Al Jazeera has released a damning new documentary called Investigating war crimes in Gaza. It outlines the horrors of the last 12 months of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, using video footage and interviews with people on the ground, journalists, human rights workers, and other experts.
It is an essential watch. It will serve as a lasting and crushing indictment of the Israeli occupation forces and the Western governments that have supported them throughout their year-long genocide in occupied Gaza.
And it should be a rallying call for people who defend humanity to stand up against the impunity and rally to resist the order which has cemented this impunity into a new global reality.
The genocide exposed the Western order as “a big sham”
Palestinian writer Susan Abulhawa speaks concisely and clearly in the documentary about what the genocide represents. She says:
The West cannot hide. They cannot claim ignorance. Nobody can say they didn’t know. We live in an era of technology, and this has been described as the first live-streamed genocide in history…
They are conducting a genocide now with glee. They’re setting their atrocities to music and putting them on catchy reels on TikTok. Ordinary Israelis see what their military is doing and celebrate it. It’s not just fringe elements who see this and think it’s a good thing.
Abulhawa later talks about the children’s organisation she runs. And she reveals that, when she interviewed a lot of the displaced youngsters in Gaza:
some of them told me that they just want to die but they… want to die in one piece. They’re scared of being shredded.
And she concluded that:
Palestinians are aware that they have been abandoned, that the world that speaks of human rights and international law was lying, that those concepts are meant for white people or for Westerners, that accountability is not meant to hold their oppressors to account, that they have been really kind of discarded like rubbish…
The West has spent decades creating this rules-based order. And it’s finally laid been laid bare as a big sham… as just a way to further Western interests. This is the jungle. This is the new order, where it’s just out in the open that those with power can do whatever they want.
‘We thought the world would stand up, but it didn’t’
In the last year, Israel has killed around 16,500 children in Gaza. Al Jazeera correspondent Youmna Elsayed says “even if Israel wanted to cross these red lines, we thought for sure that the world would stand and say no”. But it didn’t.
Al Jazeera’s documentary “assembles evidence of war crimes committed during the year-long Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip and of complicity in those crimes”.
It looks at ‘those who ordered the assault, those who supported it, those who endured it, and those who inflicted it’. And it “has compiled a database of over 2,500 social media accounts containing photos and videos placed online by Israeli soldiers”.
Human rights worker Maha Hussaini insists:
There have been journalists and human rights workers who have been directly killed during the previous attacks. But this war, it was more like systematic attacks, systematic targeting of civilians, of journalists, of human rights workers.
For anyone who’s a parent, a highly distressing point of the whole genocide is that the Israeli military strategy paid so little interest in the safety of children. In fact, it attacked suspected fathers specifically when they were at home because “it’s easier to kill somebody when they’re at home”.
Israel’s dehumanisation on display for everyone to see
Israeli occupation forces have consistently dehumanised Palestinians. Elsayed, who evacuated from northern Gaza, explains:
We were asked to walk holding a white flag in one hand raising the ID on the other hand – everyone, including the children… They’d say ‘this person wearing this colour shirt, get out of the line’. And then, they would make them strip completely to their underwear in front of everyone.
She adds that the ‘safe passageway’ where refugees walked was full of corpses:
Those who were killed, everything was left on the ground for the people who were crossing to see. I made my children promise me that they would not look at the ground at all.
The documentary also exposes some of the disgustingly racist trivialisation of the genocide inside Israel, noting that:
The destruction in Gaza sparks a TikTok craze in Israel. Civilians dress up as caricatures of Palestinians and mime to an Israeli song called ‘this was my home’.
Influencers, meanwhile, tried to suggest Palestinian suffering was fake, or taunted them over the cutting off of water and electricity. Thousands of people shared their videos.
The ‘scorched earth’ policy of an undisciplined colonial army
As refugees left the north of Gaza, soldiers filled social media with videos of destruction. These showed them wantonly destroying civilian buildings and property, looting, and pillaging to their heart’s content. Human rights worker Bill Van Esveld insists:
There’s no justification for destroying a structure if the enemy isn’t in
Retired British army officer Charlie Herbert, meanwhile, says:
These videos don’t show a professional army. They show an army that, at times, appears to almost completely lack any self-discipline, to a point where one thinks it’s not just personal lack of discipline, it’s an Institutional lack of discipline.
