The Israeli government’s mass evacuation order from northern Gaza is an ostensibly humanitarian act done in an utterly inhumane way. The order requires 1.1 million people to flee their homes in northern Gaza in advance of an imminent Israeli ground invasion – the next step in the Israeli response to the horrendous Hamas massacre and abduction of Israeli civilians on 7 October. Warring parties, if possible, are supposed to give “effective advance warning of attacks”. Yet the Israeli order will compound the suffering of the Palestinian civilians of Gaza. It may also begin an illegal process of ethnic cleansing.
The threat in northern Gaza is plenty real as Israeli bombers pulverize neighborhoods in attacks that appear designed less to pinpoint Hamas fighters than to collectively punish the civilian population of Gaza – the same population that has endured years of Hamas’s military dictatorship and had no say in Hamas’s decision to slaughter Israeli civilians. Yet evacuation has its risks, too. At least 70 people were reportedly killed while traveling along the prescribed road south.
And flee to what? Southern Gaza, already impoverished, is in no position to care for an influx of people that could effectively double its overcrowded population in a matter of days. Water is in especially short supply, because the Israeli government has cut off water to the territory (some may have resumed) and stopped the fuel needed to operate its three desalination plants. Food is not being let in. Electricity has been shut off.
Why target all of northern Gaza at once? If the point is to “destroy Hamas”, as the Israeli interior minister, Gila Gamliel, says, it hardly takes a brilliant strategist to figure out that, while parts of Hamas will fight Israeli forces in northern Gaza, other parts will deploy in the south. What happens if Israeli forces go after them? Another evacuation order? To where?
Given the humanitarian crisis that the Israeli government is knowingly generating in southern Gaza, the point may be to spark an exodus to Egypt – again, for ostensibly humanitarian purposes. The Egyptian government, a partner in maintaining Israel’s 16-year closure of Gaza, has no interest in a massive influx of refugees. Egypt is going through its own economic crisis, and in any event has long feared that large-scale movement from Gaza would include Hamas militants who would fuel the simmering insurgency in northern Sinai.
Yet if Palestinian residents of Gaza feel they must flee to Egypt to stay safe, they should be permitted to go. But they understandably worry that the Rafah crossing to Egypt will operate in only one direction – that their flight will replicate the nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948, in which 700,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes in what became Israel, never to be allowed back. The vast majority of Gaza residents are descendants of those nakba refugees.
To see why the Israeli government might welcome a new round of ethnic cleansing requires understanding its policies of demographic engineering. Beyond wanting as a top priority to minimize the number of Palestinians (or “Arab Israelis”) within the 1967 borders of Israel – currently about 21% of the population – the government maintained a hierarchy among parts of occupied Palestinian territory depending on the degree of annexation and control that it sought. The next priority was to steer Palestinians away from East Jerusalem, which Israel already purports to have annexed, then from Area C of the West Bank, which contains all the Israeli settlements and many officials would like to annex. Then came Areas A and B of the West Bank, which enjoy limited Palestinian rule but are largely controlled by the Israeli government.
Last was always Gaza. The Israeli government has long controlled its borders – hence, the ongoing occupation – but had no interest in incorporating its territory so it could tolerate its population. But as Israel’s West Bank settlement expansion renders the prospect of a viable contiguous Palestinian state increasingly remote, there is growing recognition that the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River has become a “one-state reality”. And as pressure mounts to replace the apartheid in the occupied territory with a regime of equal rights, the Palestinian population of Gaza has grown in importance. With the proportion of Jews and Palestinians roughly equal across Israel and Palestine, the far-right extremists in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government might welcome a chance to shift a million or more Palestinians off the demographic balance sheet of that effective single state.
Gideon Sa’ar, the Israeli minister, said in an interview on Saturday with Israel’s Channel 12 News that Gaza “must be smaller at the end of the war ... Whoever starts a war against Israel must lose territory.” Yoav Gallant, defense minister, said: “Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything.” They seem to be suggesting mass expulsion from at least a portion of the territory. But that collective punishment – that war crime – is a wholly inappropriate response to Hamas’s atrocities. It will be aggravated if it becomes force deportation to Egypt – the same crime that the International Criminal Court is already investigating Myanmar military officers for having committed by forcibly driving Rohingya to Bangladesh in 2017.
There is nothing utopian about insisting that the Israeli military abide by the requirements of international humanitarian law. These requirements are not a concoction of human rights groups. They are rules agreed to by all governments including Israel’s. They are not meant as a nice thing to do except when the going gets rough; they are requirements even in the most extreme circumstances, when a nation is at war, when its people are slaughtered. For the sake of Palestinian civilians, the Western governments that are embracing Israel’s unquestionable right to respond to Hamas’s vicious assault should also insist that Israel abide by the same rules that make Hamas’s targeting of civilians an unlawful way to fight against Israel’s occupation.
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs. On Twitter he is @KenRoth
