By the OMER Managing Editors

Henna Moussavi | Miriam Aitken | Charles Ough

Over recent weeks, the Israeli government has subjected the Gaza Strip, and the millions of Palestinians living in it, to an indiscriminate and violent siege. The actions of the Netanyahu administration came in response to an attack by Hamas on 7 October, which killed around 1,200 civilians and military personnel in Israel.* Under the guise of self-defence and with the backing of its Western allies, Israel’s response is risking mass atrocity crimes in a flagrant violation of international humanitarian law. Israel’s relentless bombardment of Gaza has brought into question the collective moral and political responsibility of the international community and underlined the inefficacy of bodies such as the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), which sits stagnant and idle in the face of bloodshed.  

The Israeli government has promised to “turn Gaza into a ruin”, an assurance which has been realised through the indiscriminate bombing of the Gaza Strip, striking civilian infrastructure including schools, hospitals, and residential buildings. In the first six days of the bombardment, the Israeli military dropped upward of 6,000 bombs on Gaza, almost as many as the U.S. used in any single year in Afghanistan. Since, it has continued a campaign of daily airstrikes that have wiped entire neighbourhoods off the map and erased multiple generations of Palestinian families. The numbers are staggering. Since 7 October, more children have been reported killed in Gaza than in all conflict zones in any year since 2019. As of 4 November, Israel’s attack has killed nearly 9,500 people, almost half of which are children. 

On 13 October, Israel ordered the evacuation of the northern and central Gaza Strip, affecting around 1.4 million Palestinians. A much feared ground invasion began on 27 October, when Israel struck telecommunications infrastructure in Gaza, plunging the strip into a media blackout. Israeli tanks are reportedly surrounding Gaza city while continuing intense bombardment of the strip, including in the centre and south where hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians have fled. While telecommunications have been intermittently restored, the world has been relying on the work of Palestinian journalists in Gaza to keep the cameras on and the world aware of what is happening on the ground, at extreme personal risk. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that at least 36 media workers, not only in Gaza but also in Lebanon, have been killed since 7 October. Many journalists in Gaza have had the unimaginable task of reporting on the deaths of their own families. With telecommunications sporadically down, these voices have been silenced as the risk of ongoing mass atrocities rises amidst a media blackout. 

Meanwhile, the Israeli government ordered a “complete siege” of Gaza, cutting off electricity, fuel, food, and water from 2.2 million people with nowhere to flee. Hospitals have reported carrying out operations without anaesthesia as medicine runs out. The first limited aid supplies were only able to reach Gaza through Egypt’s Rafah from 21 October. But this was only a drop in the ocean: the UN estimates at least 100 daily trucks would be necessary to address immediate urgent needs. In the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel imposed a complete closure on Palestinian cities on 7 October. Since then, the war has provided unprecedented licence for Israeli forces and settlers to perpetrate wide-scale and indiscriminate violence against Palestinians, evicting them from their villages and farms, and killing over 130, including in at least two airstrikes on West Bank cities.

Leading human rights organizations and legal experts have warned that Israel’s sweeping attacks on Gaza may constitute crimes against humanity, war crimes, and a risk of genocide. Hamas’ killing of over 1,400 civilians in Israel and the kidnapping of around 200 hostages constitutes a war crime. Israel’s carpet bombing of the Gaza Strip, its blockade of water, food, electricity and vital humanitarian supplies, and its mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza are also war crimes – a ruthless example of collective punishment.

In the words of the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, the events of the past month did not occur in a vacuum. They come in the context of the decades-long Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories and Western complicity in the dehumanisation of Palestinians. Leading Israeli and international human rights organisations, including B’Tselem, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International have concluded that the Israeli occupation amounts to apartheid, defined as a crime against humanity under the Apartheid Convention and Rome Statute. In the words of Amnesty International, it constitutes a situation “when any inhuman or inhumane act (essentially a serious human rights violation) is perpetrated in the context of an institutionalised regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over another, with the intention to maintain that system”. Even before 7 October, Israeli security forces and settlers had killed more Palestinians in 2023 than in any year since 2005. The power asymmetry between Israel and Palestinians has enabled decades-long dispossession, displacement, unlawful detention, and arbitrary killing of generations of Palestinians.

The dehumanising narrative around Palestinians coming from Israeli government ministers and Western officials and commentators have resulted in the uncritical condoning of collective punishment and the blurring of the distinction – firmly established in international law – between civilians and combatants. U.S. President Joe Biden has actively spread disinformation and cast doubts on Gaza’s health ministry’s death tolls despite leading humanitarian organisations reiterating that they consider them reliable. Many Western governments’ initial statements failed to call for restraint, to  place sufficient emphasis on Israel’s obligation to adhere to the principles of international law and to highlight the humanitarian suffering caused by the limitless response they are condoning. After a month of hostilities, the U.S. and U.K. governments have still failed to call for a ceasefire.

Each day, circumstances worsen in Gaza. It has been described as the world’s deadliest place for children, with up to five children being killed every hour. The child death toll is another clear indicator of how Hamas and its motives have been conflated with the existence of Palestinians as a population, wherein every single person in Gaza has and will suffer for the 7 October offensive. Israel’s campaign in Gaza, if continued at this belligerent and destructive pace, is on track to become one of the deadliest contemporary urban conflicts, up on the list with Mosul and Mariupol.

Based on these circumstances, the moral, humanitarian, and security implications of the ongoing war are disastrous. The conflict is producing a humanitarian catastrophe and risks inflaming tensions across the region– all whilst the world turns a blind eye. It is giving rise to anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and antisemitic bigotry. Most importantly, the war’s continuation is eradicating thousands of Palestinian lives; their histories, families, homes and what little territory they held onto have been entirely reduced to rubble, erasing the existence of an entire population of Palestinians in Gaza.

It has been disappointingly challenging for the international community to come to a consensus on the demand for a ceasefire, calling into question the morality of global leaders – notably Joe Biden and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. This has yet again highlighted the flaws within the “rules-based” international order, perpetuated through bodies like the UNSC that have proven to be entirely ineffective. The international community must recognise and give light to the history of this conflict and strive for a sustainable solution. It is our collective responsibility and that of our governments to do what is in our power to be persistent and untiring in our calls for an immediate ceasefire, a lifting of the siege on Gaza and an end to Israel’s occupation of Palestine.

*This number was changed on 29/11/2023 to reflect Israel’s revised official number of those killed and to specify that this count includes both civilians and soldiers.