“This evacuation is for your own safety,” the Israeli army said on October 13, when it ordered 1.1 million Palestinians in northern Gaza to leave their homes. Thousands heeded the warning and headed south, only to be bombed en route and upon arrival.
The mass evacuation order was only the inauguration of a series of announcements and legal technologies developed by the Israeli army and its legal team in order to organize violence against the Palestinian population and to envelop it in an obscure tale of international humanitarian law precautions.
Israel’s deadly ‘humanitarian efforts’
In November, shortly after the Israeli army launched its ground offensive, it designated Gaza’s main north-south road – Salah al-Din Street – as a “security corridor”. A map with the evacuation passage was shared by the occupying forces, highlighting their “humanitarian effort” to protect civilians. But since then, Gaza’s main roadway has become a corridor of horror where Palestinians have been randomly bombed, executed, forcibly disappeared, tortured and humiliated.
Meanwhile, the Israeli army continued to bombard the territory south of Wadi Gaza, which it had repeatedly declared a “safe zone” where Palestinians from the north could seek refuge.
When the war’s death toll reached 15,000 Palestinians by the end of November, many of them civilians killed in “safe zones,” the US administration attempted to hide its support for indiscriminate targeting of civilians. by Israel by superficially asking to “expand” the so-called security zones. The Israeli army therefore reacted by introducing a new “humanitarian tool”: the evacuation grid system. He posted a grid map on social media dividing the Gaza Strip into 600 blocks and indicating which areas were supposed to be “evacuated” and which were “safe.”
Instead of increasing safety zones for civilians, the system – deployed while Gaza was cut off from all forms of communication by the Israeli military – increased the level of chaos and deaths.
Areas previously designated as safe, such as Khan Younis and Rafah, have been transformed into urban battlefields. As a result, Israel ordered Palestinian civilians in these areas to return to new safety zones. But the areas to which the evacuation grid system required Palestinians to flee were immediately targeted by the Israeli army.
In December, a New York Times investigation found that during the first month and a half of the war, Israel “regularly used one of its largest and most destructive bombs in areas it had designated as being safe for civilians. The 2,000-pound U.S.-made bombs dropped in the security zones posed “an ever-present threat to civilians seeking safety in southern Gaza.”
Nonetheless, the Biden administration has repeatedly praised Israel for its “efforts” to protect civilians.
Organizing genocidal violence
According to international law, both in the Geneva Conventions and in the Additional Protocols, security zones must be recognized in an agreement between the combating parties. However, in conflicts this rarely happens and safe zones – and the legal technologies associated with them – can become tools for organizing violence.
The concentration of defenseless civilians in areas designated and demarcated on a map as protected can be used and exploited by actors on the battlefield to manage and direct their use of lethal force.
This was the case in Bosnia, with the famous “safe zone” of Srebrenica. The zone was established by the United Nations in 1993 to protect Bosnian Muslims under attack, but the disarmament of the safe zone made it easy prey for Serbian forces. They first obstructed the delivery of humanitarian aid to the region, then rounded up and massacred thousands of Muslim civilians.
Safe zones also became deadly in the case of Sri Lanka, where the government imposed the creation of Tamil safe zones in which it killed thousands of civilians, while accusing the Tamil Tigers of allegedly using the refugees concentrated in security zones as “human shields”. .
Similarly, in Gaza, Israel unilaterally imposes what is “safe” for Palestinian civilians and where. In doing so, it deploys the security discourse and associated legal technologies – warnings, safe zones, security corridors, evacuation grilles – as a lethal tool to implement the ethnic cleansing of different areas of the territory designated as safe /dangerous.
Zones or parts of territories defined as safe are used to concentrate displaced populations and to better manage military operations and massacres of civilians. As a poignant Reuters headline puts it: “Israel Orders Gazans to Flee, Bombs Where It Sends Them.”
In other words, by issuing an evacuation order and depopulating large swaths of Gaza territory, Israel has concentrated the ethnically cleansed population into increasingly restricted areas that it targets immediately after they have been designated as “safety zones”. This shows a clear intention to liquidate Palestinian civilians after displacing them, and can become a tool to make extermination more effective.
In crowded areas like Rafah, with extremely high population density due to the influx of displaced people from northern and central Gaza, a single attack can kill large numbers of people at once.
In addition to serving a clear military objective, this necropolitical appropriation of the humanitarian duty to warn and create safe spaces for civilians is also part of Israel’s legal strategy to defend itself from accusations of committing crimes. of war and crimes against humanity.
With the recent petition for genocide submitted by the Republic of South Africa to the International Court of Justice, which accuses Israel of acts “intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnic group”, it there is increased urgency. so that the Israeli government tries to present itself as respectful of international law.
Israel has always tried to give some semblance of legality to its 75 years of ethnic cleansing and dispossession. But this time, the force of genocidal annihilation he has unleashed has reached such an unprecedented scale – effectively putting 2.3 million people in mortal danger – that his legal talk about security cannot disguise his utter contempt. for the civil status of the population of Gaza.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial position of Tel Aviv Tribune.
