This is the second article in a two-part series. Read part one here.The Geneva Conventions which lay down the laws of war have a long history, but their most recent incarnations date from the years after World War II. Three existing conventions were updated to stipulate the minimal standards applicable to the treatment of prisoners of war, and the protection of medical sites during times of conflict. A fourth convention was added, extending a wide range of protections to civilians in times of armed conflict.Then came the Genocide Convention, agreed in 1948, to ensure that mass murder on an industrial scale never again occurred. The immediate context was the discovery of the scale of the Holocaust, and the cruel premeditation and intent behind Nazi Germany’s plan for the extermination of European Jewry. But other horrors from the time, such as the genocide of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks, were actively in the background.The Refugees Convention agreed 1951 and made globally applicable through a protocol added in 1967, was another response to European traumas. In its early conception, it was a safeguard against the turmoil arising from mass population movements in Europe between the world wars, when the collapse of three multinational empires created politically unsettled conditions, fuelling efforts by various ethnic groups to carve out exclusive territories and purge these of others.No country has been as consistent in the violation of these conventions than Israel. Its genocidal origins as a nation that denies the existence of a long settled Palestinian people in a land it seeks to colonise, has been written about authoritatively and extensively. The ICJ ruling of January 26 gives expression to the grim consequences of that embedded character of the Zionist project.At the moment of its creation, Israel expelled an estimated 700,000 Palestinians from their places of residence. Many ended up in Gaza, which did not fall to Israel because of the resolute defence of Egyptian and allied Palestinian forces. In 1948, by Resolution 194, the United Nations demanded that Israel should permit the return of all refugees or pay out appropriate levels of compensation. The Refugees Convention was not in force at the time and has since becoming operative, been inapplicable to the Palestinian refugees, whose status has been the subject of numerous other UN resolutions.As recently as December 2022, the UN recalled all its resolutions on the issue since 1948, and placed on record its awareness of the “growing needs” of Palestinian refugees across the whole region, and expressed “grave concern” at the “especially difficult situation of the Palestine refugees under occupation”, and the “grave humanitarian situation and socio-economic conditions of the Palestine refugees in the Gaza Strip”. It also noted “with regret that repatriation or compensation of the refugees”, as required by the 1948 resolution had not been effected.The right of return of the Palestinian refugees is a recognised aspect of international law. Israel played along with the demand when it was first formulated since it was a condition of its admission into the U.N. Once membership of the world body was secured, Israel shut the door. In public statements in the native language since, Israel’s political leadership has absolutely ruled out any possible return of the refugees, which would be a fatal threat to the ethnic purity of the Zionist nation (Ilan Pappe, 2017: 175). When speaking in English or addressing a global audience, Israeli spokespersons have blamed the victim, accusing the Palestinians of the undying urge to wage war and destroy Israel.Expulsions from their homes and lands have been a part of the daily reality of Palestinian life, particularly after the 1967 war of aggression brought all of the territory between the river and the sea under Israeli military overlordship. Violations of the Geneva Conventions have become routinised to an extent that they have become expected behaviour from Israel. Early during the current assault on Gaza, the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital in the north was bombed. Soon afterwards, with little evidence available, Biden blamed the criminal act on a Palestinian rogue operation. That emboldened the Israeli side to destroy every one of Gaza’s medical facilities in the weeks that followed. Al-Shifa, Gaza’s largest hospital, was occupied mid-November and its director taken into Israeli custody. Over the next ten days, Israeli forces destroyed vital medical equipment and infrastructure and forced the evacuation of all patients.Every hospital in Gaza has been in Israel’s narrative, a Hamas control centre where sinister terror acts are plotted in an underlying network of tunnels. It is a story-line that even the credulous U.S. media has had difficulty swallowing. An investigation by the Washington Post, published December 23, found Israel’s claims collapsing at the slightest scrutiny. There was nothing to suggest, the Washington Post found, that the Al-Shifa tunnels were not for anything but routine storage and internal transportation of kit and equipment. The rooms connected to the tunnel network “showed no immediate evidence of military use”. None of the five hospital buildings identified as Hamas control centres “appeared connected to the tunnel network”, nor was there any “evidence that the tunnels could be accessed from inside hospital wards”.Genocidal propaganda never concedes an argument to fact. As Israel ramped up for “absolute victory”, an expert quoted in the Washington Post offered a reading of its motives. All the fake images and information put out by the Israeli occupation, said this former US State Department official, constituted a “pre-excuse (for) future operations against hospitals”.Dehumanising propagandaIn the days following the destruction of Al-Shifa, that rationale for a plan to create an uninhabitable wasteland, was fully exploited in the destruction of every medical facility in Gaza. Late-January, Israeli forces laid siege to the Al-Amal and Nasser hospitals in the southern Gaza town of Khan Yunis. Patients, for the most part victims of Israeli bombing in other parts of Gaza were ordered evacuated. Weeks later, the bodies of abandoned babies were found in some hospitals in an advanced state of decomposition. Recordings circulating on social media showed Israeli soldiers using the most demeaning terms as they ordered out patients and hospital staff through megaphones.Before global audiences, Israel has found means to dehumanise the Palestinians as a people and delegitimise their resistance in every possible way. First came the claim that Hamas militants had bound and trussed 40 babies, before beheading them during their raid into southern Israel on October 7. That claim, eagerly embraced by the Biden bunch, was soon proven false, though without any manner of a