And importantly, asserts legal expert Rodney Dixon, this behaviour goes against international law. He stresses:
it’s something of a scorched Earth policy where everything is destroyed. And it makes it very difficult to reconstruct civilian life there after.
Soldiers also seemed to have a particular obsession with the underwear or lingerie of female refugees.
Speaking about the destruction of one village near the Israeli border, Dixon highlights that:
The justification that is given is one of revenge. And under International humanitarian law, it is strictly prohibited to use reprisals against the civilian population of your enemy.
Van Esveld adds that:
The large-scale, unnecessary destruction of civilian property – it’s prohibited in the Geneva conventions, it’s prohibited under the Rome statute of the international criminal court…
It’s banned. And if you do enough of it, it’s a war crime.
As the documentary also points out:
Each of Gaza’s 36 hospitals has been attacked, with 19 closed down altogether. Medical equipment has been deliberately destroyed.
Human shields, torture, and humiliation by Israel
The invading forces also posted numerous videos of detainee humiliation, showing footage of naked men paraded around and mistreated. As Van Esveld stresses:
these are really blatant violations of international law
Herbert, meanwhile, points out that:
this footage breaks every norm of the treatment of detainees or the treatment of prisoners of war. It breaks every accepted standard practice and norm.
Torture has apparently been rife too, as some soldiers have admitted.
Regarding the Israeli assault on the Nasser hospital in Khan Yunis, the second biggest in Gaza, the documentary shows footage of Israel using a civilian as a messenger – a human shield – to tell people to evacuate the hospital. As Dixon insists, “that’s prohibited under international law”. Israeli snipers then killed him.
The documentary also challenges the claims that armed militias in Gaza have used civilians as human shields. In fact, Hussaini said:
in the case of Gaza, civilians here have been one of the main targets of the Israeli army since the beginning of the attack. So there wouldn’t be a purpose in using a civilian as a human shield because the civilian himself is a target.
It shows video evidence, however, of Israeli occupation forces using human shields. And it has interviewed civilians who say Israeli forces have used them as human shields.
It then shows the horrific conditions in which Israeli forces have kept detainees, whether civilians or fighters. This includes the rape of prisoners.
Starvation and assassination of civilians and aid workers
It also documents the starvation Israeli occupation forces brought to Gaza, and their assault on aid workers. As Van Esveld says:
Human Rights Watch documented another seven cases where very specifically humanitarian and aid workers were attacked after having given the Israeli military their precise coordinates and detailed information about their activities and their movements…
so our assessment is very clearly that the Israeli authorities are using starvation as a weapon of war in Gaza. It’s a double war crime. You have collective punishment of the civilian population, and you specifically have the use of starvation as a weapon of war
Herbert looks at a video where an Israeli unit assassinates an unarmed man. And he says the fact that soldiers shared it on YouTube should the “degree of impunity” they feel they have. There are other cases where the same thing happens.
Occupation snipers have also shot women and children, as medical practitioners have testified. In one letter, a group of professionals wrote that:
Every one of us, on a daily basis, treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head and chest.
The documentary points out that:
it’s possible the final toll for dead and injured in the Gaza Strip will be more than 10% of the total population
Western complicity in Israel’s war crimes
The documentary insists:
The Assault on Gaza is facilitated by Western powers. 69% of Israel’s arms imports come from the US, 30% from Germany. Behind the scenes, another country plays a key role.
And that’s the UK, particularly via flights from the British base on Cyprus.
It adds:
With Israel under investigation by the international court of justice for genocide, the assistance given by the UK and other Western Powers has legal implications.
As Van Esveld stresses:
if you start acting in a conflict to a level that the people on the ground who are doing the fighting are using your information actively as they fight, you can’t just say the Israelis are doing things… but we’re not really involved. Actually, you may be a party to the conflict yourself.
He concludes that:
International law has been trashed by the actions of the Israeli military, by the actions of the parties to this conflict but also by the actions of their allies which look at what’s going on and continue to pour gasoline on the flames.
Despite all of this behaviour over the last year, the Israeli occupation forces have neither destroyed Hamas nor returned the Israeli hostages. Israel’s Western backers, meanwhile, still refuse to hold it to account for its crimes.
The documentary helps to make it as clear as ever that Israeli occupation forces have committed war crimes and have had no interest in respecting international law. This makes it an absolute moral duty – for all of us whose governments continue to support Israel’s genocidal regime – to stand up and resist.
Watch the Al Jazeera documentary below:
