- Infrastructure in Gaza faces heavy blows as 38,000 buildings in Gaza appearing to be damaged.
- Civilian faculties continue to be targeted including mosques, schools and hospitals adding to the list of Israel’s violations of international law.
Israel remains persistent in justifying attacks on heavily populated areas by claiming that Hamas fighters use such places as shelter.
Netanyahu claims, “While Israel is doing everything to refrain from harming civilians and calling on them to leave areas of fighting, Hamas-ISIS is doing everything to prevent them from leaving for safe areas and is using them as human shields,”. This rhetoric was backed by the EU on November 12th condemning Hamas for using “hospitals and civilians as human shields”.
Israel is “doing everything to refrain from harming civilians” according to Netanyahu and Israel’s narrative of encouraging civilians to the south has remained consistent. However, Israel’s bombardment of southern regions like Khan Younis remain equally consistent.
According to the source ‘Damage analysis of Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellite data by Corey Scher of the CUNY Graduate Center and Jamon Van Den Hoek of Oregon State University’, the damage reports show that Israeli forces have repeatedly bombarded regions in southern Gaza.
Despite Netanyahu’s attempt to show sympathy with Palestinian civilians, who he claims are being used as human shields, 11,000 people have been killed in Gaza with 8,000 of them being women and children. A child is killed in Gaza every 10 minutes according to the world health organization thus begging the question if Israel is even trying to avoid casualties.
Targeted strikes on mosques, schools and hospitals show Israel’s lack of effort in targeting Hamas but instead highlight that civilians and “Hamas-ISIS” (according to Netanyahu) are viewed in the same light by the Israeli government.
Furthermore, organisations such as the UN seem ineffective at pressuring Israel and it’s allies to push for a ceasefire or anything of an equivalent nature. Israel and its allies, namely the United States of America, show a clear subjectivity with regards to which issues they will use the UN or international law as a standard.
The state of Israel has violated 65 UN resolutions and since 2015, the general assembly has adopted 140 resolutions which condemn or criticize Israel. Israel was critisised in more resolutions than all other countries combined in 2022. These figures vastly undermine the significance of the UN and international law.
If international law had carried any substantial amount of weight, then Israel’s violations of international law would have been dealt with in a similar way that Iraq’s alleged violations, regarding non-existent WMDs , were dealt with in 2003.
