Israel’s forced displacement in Gaza amounts to war crime: HRW

Rights group says Israel appears to have plans to permanently prevent Palestinians from returning to parts of Gaza.

Israeli authorities have caused massive and deliberate forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, in what amounts to a war crime, a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) has found.

The international human rights organisation analysed satellite imagery, Israeli forced evacuation orders and statements by senior Israeli officials to show that authorities in Israel are deliberately and permanently making returning to large areas of Gaza effectively impossible for the Palestinian population.

“Israeli forces have destroyed the majority of Gaza’s water, sanitation, communications, energy and transport infrastructure as well as its schools and hospitals” and “systematically razed orchards, fields and greenhouses” report author Nadia Hardman told journalists in a news conference in advance of the report’s release on Thursday.

“So much civilian infrastructure has been destroyed that much of Gaza has been rendered uninhabitable,” Hardman said.

In addition to the widespread destruction carried out by Israeli forces across the besieged enclave, HRW found that Israel has continued to expand three so-called “buffer zones” by razing large areas of Gaza’s cities, including Rafah, and building Israeli military access roads and structures to make them permanent features in the Palestinian territory.