Stop genocide in Rafah

With Israeli forces poised to attack a million Gazans’ last refuge, real international pressure is needed to stop genocide. Where are the sanctions?

The Gaza strip used to pack a population of over two million, roughly the size of the country I live in, into an area roughly the size of my town: one of the most densely inhabited places on the planet. Israeli attacks have flattened northern Gaza and corraled over a million Palestinians into the yet smaller town of Rafah by the Egyptian border. I watch the news in horror as Israeli forces are bombing them like fish in a barrel in preparation for a ground offensive, amid cries from the UN and relief organizations that this will take the humanitarian nightmare to a new level and lead to war crimes. The air strikes in the early hours of Monday took at least 74 lives. Netanyahu has ordered an evacuation plan, but there is nowhere safe for people to go.

Half of Gazans are children; they have grown up under the increasingly unlivable conditions of Israeli blockade and a Hamas rule they’ve never voted for. They have now spent four months in hell: bombed, killed, maimed, displaced and bombed again, all the while denied basic conditions for survival – water, food, medical supplies, power, fuel, shelter. Israel has bombed hospitals, schools, refugee camps, bakeries. 80% of Gaza’s population are displaced. Over 28,000 people have reportedly been killed. Again, around half of them appear to be children, which testifies to the indiscriminate nature of the attacks. Gazans are starving. Aid workers have long since run out of words to describe the desperate situation as Gazans have run out of everything else. Israel’s inability or unwillingness to spare civilians in its war on Hamas has turned Gaza from the world’s “biggest open-air prison” into a death camp.

I’ve been screaming into the void for Israel to step back from the brink of genocide since the early weeks of the war. I have stuck to this circumspect formulation because genocide has a legal meaning that requires intent and is hard to prove; because calling on Israel to prevent genocide seems more constructive than naming it already guilty, and because the mere risk of genocide along with the manifestly desperate humanitarian catastrophe and credible charges of other crimes should have moved the world to act. But one can only mince words for so long. In genocide proceedings filed by South Africa, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on January 26 adopted provisional measures requiring Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all genocidal acts. The Netanyahu regime is thumbing its nose at the ICJ as it is. Doubling down on the carnage by invading the last refuge in Gaza would surely be a genocidal act in direct contravention of the Court’s order. You can only destroy so much of a people “collaterally” without betraying intent, and in terms of outcomes, Netanyahu’s “absolute victory” will be indistinguishable from genocide. Unless, perhaps, if Egypt were to open its border, in which case Israel would be committing the no less criminal act of mass forced displacement.

Israel is also thumbing its nose at its chief friend and protector, the U.S. If we’re supposed to take the Biden administration’s concern for Palestinian civilians and their calls for a humanitarian pause at face value, they look pathetically weak for failing to exert any meaningful moderating influence on a small client state they sponsor with military aid. As the ICJ has put them on notice, it also puts the U.S. at risk of breaching their duties under the Genocide Convention. From the beginning, America’s “unequivocal support” coupled with mutterings about protecting civilians has allowed Israel to hear what it wanted to hear and do what it wanted to do. The latest signals from the White House – leaking privately peevish Biden remarks and supporting a Rafah offensive with a “credible plan” for protecting the population, as if such a thing were possible – are more of the same.

The Biden administration has had its eyes on a bigger prize: a pathway to a two-state solution, involving recognition of Israel by Saudi Arabia, probably with the Palestinian Administration (PA) assuming control of Gaza with assistance from several Arab states. If Blinken’s shuttle diplomacy could pull it off, it would be a master stroke transforming crisis into opportunity, a win-win for the U.S., and a shoo-in for the Nobel Prize. Unfortunately it’s also a game of three-dimensional chess, played with Gazans as pawns, that offers the actual parties things they don’t want: for Hamas and Netanyahu, a two-state solution without Hamas or Netanyahu; for the PA, responsibility for the starving survivors in a heap of rubble and body parts. Blinken hasn’t pulled it off, and while part of the process has been asking Israel to pause the fighting, the diplomacy has not been backed by meaningful pressure. Indeed, deflecting calls for sanctions against Israel may be the point of it.

Without a lasting cease-fire and resumption of funding for UNRWA, the population of Gaza will continue to be denied basic conditions for survival. A lasting cease-fire would require Israel to give up its aim of eliminating Hamas. It should, not because Hamas is worth keeping, but because it is so deeply embedded that it cannot be eliminated without also destroying Gaza and a significant part of its people. This would not prevent Israel from defending itself – killing Palestinian civilians deep in Palestinian territory is not self-defense. As far as deterrence, Israel has surely already made its point by killing twenty times as many people as Hamas did in its 7 October attacks – pointlessly, as Hamas seems to care sadly little about the suffering of its people. And a cease-fire would not prevent hostage negotiations; on the contrary, it is Netanyahu’s intent to continue the war until total victory over Hamas that leaves Hamas with no incentive to negotiate.

Friends don’t let friends commit mass atrocity. It is past time for President Biden to tell Netanyahu to cease fire or lose American support. It is past time to unblock the UN Security Council. It is past time to impose international sanctions on Israel, starting with an embargo on arms, as well as targeted sanctions on the Israeli regime. It is past time for the EU, Israel’s biggest trading partner, to threaten economic sanctions. For the children cowering in Rafah, time may have already run out, as it did for six-year old Hind Rajab in Gaza City two weeks ago, stuck in a car with her dead family, pleading for the help that never came.