formal retraction from those who put it out.Israel was quick to move on with its tested propaganda technique: to pin a concocted atrocity on the Palestinians and demand that the world join in condemnation, with the accusation of anti-Semitism kept in reserve, to be hurled at all who refused to play along. Late-November, the Prime Ministers of Belgium and Spain travelled to the war zone, and while addressing the media at the Rafah border crossing, described as unacceptable the “destruction of Gaza as a society”. Netanyahu was swift with his condemnation, and formally kicked off the next phase in the propaganda war with accusations of sexual brutality and mass rapes by Hamas militants on October 7.From early December, following a cue from Netanyahu, Biden was roused to action across many time zones. Netanyahu spoke in Hebrew through most of his press conference that day, but switched to English at a strategic moment: “I say to the women’s rights organisations, to the human rights organisations, you’ve heard of the rape of Israeli women, horrible atrocities, sexual mutilation? Where the hell are you?”Across the width of the world, at a fund-raising event for his re-election bid, Biden curiously found words that almost echoed Netanyahu: “It’s on all of us — government, international organisations, civil society and businesses — to forcefully condemn the sexual violence of Hamas terrorists without equivocation”. While trotting out a litany of horror porn stories about mass rapes and the mutilation of the feminine body Israeli government spokesmen and media were loud in demanding condemnation from the UN and other global bodies. On December 28, the New York Times came out with the story, anchored by Pulitzer awardee Jeffrey Gettleman, that instantly became the most widely cited documentation of gender crimes on October 7.Except that it did not take long for the story to fall apart. The witnesses cited in the story proved to have made contrary statements on the record to various media outlets in the days after October 7. The family of one of the purported victims rejected the main findings of the story. And the New York Times, roiled by questions within, cancelled a podcast that was scheduled to explore further unreported nuances of the story.After a thorough dismantling, investigative journalists Aaron Mate and Max Blumenthal from the Grayzone website, wrote to the New York Times, demanding explanations for a report “marred by sensationalism, wild leaps of logic, and an absence of concrete evidence to support its sweeping conclusion”. That explanation is yet to be proffered, though Gettleman, a former Chief of Bureau in Delhi, has since gone on record saying that his role as a journalist is to document, and not to gather evidence, since “evidence is almost like the legal term that suggests you’re trying to prove an allegation or prove a case in court”. It was yet another spurious justification for a report that has been described as a “master class in crappy journalism”.In line with an established pattern, this propaganda effort never quite made the transition out of the world of innuendo and concoction into the realm of verification. A U.N. inquiry into mass crimes in Gaza and Israel had not quite got off the ground before it came under scathing fire from Israeli spokespersons. Israeli medical staff and other first responders with information potentially relevant to the inquiries were directed not to cooperate with a Commission supposedly suffused with anti-Semitic bias.Another front in the war on global opinionIsrael opened another front against the UN soon after the ICJ’s preliminary findings in the genocide hearing. The target this time was the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), created in 1949 to provide essential social services and humanitarian support to the Palestinian refugee population. UNRWA activities now extend to refugee camps in Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza. For Israel, UNRWA is a constant reminder of its war crimes from the moment of its birth. Within two days of the ICJ ruling, Israel declared, based on the interrogation of Palestinian prisoners, that 12 UNRWA staffers had participated in the October 7 attacks. No proof of any sort was put forward, but UNRWA moved quickly to suspend seven of the personnel identified by Israel. The others remained untraceable and had perhaps been killed in Israeli attacks since October 7.Israel’s western allies, which also happen to the UNRWA’s principal funders, jumped to do its bidding. The agency, which is a vital lifeline for the entire Gaza population, was effectively crippled by the withdrawal of support, left without the means of sustaining its operations beyond early-March. Welcoming the decision by the cabal of western powers led by the US, Israel’s foreign minister denounced UNRWA as a body that “perpetuates the refugee issue, obstructs peace, and serves as a civilian arm of Hamas in Gaza”. The problem with UNRWA in other words, is simply that it is a constant reminder that Israel was born in an ethnic cleansing that it has since perpetuated and aggravated.Where the Zionist regime sees the end-point of the current phase of conflict is unclear. Early in the days of the brutal slaughter, the US moved an aircraft-carrier battle group to the Eastern Mediterranean in an obvious signal of support for Israel. A few days later, the US made a public announcement, breaching its classification rules, that a submarine armed with nuclear missiles had been dispatched to the same stretch of territory.If a show of force in support of genocide is acceptable as part of the public engagement by the US in the region, what possibly could be the nature of its private counsels to both sides? These can only be guessed at, though what is known in public is that the heads of state of both Egypt and Jordan, soon after a visit from US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, absolutely rejected any possibility of taking in refugees from Israel’s assault in Gaza. That was on the face of it, contrary to the humanitarian instinct, in conflict indeed, with the implicit demands of the Refugees Convention. In the specific circumstances of Palestine, it presents a cruel dilemma to neighbouring Arab states: to either play along with the next phase of Israel’s ethnic cleansing, which could be the largest ever, or connive in the mass murder of innocents. For the world beyond, this is perhaps a moment of inflection, when the legal foundations on which a world order was built finally collapse. Its credentials were always dubious, but the custodian of the global order, the sole superpower, now stands irretrievably exposed as a racially bigoted and duplicitous actor.Sukumar Muralidharan is an independent writer and researcher based in the Delhi region. He has worked in print media, as a journalism instructor and trainer, and press freedom campaigner.
