Human Rights Watch accused Israel of committing “acts of genocide” by denying access to drinking water to Palestinians in Gaza, and called on the international community to impose targeted sanctions.
In a new 184-page report released Thursday, the New York-based watchdog said that since October 2023 – when Israel launched its military offensive in Gaza – Israeli authorities have “deliberately obstructed Palestinian access to the adequate quantity of water necessary for their survival. in the Gaza Strip.
“What we found is that the Israeli government is intentionally killing Palestinians in Gaza by denying them the water they need to survive,” said Lama Fakih, Middle East director of Human Rights Watch. during a press conference.
Bill Van Esveld, Human Rights Watch’s acting director for Israel and Palestine, told Tel Aviv Tribune that the organization interviewed more than 115 people and used satellite imagery as part of its investigation.
“We did a very thorough job and we found four key things that Israel did to deliberately block (access to water) in Gaza,” he said.
First, the pipelines bringing drinking water from Israel to Gaza were blocked. Israel then cut off the electricity supply needed to activate the water pumps of the reserves inside Gaza, so that desalination plants, water wells and waste management plants stopped operating.
Some of these facilities had solar panels to power them in the event of a power outage. “The Israeli army then came in and bulldozed every single one in four of Gaza’s six sewage treatment facilities, leaving nothing to chance,” Van Esveld said.
“Finally, they prevented any attempt at repair,” he said, by killing technical staff and preventing aid agencies from bringing in water supplies.
“This is a global policy preventing people from having access to water,” Van Esveld concluded, and “a very clear statement of extermination.”
“What that means is you deliberately impose conditions on a population that you know are going to kill a lot of those people.”
The organization found that Palestinians in Gaza had access to two to nine liters of water per day in many areas, well below the survival threshold of 15 liters, contributing to the spread of disease and death. .
The report concluded that this policy amounted to “acts of genocide” under the criteria set out in the 1948 Genocide Convention. “The Israeli authorities intentionally inflicted upon the Palestinian population of Gaza living conditions calculated to bring about their physical destruction.” total or partial. part,” he said.
Israel rejects findings
Israel has repeatedly rejected any accusations of genocide, saying it had the right to defend itself following the attack carried out by Hamas from Gaza on October 7, 2023.
On Thursday, he dismissed the HRW report, calling its findings “appalling lies.”
Proving the crime of genocide against Israeli officials in international courts also requires establishing the intent to commit the crime.
The Genocide Convention, promulgated following the massacre of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, defines the crime of genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious.
The report cites statements from some senior Israeli officials that it says suggest they “want to destroy the Palestinians,” meaning that water deprivation “could amount to a crime of genocide.”
He also argued that Israel had violated interim measures issued by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in January, in a case brought by South Africa alleging that Israel was violating the genocide convention .
The court asked Israel to allow the provision of basic services and humanitarian assistance in order to demonstrate that it had no genocidal intent.
In light of its findings, HRW called on the international community to impose “targeted sanctions, a suspension of arms transfers and military assistance, and a review of bilateral trade and political agreements” to put pressure on on Israel to comply with the ICJ’s provisional measures.
This report follows another Amnesty International study released earlier this month, which also concluded that Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) last month issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense chief for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The Israeli war has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, displaced most of the population and reduced much of the coastal enclave to rubble.