Final assault and genocide in Gaza

After nearly two years of war, the Israeli army launched what appears to be the final ground assault on Tuesday to conquer Gaza City, the largest urban center in the Strip, with an estimated population of 600,000 people, which has grown to one million in recent months due to the arrival of refugees fleeing the attacks. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made this decision despite knowing that the military operation will cause significant civilian casualties among Palestinians, who no longer have shelter. It is estimated that only 140,000 people have obeyed the Israeli army's evacuation order. In fact, early last morning the city was subjected to intense bombardment prior to the deployment of two tank and infantry divisions. The current death toll for the day is 85 Gazans killed by the bombardments and another three from hunger.

It's far from clear what the objective of the occupation of Gaza is beyond making life impossible for its citizens and forcing them to abandon their homes. Because once the Israeli army controls 100% of the city, what will it do beyond keeping a significant contingent of soldiers patrolling among the rubble? It doesn't take much effort to see that what Israel is doing is practicing a policy of ethnic cleansing, that is, forced population displacement.

The problem is that since this population does not want to be displaced, the methods used are suspiciously similar to those that define the legal concept of genocide. This was established by a panel of independent experts in a report commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council and presented this Tuesday in Geneva. This commission has found proven four of the five acts that define genocide: murder, infliction of serious physical or mental harm, imposing conditions leading to the destruction of a people, and imposing measures to prevent births, citing cases such as the attack on a fertility clinic and restrictions on the arrival of humanitarian aid. The report is even more significant because it was presented by the prestigious jurist Navi Pillay, who presided over the International Criminal Tribunal that tried the genocide committed in Rwanda in 1994.

There are increasingly fewer arguments for not considering what is happening in Gaza as genocide, and therefore we must wait for the international community to begin to act appropriately in these cases. The European Commission will take a step this Wednesday to partially suspend the EU cooperation agreement with Israel. And international pressure must continue at all levels, just as it did in the 1970s and 1980s with apartheid South Africa. It is true that Israel enjoys the unconditional support of the United States, and that gives it carte blanche to the occupied territories, but the time has come when everyone must assume their share of moral responsibility for events that shake the world and take us back to very dark times.