In the month following our last bulletin which documented solidarity actions with the Palestinians of Gaza in the face of Israeli genocide, the Israelis intensified their destruction of Gaza, destroying many of its hospitals. These and other actions constitute war crimes according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the countries of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, China and South Africa) and Israelis Against Apartheid.

United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk declared Wednesday, November 8, that “the collective punishment by Israel of Palestinian civilians amounts… to a war crime, as does the unlawful forcible evacuation of civilians.” Türk’s comments came after he visited the Rafah border crossing that connects Egypt to Gaza, which he described as “the gates to a living nightmare—a nightmare where people have been suffocating, under persistent bombardment, mourning their families, struggling for water, for food, for electricity and fuel.” Long before October 7, when a Hamas-led attack killed over 1,400 Israelis and triggered Israel’s retaliation, Gaza was “described as the world’s biggest open-air prison… under a 56-year occupation and a 16-year blockade by Israel,” he highlighted.

U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres —who has also been pushing for a cease-fire—called out Israel’s aerial and ground operations for their impact on civilians during a Reuters conference on Wednesday, November 8. “We have in a few days in Gaza thousands and thousands of children killed, which means there is also something clearly wrong in the way military operations are being done.” He said Gaza was becoming “a graveyard for children.” According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza, the Israeli war against Hamas has already killed over 4,300 children.

Amnesty International, on October 20, wrote that Israeli attacks on Gaza caused mass civilian casualties and must be investigated as war crimes. ““In their stated intent to use all means to destroy Hamas, Israeli forces have shown a shocking disregard for civilian lives. They have pulverized street after street of residential buildings killing civilians on a mass scale and destroying essential infrastructure, while new restrictions mean Gaza is fast running out of water, medicine, fuel and electricity. Testimonies from eyewitness and survivors highlighted, again and again, how Israeli attacks decimated Palestinian families, causing such destruction that surviving relatives have little but rubble to remember their loved ones by.”

Human Rights Watch, on November 14, wrote that “The Israeli military’s repeated, apparently unlawful attacks on medical facilities, personnel, and transport are further destroying Gaza’s healthcare system and should be investigated as war crimes.” The World Health Organization (WHO) has reported that at least 521 people, including 16 medical workers, have been killed in 137 “attacks on health care” in Gaza as of November 12. These attacks, alongside Israel’s decisions to cut off electricity and water and block humanitarian aid to Gaza, have severely impeded health care access. The United Nations found as of November 10 that two-thirds of primary care facilities and half of all hospitals in Gaza are not functioning at a time when medical personnel are dealing with unprecedented numbers of severely injured patients. Hospitals have run out of medicine and basic equipment, and doctors told Human Rights Watch that they were forced to operate without anesthesia and to use vinegar as an antiseptic.

Following an extraordinary BRICS summit  on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, convened by South African president Cyril Ramaphosa and held via videoconference. November 21, 2023, Ramaphosa said “Israel’s actions clearly violate international law, including the United Nations Charter and the Geneva Convention. The collective punishment of Palestinian civilians through the illegal use of force by Israel is a war crime. The deliberate denial of medicine, fuel, food and water to Gaza residents amounts to genocide.” His demand for a ceasefire was echoed in statements from the presidents of Russia, Brazil and China.

Israelis Against Apartheid, a group representing more than 1,500 citizens, this week  urged  the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor “to take accelerated action against the escalating Israeli war crimes and genocide of the Palestinian people” in Gaza. “Israeli military personnel and journalists are now openly calling for ethnic cleansing and genocide,” their letter adds. “It is evident that Israel is disregarding the lives of civilians in Gaza, ordering them to evacuate vast areas even as there is no safe place in Gaza to which people can flee.”

How can these war crimes be stopped? This question is considered in a related blog this month.

“Israel’s military occupation has morphed the entire occupied Palestinian territory into an open-air prison, where Palestinians are constantly confined, surveilled and disciplined.” This is the conclusion of the latest report to the United Nations by its Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian Territory.

The report “finds that since 1967, over 800,000 Palestinians, including children as young as 12, have been arrested and detained under authoritarian rules enacted, enforced and adjudicated by the Israeli military. Palestinians are subject to long detention for expressing opinions, gathering, pronouncing unauthorised political speeches, or even merely attempting to do so, and ultimately deprived of their status of protected civilians. They are often presumed guilty without evidence, arrested without warrants, detained without charge or trial and brutalised in Israeli custody.”

Not surprisingly, the rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, is under vicious attacks by Israel and it supporters. This is described in detail in the an article from the Jordan News.

Another recent report comes from Mary Robinson, Chair of The Elders, former President of Ireland and UN High Commissioner of Human Rights, and Ban Ki-moon, Deputy Chair of The Elders and former UN Secretary-General, based on a three-day visit to Israel and Palestine.

They heard from Israeli, Palestinian and international human rights organisations about the “ever-growing evidence that the situation meets the international legal definition of apartheid: the expansion and entrenchment of illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the establishment of dual legal regimes and separation infrastructure in the occupied territories, and the institutionalised discrimination and abuses perpetrated against Palestinians. ”

Their report concludes that “The Government of Israel’s intent to exercise sovereignty over all the territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea undermines the democratic ideals of the Israeli state, denies the Palestinian people their right to self-determination, and risks an uncontrollable explosion of violence on both sides.”

An editorial from Argentina summarizes recent events that threaten the democratic ideals of the Israeli State, in particular a new law that reduced the power of the Supreme Court of Justice to challenge government decisions. The editorial concludes that “the concentration of power makes it almost impossible to remove the president despite holding elections. Israel would thus seek to progressively abandon its democratic character, essential to maintain strong ties with the West and, particularly, with its greatest ally in the world, the United States.”

However, Israelis are not accepting the reforms without protest. As the editorial says that the protests are the greatest in Israeli history: “For more than 30 weeks, hundreds of thousands of protesters defy rain, cold or heat, opposing a reform that they simply consider a coup d’état.”

We are reminded of the apartheid regime in South Africa that was defeated by the combination of struggle within South Africa and diplomatic and economic pressure from the rest of the world.

The movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction Israel’s regime of military occupation, settler-colonialism and apartheid (BDS) continues to grow. A summary of BDS events over the past 18 years shows how this has developed.

The most recent BDS declaration comes from the American Anthropological Association, which voted to boycott Israeli academic institutions on the grounds that ““The Israeli state operates an apartheid regime from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea” and “Israeli academic institutions are complicit in the Israeli state’s regime of oppression against Palestinians… including by providing research and development of military and surveillance technologies used against Palestinians.”

Concerning the struggle by the Palestinians themselves, we publish two articles in CPNN this month.

The initiative Swim with Gaza proposes a solidarity swim with the children of Gaza on August 26: “Since 2007 the people of Gaza have been imprisoned. They have no parks, no mountains, no valleys. But they have the sea. Their only free space for fun. Let’s join them in the sea for a solidarity swim. Each year they have a swimming festival on Gaza beach. This year the Swimming Festival will be held on 26th August. So join in wherever you are – Egypt, Lebanon, South Africa, Morocco, Spain, Ireland, Brazil or Chile.”

Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian activist whom we quote often in CPNN, responds to the recent Israeli invasion of the city of Jenin including the Jenin Refugee camp. He asks himself the question of whether the Palestinian resistance can be non-violent or will it end in violence, and responds with a long quote from his friend, the historian Howard Zinn, including the following excerpt:

“We forget how often in this century we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people’s thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.”