As a fresh wave of Israeli military offensives displaces millions in Gaza, a scathing new report from Human Rights Watch (HRW) accuses Israel of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Palestinian enclave. HRW asserts that Israel’s actions align with a systematic state policy of forcible population transfer, possibly amounting to ethnic cleansing.
Currently, a staggering 1.9 million people – nearly 90% of Gaza’s population – have been uprooted from their homes. The displacement crisis has escalated dramatically since early October, when Israeli forces launched renewed operations in northern Gaza, ostensibly to quell a “Hamas resurgence” following atrocities last year.
However, HRW’s investigation found that Israeli tactics like blocking aid, demolishing vital infrastructure, and issuing contradictory evacuation orders are deliberately engineering a humanitarian catastrophe to drive Palestinians out permanently. Israel vehemently denies the allegations, dismissing the report as “completely false.”
Civilians Trapped in ‘Uninhabitable’ Conditions
For the 75,000 Palestinians still trapped in northern Gaza, life has become an apocalyptic nightmare. Cut off from the outside world by Israeli forces controlling the Netzarim corridor, residents face extreme shortages of food, water, medicine, and electricity. Aid agencies accuse Israel of systematically blocking humanitarian convoys.
“The northern Gaza Strip is under siege,” says Milena Ansari, a Palestinian lawyer and HRW researcher. “Many people queue for hours, from 7am to 2pm, for a piece of bread. Life essentials do not exist.”
The scale of destruction is so vast that many areas are now uninhabitable, fueling fears that Israel intends to resettle the territory with its own population. Israeli officials like finance minister Bezalel Yoel Smotrich have openly called for Jewish settlements in Gaza.
Echoes of Nakba Trauma
For Palestinians, the current expulsions evoke the deep intergenerational wounds of the Nakba, the mass displacement that coincided with Israel’s founding in 1948. “This has triggered a generational trauma,” Ansari notes, recounting the story of Dr. Hassan, a displaced Gazan: “The first thing he thought of during the evacuation was the Nakba.”
The Gaza blockade, among the world’s most restrictive, had already reduced the territory to the brink of uninhabitability. Now, nonstop Israeli bombardment and isolation of the north are tipping the situation into a full-blown humanitarian disaster.
We can’t overemphasize how bad the situation is there. People who have been surrounded for a year by destruction and displacement, they are saying that the situation right now is unimaginable.
Kaamil Ahmed, Guardian journalist
Civilians Struggling to Survive
For desperate civilians simply trying to survive, even small efforts to restore normalcy are quashed. “I spoke to one guy in Jabalia who returned to his damaged home and started a little garden to grow vegetables – but now he’s had to leave again and his home was demolished,” Ahmed recounts. “Even when civilians try to carve out a way to survive they are forced away.”
As global outrage mounts, HRW is urging the international community to take decisive action, including pushing for an International Criminal Court investigation into Israeli officials implicated in war crimes and crimes against humanity.
“The world cannot stand by as Israel reduces Gaza to rubble and forces Palestinians into catastrophic conditions,” the report concludes. “Impunity will only beget more human suffering on a mass scale.”
