Last week, 16 Israeli scholars and lecturers sent a letter to Defense Minister Israel Katz, IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, and several other officials, warning them in no uncertain terms of “the clear and explicit illegality inherent in the plan to concentrate the population of Gaza.” Implementing it, they said, would constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.
The letter was signed, among others, by Eyal Benvenisti, formerly of Cambridge University, was one of the experts who defended Israel in the genocide case brought against it by South Africa at the International Court of Justice, reported the Times Of Israel.
In their letter, the legal experts pointed out that the planned evacuations were not from any specific area of hostilities in Gaza but from the entire territory, calling into question the “imperative military necessity” of the plan (as specified in the Fourth Geneva Convention—ed.). They also stressed that no “legitimate consideration of protection or military necessity” had been presented to justify the plan.
The letter also points out that the state of infrastructure in Rafah, which has essentially been razed to the ground by the Israeli military, is insufficient to provide minimum humanitarian or hygienic conditions for even the 600,000 persons Israel would initially seek to relocate to the zone.
They further noted that Katz had said that encouraging “voluntary emigration” of the Gaza population out of the territory was specifically part of his plan. This would violate the stipulations in the Geneva Convention that evacuated persons be allowed to return to their homes as quickly as possible. “In our view, should this plan materialize, it would not be an evacuation in the legal sense, but rather the establishment of a mass detention camp, the primary purpose of which is ethnic cleansing and expulsion,” the academics wrote.
They said that Katz’s plan would therefore constitute the crimes against humanity of deportation or forcible transfer, severe deprivation of physical liberty, and persecution of an identifiable group under the Rome Statute. “In addition, there is a high risk that, given the dismal humanitarian conditions in Gaza, and specifically if the population is pushed into a small area, the crime of extermination could materialize due to the likely creation of living conditions leading to the destruction of part of the population,” the academics added.
The signers of the letter also warned that the “concentration of civilians under extreme density and existing humanitarian conditions” could be interpreted as the “deliberate infliction on the group of conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part,” which is one of the definitions of genocide under the Genocide Convention of 1948, to which Israel is party. They advised that any directive to implement the plan would be “a manifestly illegal order” that should be refused.
