We have to add another crime to the list of crimes committed by Israel in Gaza: ecocide
By Thomas Fazi
Feb 6, 2024
That Israel’s four-month-long genocidal assault on Gaza has turned most of the Strip to rubble should, by now, be public knowledge. The latest confirmation of this came in the form of a visual investigation by the Guardian, which used satellite imagery and open-source evidence to catalogue the extent of the destruction. The shocking, if not entirely surprising, findings of their investigation are summed up by the following image:
As the image makes clear, most buildings in Gaza — including schools and universities, hospitals, mosques and cultural heritage sites — have been either destroyed or badly damaged, killing in the process around 27,000 Gazans, including 11,500 children, in a clear effort to make Gaza permanently uninhabitable.
It’s worth noting that not all buildings were destroyed through air strikes and shelling; some, such as Israa University, Gaza’s last standing university, were destroyed through the detonation of hundreds of landmines strapped to the building. As the report reads:
“The Guardian has documented the destruction of hundreds of examples of civilian infrastructure critical to the lives of future returnees in the three areas of Gaza it analysed. These are not comprehensive analyses of the entire Gaza Strip, where more damage exists.
Khan Younis, in southern Gaza, sits at the edge of northern Gaza’s former evacuation line. Initially considered a safe zone, the city took in fleeing and injured civilians when the war’s focus was in the north, but has been relentlessly bombarded since December after the IDF expanded its campaign.
The destruction has not only forced 1.9 million people to leave their homes but also made it impossible for many to return. This has led some experts to describe what is happening in Gaza as “domicide”, defined as the widespread, deliberate destruction of the home to make it uninhabitable, preventing the return of displaced people. The concept is not recognised in law.
Gaza’s destruction is far worse in terms of the scale, ferocity and impact when compared to Ukraine, Syria or other conflicts”, said Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing. Rajagopal called for domicide to be recognised as a crime under international law at the UN general assembly in 2022.
The utter annihilation of Beit Hanoun and the destruction of al-Zahra and Khan Younis, are evidence that Israeli use of force has made life impossible by making them uninhabitable”, said Rajagopal. “All that matters to live a dignified and secure life is destroyed and that is not legal or legitimate under any sense of a law-based world”.
Whatever you want to call what Israel is doing in Gaza — genocide, domicide, ethnic cleansing — the intent is all too obvious: to make Gaza Palestinian-free, either through the physical destruction of the Gazan population (so far more than 1% of the Gazan population, mostly women and children, has been murdered) or by pushing them out of the Strip, forcibly or by leaving people no choice but to leave by making life in Gaza impossible. This includes deliberately starving Gazans. As Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation, wrote:
“Gaza is experiencing mass starvation like no other in recent history. Before the outbreak of fighting in October, food security in Gaza was precarious, but very few children — less than 1% — suffered severe acute malnutrition, the most dangerous kind. Today, almost all Gazans, of any age, anywhere in the territory, are at risk.
There is no instance since the Second World War in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed. And there’s no case in which the international obligation to stop it has been so clear.”
As UN human rights experts have said, “Israel is destroying Gaza’s food system and using food as a weapon against the Palestinian people”.
Overall, it appears clear that the aim of making Gaza unliveable has largely been achieved: Gaza is no longer capable of supporting life, certainly not that of 2 million people — and won’t be for a long time.
This is especially true if we take into consideration an aspect of Israel’s genocidal/domicidal policies that is passing relatively unnoticed: the long-term poisoning of Gaza. The IDF recently confirmed that it had been flooding some tunnels in the Gaza Strip with seawater, confirming what had been an open secret for several weeks.
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