Mohammad Hadi Zakerhossein, assistant professor at the faculty of Law & Political Science, Tehran Univ.
What is happening these days in the Gaza Strip by the Zionist regime’s military forces is writing a new black-and-red chapter in the history book of international crimes committed in front of the eyes of the international community. These atrocities, which have reached the threshold of the most severe international crimes, namely "genocide," "war crimes," and "crimes against humanity," are regarded as a threat to international peace and security, which are neither subject to the passage of time nor do the perpetrators deserve forgiveness and amnesty.
According to the teachings of international criminal justice, all governments are to be committed to the legal war against international crimes and ending impunity for the perpetrators of these crimes. In such a direction, many mechanisms of investigation and prosecution have been established to record the truth in history and prevent the criminals’ denial and distortion of their crimes in the war of narratives. From the point of view of international criminal justice, the hit-and-run era is over, and every criminal at any time and place must be held accountable for their actions. Although there is a long way to go so as to enable the silent victims of these days in Gaza to feel a sense of justice, the prerequisite to the realization of this important task is to document the long list of crimes committed by the Zionists.
The Gaza Strip has been suffering for years from the Zionist regime’s crime of occupation. Transferring the population to the occupied areas, building settlements, and spreading the ominous phenomenon of settlements is an ongoing war crime that will increase the scope and list of the responsibilities of the Zionists as long as the occupation continues. The International Court of Justice in its advisory opinion in 2004 on the construction of a separation wall explicitly acknowledged the occupation of Gaza by Israel. International law has recognized the right to armed resistance against occupation as a legitimate tool to restore the right to self-determination. Therefore, the occupation forces have no right to resort to force against the resistance forces and liberation movements under the guise of “legitimate defense,” because no right blooms in unjustly occupied lands. In 2005, the Zionist regime withdrew its military forces from the Gaza Strip and claimed an end to the occupation of that area, but due to the regime’s ongoing full control over the Gaza Strip and its borders, from the point of view of international institutions, including the International Criminal Court, the area still considered as an occupied territory.
The state of occupation creates a situation that necessitates the rule of international humanitarian law, or laws of armed conflicts. Humanitarian laws are standards whose violation no war can justify, and the purpose of their establishment is to reduce the sufferings of civilians at the time and in the context of war. The Israeli regime has committed a long list of war crimes in the illegal war it has waged against the Gaza resistance. It is as if the war advisors of the Zionist army have vowed to themselves to make sure the Israeli military does not leave any crime uncommitted. The forced transfer of the population in northern Gaza to the southern areas; the expulsion and forced migration of some residents of Gaza to other countries, which according to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights Situation in occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, is an act of ethnic cleansing; starving the residents of Gaza as a forbidden war method for collective punishment or to force civilians into submission by depriving them of access to life necessities such as water, food, medical facilities, electricity, and fuel; directing military attacks against civilians in residential areas supported by the humanitarian law system, which is regarded as a banned war method even if it did not cause casualties; killing civilians, especially children and women who are subject to special support during times of war and whose number increase daily in Gaza; targeting places dedicated to education such as universities and schools, and religious affairs centers such as mosques and churches, which violates the basic right to education and freedom of religion that are respected at all times and even times of war; preventing the access of the people under occupation to aid, which the occupation forces are duty-bound to meet; targeting health facilities such as hospitals and Red Crescent centers as well as medical staff; inflicting severe damage to civilians who had been subject to years of siege and confinement; widespread and arbitrary demolition of civilian property in the ground incursion into northern Gaza; the use of banned weapons such as white phosphorus are only a part of the actions that constitute war crimes that are widespread and organized these days in the Gaza Strip.
The intensity and severity of the crimes of the Zionists these days and their continuation and extent have gone beyond the violation of the fundamental principles of the humanitarian law and have revealed signs of genocide in Gaza. Genocide is the annihilation of all or part of a national or racial group, such as Arabs and Palestinians, in a particular area that is done through some criminal physical actions such as killing and imposing certain life conditions that lead to the physical annihilation of its members. The situation of Gaza these days, that is, making the north uninhabitable along with insufficient living facilities in the south and the dangers of traveling from the north to the south, all create and impose conditions designed to annihilate the Gaza-dwelling Palestinians and are clear signs that the Zionist regime is seeking to annihilate part of the Palestinian nation in Gaza.
The genocidal statements of Zionist authorities, such as calling people of resistance animals, also reveal this regime’s intention of annihilating the Palestinians. The emergence of signs of genocide imposes wide-ranging obligations for member states of the Genocide Convention, especially Israel’s Western allies, with the US chief among them, to prevent the occurrence of genocide and its continuation through all possible means. This is while these countries, rather than fulfilling their international obligations, have taken Israel’s side and have paved the way for the crime of genocide by giving the regime the green light.
In recognizing Israel’s heinous crimes, one should not just pay attention to the new wave of attacks after October 7. Israel’s crimes against the Palestinian people began decades ago even in days when there were no apparent fighting and armed conflicts and continued, in line with this regime’s occupation policy, in an organized and widespread manner and in the form of actions that constitute crimes against humanity targeting the Palestinian people. At the top of these crimes, apartheid should be mentioned, as the Zionist regime has revived this historical crime in the contemporary era, and, as the only apartheid regime in the world in this era, it has managed to remind the world of the bitter days of the racist South African regime. Apartheid means the application of discriminatory policies and processes that lead to the separation of one race (Palestinian Arabs) from another (Hebrews), and the deprivation and widespread systematic suppression of the victim race in order to establish the domination of the dominant race.
As international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch have documented in recent years, the Zionist regime is trying to deprive Palestinians of their basic rights in the occupied territories to remove them from the society as a second-class race. The deprivation of freedoms and arbitrary arrests, forced disappearances and leaving relatives of prisoners and abductees unaware of their fate, torture and mistreatment of detainees in addition to persecution and harassment of Palestinians, and depriving them of their fundamental rights are other actions that constitute crimes against humanity, which is what the Zionist regime is committing against the Palestinian people.
(The views expressed in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Khamenei.ir.)
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