Over 20 pro-Palestine organisations have condemned a “propagandistic, genocide-enabling” report by Human Rights Watch.
Crucially, Palestinian civil society groups issued a scathing statement over the publication which “pays lip service” to the “root causes” of the 7 October attacks, and litters its analysis with long-debunked Israel lines.
HRW: a political bias that devalues Palestinian lives
On 17 July, Human Rights Watch (HRW) released the report in question. It titled this:
“I Can’t Erase All the Blood from My Mind” – Palestinian Armed Groups’ October 7 Assault on Israel
As the name suggests, the publication explores the events of 7 October. The report authors conducted interviews in person and remotely with:
144 people including: 94 survivors of the October 7 attacks; family members of survivors, hostages and those killed; first responders who collected human remains from the attack sites; medical experts who examined the human remains and provided forensic advice to the Israeli authorities; officials from the municipalities affected by the attacks; journalists who visited the attack sites after Israeli forces secured the areas; analysts of Palestinian political and armed groups; and international investigators.
Overall, it claims to detail:
numerous incidents of violations of international humanitarian law—the laws of war—by Palestinian armed groups on October 7, 2023; it does not include violations since then. These include deliberate and indiscriminate attacks against civilians and civilian objects; willful killing of persons in custody; cruel and other inhumane treatment; sexual and gender-based violence; hostage taking; mutilation and despoiling (robbing) of bodies; use of human shields; and pillage and looting.
However, a group of Palestinian organisations have called the integrity of the report into question. Notably, they underscored point after point how the report:
says everything about the organization’s political bias.
Tellingly, they highlighted that after months of Israel’s livestreamed genocide, HRW hasn’t demanded:
a permanent ceasefire, let alone name Israel’s crime as a genocide, as have many UN experts and prominent scholars of genocide
The statement therefore expressed how this:
further exposes the organization’s racist and colonial devaluation of Palestinian lives. It has chosen to abstract the actions of the oppressed from the context of oppression in the service of Israel’s colonial domination over all Palestinians and its genocide in the Gaza ghetto.
HRW on Palestine: convenient omissions
Also, the Palestinian organisations detailed how HRW utilised passive voice to obscure the perpetrator of genocide – Israel – or even a mention of Israel’s actions as genocide. In one especially notable passage, the report read:
Between October 7, 2023, and July 1, 2024, the hostilities resulted in at least 37,900 Palestinians killed, and 87,060 others injured, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.
Moreover, the group’s statement described how HRW entirely ignored the apartheid and military occupation context of 7 October. As such, the groups argued that:
By deliberately ignoring this essential context of colonial oppression, the report ignores that the right of all peoples resisting foreign occupation and colonization to resort to armed struggle is recognized, in accordance with international law. Even when referring to Israeli soldiers held captive by Palestinian resistance forces, the report calls them “hostages,” erasing any distinction between them and civilian captives.
HRW’s Palestine report also did not mention:
- How multiple claims of violence on 7 October turned out to be Israeli propaganda, some even now refuted by Israel’s own military reports.
- How Israel deployed its Hannibal Directive and targeted Israeli citizens.
- A report on the attack on the Nova festival where an Israeli pilot admitted firing indiscriminately at cars on the site.
The Palestinian organisations said that:
While acknowledging that some assertions of Palestinian violations from the day have been proven false, the report fails to address the now well exposed, systematic campaign of propaganda by Israel, its organs, and officials which was echoed by deeply complicit Western leaders and media outlets before being retracted by most. By deliberately ignoring the orchestrated campaign to dehumanize Palestinians the report attempts to revive that misinformation campaign.
‘Human rights for some!’
In particular, the statement pinpointed one especially “glaring” example. This was HRW’s assertion that gender-based violence was “systemic”. By contrast, the Palestinian organisations identified that HRW acknowledged that it was unable to “gather verifiable information” to prove this, but concluded so regardless.
What’s more, this spoke to the statement’s broader point that the HRW report was loaded with unverified “evidence” of war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Ultimately, the Palestinian organisations drew attention to the “asymmetry” of the Israel-Palestine “colonial relationship”. Critically, it drove home how HRW’s partisan report whitewashed Israel’s current and historic crimes against Palestinians.
Notably, it referred to the conservative estimate in the recent Lancet study. This found that Israel’s ongoing genocidal siege in the Gaza strip could kill 186,000 Palestinian people. Using this, the statement identified that this would amount to approximately 163,000 civilians, or 200 times the number of Israeli citizens killed. Given this, it argued that:
It seems HRW not only ignores Israel’s settler-colonial reality and the oppressor-oppressed relationship of power and resistance; it also values every civilian Israeli life 200 times more than any civilian Palestinian life. Human rights for some!
Overall, the statement concluded that HRW is complicit in Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza:
Israel’s genocide in Gaza is armed, funded, rationalized, and defended by the colonial West, headed by the US. It is also enabled by the complicity of states, institutions, corporations, and racist mainstream media outlets – as well as organizations claiming the mantle of human rights yet engaging in an unethical attempt to whitewash the most grotesque, systematic violations of human rights. This HRW report does exactly that.
Featured image via HRW -screengrab
