Palestinians gather to receive aid, including food supplies provided by World Food Program, outside a United Nations distribution center, amid the Israel-Hamas conflict, in Jabalia in the northern Gaza Strip, on August 24, 2024.
| Photo Credit: Reuters

Israel’s warfare in Gaza is consistent with the characteristics of genocide, a special U.N. committee said Thursday (November 14, 2024), accusing the country of “using starvation as a method of war”.

The United Nations Special Committee pointed to “mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions intentionally imposed on Palestinians”, in a fresh report covering the period from Hamas’s deadly October 7 attack in Israel last year through to July.

“Through its siege over Gaza, obstruction of humanitarian aid, alongside targeted attacks and killing of civilians and aid workers, despite repeated U.N. appeals, binding orders from the International Court of Justice and resolutions of the Security Council, Israel is intentionally causing death, starvation and serious injury,” it said in a statement.

Israel’s warfare practices in Gaza “are consistent with the characteristics of genocide”, said the committee, which has for decades been investigating Israeli practices affecting rights in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Israel, it charged, was “using starvation as a method of war and inflicting collective punishment on the Palestinian population”.

A U.N.-backed assessment at the weekend warned that famine was imminent in northern Gaza.

Thursday’s (November 14, 2024) report documented how Israel’s extensive bombing campaign in Gaza had decimated essential services and unleashed an environmental catastrophe with lasting health impacts.

By February this year, Israeli forces had used more than 25,000 tonnes of explosives across the Gaza Strip, “equivalent to two nuclear bombs”, the report pointed out.

AI-assisted targeting

“By destroying vital water, sanitation and food systems, and contaminating the environment, Israel has created a lethal mix of crises that will inflict severe harm on generations to come,” the committee said.

The committee said it was “deeply alarmed by the unprecedented destruction of civilian infrastructure and the high death toll in Gaza”, where more than 43,700 people have been killed since the war began, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory.

The staggering number of deaths raised serious concerns, it said, about Israel’s use of artificial intelligence-enhanced targeting systems in its military operations.

“The Israeli military’s use of AI-assisted targeting, with minimal human oversight, combined with heavy bombs, underscores Israel’s disregard of its obligation to distinguish between civilians and combatants and take adequate safeguards to prevent civilian deaths,” it said.

It warned that reported new directives lowering the criteria for selecting targets and increasing the previously accepted ratio of civilian to combatant casualties appeared to have allowed the military to use AI systems to “rapidly generate tens of thousands of targets, as well as to track targets to their homes, particularly at night when families shelter together”.

The committee stressed the obligations of other countries to urgently act to halt the bloodshed, saying that “other States are unwilling to hold Israel accountable and continue to provide it with military and other support”.

Palestinians transport bags of flour on a horse-drawn cart in the besieged Gaza Strip on November 5, 2024, amid the ongoing war between Israel and the Hamas.
| Photo Credit: AFP

An Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza has killed at least 20 people, mostly women and children, Palestinian officials said Tuesday (November 5, 2024), as Israel wages a nearly monthlong air and ground operation in what was already the most isolated and heavily destroyed part of the territory.

The strike late Monday (November 4, 2024) hit a home where several displaced families were sheltering in the town of Beit Lahiya, near the border with Israel, according to Hossam Abu Safiya, the director of the recently raided and barely functioning Kamal Adwan Hospital, which received the casualties.

The Israeli military said it targeted a weapons storage facility from which a militant had operated, and that “numerous steps were taken to mitigate the risk of harming civilians.”

The dead included eight women and six children, according to a list provided by the Gaza Health Ministry’s emergency service. Separate strikes elsewhere in Gaza early Tuesday (November 5, 2024) killed another 10 people, according to health officials.

Israel launched the offensive in the north after saying Hamas militants had regrouped there. The Army has returned to several areas of Gaza multiple times after previous operations, as Hamas continues to carry out hit-and-run attacks on troops and fire occasional rockets into Israel.

The military has ordered the complete evacuation of Beit Lahiya, the nearby town of Beit Hanoun and the urban Jabaliya refugee camp, and has allowed almost no humanitarian aid into the area for over a month. That has drawn rebukes from the Biden administration, which has warned that U.S. laws might force it to curb military aid to Israel if more aid is not allowed in.

Tens of thousands of people have fled to nearby Gaza City in the latest wave of displacement within the besieged territory. Around 90% of the population of 2.3 million have fled during the war, often multiple times.

The three hospitals serving the area have been largely inaccessible because of the fighting, and ambulances have stopped operating. Israeli troops raided Kamal Adwan Hospital last month, saying Hamas militants were sheltering there, allegations denied by Palestinian health officials.

The offensive has raised fears among Palestinians that Israel is implementing a surrender-or-starve plan for northern Gaza proposed by former generals, in which civilians would be ordered out, aid would be cut off and anyone remaining would be considered a fighter.

The Israeli military has denied receiving such orders, but the government has not said whether it is adopting part or all of the plan.

Palestinian officials said a separate wave of Israeli strikes early Tuesday killed 10 people, including four children and two women.

One strike hit a house in the Tufah neighborhood in Gaza City, killing two children and their parents, according to the Health Ministry’s emergency service. Two other children were wounded, it said.

In the central town of Zuweida, an Israeli airstrike hit a tent where a displaced family was sheltering, killing four people, including a mother and her two children, according to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in the nearby city of Deir al-Balah. Another strike hit a house in Deir al-Balah, killing two people, the hospital said. An Associated Press journalist counted the bodies at the hospital morgue.

The Israeli military says it only targets militants and accuses them of hiding among civilians. It rarely comments on individual strikes, which often kill women and children.

The war began when Hamas-led militants attacked southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, taking another 250 people hostage. Around 100 captives are still inside Gaza, about a third of whom are believed to be dead.

Israel’s retaliatory offensive has killed over 43,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants in its toll but says over half of those killed were women and children.