no consequences,” the historian adds.
Ethnic cleansing, said the report, is openly discussed in Israeli discourse, including by ministers in the ruling government such as the Heritage Minister “who also called to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza” and the head of a local council, who proposed to send all Gazans to Lebanon, flatten the whole Strip so “it becomes an empty museum like Auschwitz”.
‘Making Gaza unlivable’
“All the evidence I have seen indicates that Israel is systematically destroying Gaza to make it unlivable in the future,” says Mordechai.
The report points to Israel having dropped 6,000 bombs on Gaza – over the annual total used by the US in Afghanistan – in the first week following October 7. While in the first three months of fighting Israel “had destroyed over 10,000 buildings in the Strip – compared to some 4,700 buildings in Aleppo after three years of fighting.”
Israel “is said to have dropped over 500 2,000-pound bombs within the densely populated urban area, despite the massive collateral damage these bombs cause (causing death or injury in a radius of up to 365 meters around the target).”
“The wholescale destruction of targets with no military value such as archives, libraries, universities, mosques and heritage sites – as well as the broader destruction of the civilian infrastructure as well as over half the buildings throughout the Gaza Strip – all contribute to the objective of making Gaza uninhabitable,” Mordechai says.
Northern Gaza
The historian says that when the Israeli siege of northern Gaza began in October 2024, it “almost immediately” became clear that this operation “was qualitatively different from those that preceded it.”
“Israel de facto began a complete siege of northern Gaza, directly attacked civilians and hospitals, and attempted to remove the local population from the area in what was quickly recognized as ethnic cleansing.”
Mordechai says Israel has “repeatedly massacred Palestinians in Gaza” killing over 44,000 Palestinians – at least 60% of whom are women, children and elderly, adding that at least 100,000 others have been injured and more than 10,000 are still missing.
“There is ample evidence for Israel’s indiscriminate and disproportionate attacks throughout the war, as well as many examples for massacres and other killings, he writes.
Amnesty’s genocide conclusion
Amnesty International concluded in a new report this week that it has found “sufficient basis” to conclude that Israel has committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
“Amnesty International’s report demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza,” said Agnès Callamard, Secretary General of Amnesty International.
“These acts include killings, causing serious bodily or mental harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction,” she added, following the release of the 296-page report on Thursday, titled ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman’: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza’.
