Sari Bashi
The New York Review of Books / October 17, 2024
As it escalates its attacks on north Gaza, the Israeli army has ordered the entire civilian population to evacuate—and cut off food aid to all who remain.
Forced displacement can amount to a war crime. So can using starvation as a weapon of war. Since October 1 the Israeli military has ordered some 400,000 people in northern Gaza to leave their homes and blocked aid from reaching them—risking both crimes again and again.
Israeli military operations in Gaza have been ongoing for more than a year, after Hamas-led fighters committed crimes against humanity in southern Israel, killing hundreds of civilians and taking scores of hostages. From the outset, senior Israeli officials said that they held everyone in Gaza responsible for the October 7 attack. They closed Gaza’s crossings, blocked aid, and cut the supply of electricity and drinking water. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to turn Gaza into “cities of ruins.”
For a year, in violation of three provisional orders from the International Court of Justice, Israeli authorities have allowed only a trickle of aid to enter Gaza, impeding humanitarian missions, especially to Gaza’s north, decimating the civilian infrastructure, and killing aid workers. Almost everyone in Gaza is struggling to get adequate food, and for half a million people, the shortages are catastrophic. Malnutrition has killed children, most hospitals are not functioning, and infectious diseases, including polio, have spread.
Israeli authorities say that they issued the latest evacuation orders for the north—four between October 1 and October 12—to give civilians a chance to flee to safety as the Israeli military targets Hamas. But there’s mounting evidence that the Israeli military is unlawfully forcing civilians out of northern Gaza, with no safe place to go, no safe way to get there, and no apparent plans to let them return.
International humanitarian law prohibits forcible transfer or deportation of an occupied population. A narrow exception allows temporary evacuation as a measure of last resort, in cases of imperative military necessity or if needed to protect the civilians involved. But that requires the Israeli military to ensure that civilians are safely moved, that they can get necessities such as food, water, health care, and shelter, and that people are allowed to return home as soon as possible after hostilities end in that area.
The Israeli military has not met those conditions during the past year, and there’s little hope they will do so now. A week into the hostilities last October, the Israeli military ordered more than a million people in northern Gaza to leave their homes, without providing a safe destination and sometimes attacking them as they fled. A doctor from the Jabalia refugee camp told Human Rights Watch, where I am the program director, that he fled with his family soon after those first orders were issued: “Once I heard the evacuation order to go south, my first reaction was: I’m not leaving…but then the bombs started, and our houses were being destroyed. I needed to protect my family.” He said that he and thirty-six family members fled south, along the designated evacuation route, but that they faced bombardments while fleeing and after arriving at the so-called safe zone in the south, where the shelters were full.
The Israeli military has so far blocked most displaced residents from returning to the north. Senior government officials have meanwhile publicly suggested that Gaza’s territory will decrease, that its residents should leave and be resettled, and that this war will be another Nakba—the Palestinian term for the mass displacement of 1948. Israeli attacks over the past year have left most of Gaza uninhabitable, exacerbating concerns that displacement will be permanent. According to the UN, 87 percent of Gaza’s housing units and schools have been damaged or destroyed, as have 68 percent of its cropland, at least 80 percent of commercial facilities, and 68 percent of the road network. The water and energy infrastructure are in ruins, and all universities have been destroyed.
Evacuation orders now cover 85 percent of the Gaza Strip. About 1.9 million of Gaza’s 2.2 million Palestinians have been displaced, sheltering in relatives’ homes, public buildings, tents, and greenhouses and under tarpaulins. The rainy season begins this month.
More than 400,000 people, according to the UN, remain in northern Gaza. Some are older or have disabilities. Some are hospitalized. Some had managed to return to the north after previous displacements. Many have no place to go and have said they don’t believe they’ll be any safer in the so-called humanitarian zones that the Israeli military has designated. The director of Kamal Adwan Hospital in the north, Dr. Hussam Abu Safiah, said that shortages of food, fuel and medical supplies were “terrifying” and endangered patients’ lives, including newborn babies: “Milk is also running out, food is running out, everything available is depleting.”
These latest evacuation orders and obstruction of humanitarian aid resemble measures proposed in a plan that retired Israeli generals reportedly presented to the Israeli government recently, to force civilians out of northern Gaza by blocking food, water and other supplies. The Israeli military denies implementing the plan—but has in fact not allowed food aid to enter northern Gaza since October 1. During that time it has ordered hospitals there evacuated amid intensifying, deadly attacks, including on a food distribution center. Water wells, bakeries, medical points, and shelters in the north have shut down.
People in northern Gaza are caught between fear of attack and starvation and fear that if they leave their homes, they won’t be allowed to return. A majority of them are refugees and the descendants of refugees who fled or were forced from their homes in 1948, in what’s now Israel, and were never allowed back. Maintaining Jewish demographic superiority in large swaths of the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, including through forced displacement, is a central element of the Israeli government’s ongoing crime against humanity of apartheid, aimed at maintaining the domination of Israeli Jews over Palestinians. Some Israeli government ministers have openly called for re-establishing Jewish settlements in Gaza—which would be a war crime.
Civilians maintain their protected status whether or not they heed military evacuation orders, and the Israeli military—as the occupying power—must ensure that adequate aid reaches them wherever they are. Israel should flood northern Gaza with humanitarian aid, including supplies for hospitals, refrain from unlawful attacks, and end all forced displacement. The United States reportedly wrote to the Israeli government on October 13 demanding that it let more humanitarian aid enter the Strip. It’s not the first time the US has made that demand, with little effect. It’s time for the US to take concrete action and suspend military assistance to Israel, to avoid complicity in the spiralling abuses against civilians in Gaza, most urgently in the north.
Sari Bashi is the Program Director at Human Rights Watch
