Another Report from Human Rights Watch: Ignore Hamas, Blame Israel

On November 14, Human Rights Watch released a report titled “Hopeless, Starving, and Besieged,” which accuses Israel of numerous war crimes in Gaza.

The report is based primarily on interviews with 39 Gaza residents, along with analysis of photographs, satellite imagery, and evacuation orders the IDF published on social media.

Of course the war has caused tremendous suffering for Gaza. While fighting against Hamas in a densely urban setting makes this largely inevitable, Israel should not be immune from scrutiny as to whether it has done enough to respect the rights of Gaza civilians. So investigation and analysis of Israel’s conduct is certainly in order.

However, as we’ve unfortunately become accustomed to from Human Rights Watch, this report is biased against Israel at every turn.

Standard of Perfection

Humanitarian law is extraordinarily demanding in the protections it affords civilians — so much so, that no army has ever succeeded at upholding humanitarian law completely. In fact, most do a terrible job. A reasonable question might be to ask how Israel’s humanitarian score compares with other Western nations in their own recent conflicts. But Human Rights Watch holds Israel to a standard of complete perfection — any time Israel falls the slightest bit short of what they believe humanitarian law requires, no matter how impossible the situation, this report immediately accuses Israel of a war crime.

For example, in declaring most evacuations of civilians illegal, the report says, “failure to ensure the security and the guarantee of protections of displaced persons as they fled and in the places to which they were displaced would still render the displacement unlawful.”

In other words, the IDF told civilians to leave a residential area where it was planning to operate against Hamas missiles and tunnels, where they would be in enormous danger should they remain.

But even though evacuation was clearly a good idea and would make them much, much safer, since Israel couldn’t guarantee that they would be completely safe while traveling and at their destination, Human Rights Watch says the evacuation was a war crime.

But how can anywhere in Gaza be completely safe, with Hamas popping up all over? This demand that Israel ensure complete safety for evacuees is impossible, and that would be the case for any other army as well.

The report even criticizes Israel for this: “The evacuation orders also failed to take into account the needs of people with disabilities, many of whom are unable to leave without assistance.”

Of course it would be best if Gaza residents had plenty of time to leave in an organized fashion, with special consideration for those with disabilities. But rockets were raining down on Israel’s cities, with hostages languishing in captivity and Israeli soldiers in danger of attack by Hamas as they wait. Human Rights Watch makes it sound as if Palestinian civilians are the only ones whose rights need to be considered. They’re not.

The report describes Israel’s system for issuing evacuation orders like this:

On December 1, the Israeli military published an online map on its website, that could be accessed using a QR code from a mobile phone, that divided Gaza into a grid of 620 numbered blocks, allowing the user to know in which of these blocks they are located, using the location services of their phone, assuming one had a phone with sufficient battery charge and internet connection. The Israeli military then continued to publish leaflets and social media posts indicating the blocks slated for evacuation.

That might sound like a pretty elaborate, good faith effort to give Gaza civilians continuously updated information to help them avoid the fighting. But not according to Human Rights Watch. The group repeatedly criticizes Israel’s evacuation instructions as incomplete or misleading.

For example, regarding one order on Dec. 3, they write:

The caption in the X post instructed people living in blocks 36, 38 through 54, and 219 through 221 to evacuate, but the heading on the map provided a different list of block numbers: 36, 47 through 54, and 221 through 219, which resulted in the omission of nine blocks.

The appropriate conclusion to draw here is that Israel is not perfect. Getting real-time information from army units actually in Gaza to the people issuing the notices was not seamless. And yes, this certainly did cause stress and uncertainty for Gaza residents, perhaps even leading some to harm. But what government would have done better?

Any new website or system has kinks and mistakes, let alone something as complex as this, being done hurriedly in the midst of a war. The alerts Israel gives to its own citizens to protect themselves from incoming missiles are hardly error-free either. By condemning Israel for even these simple missteps, Human Rights Watch reveals that its agenda is simply to blame Israel for everything, no matter what.

What About Hamas?

The report acknowledges that the Hamas Oct. 7 atrocities precipitated the war. But beyond that, Hamas is hardly mentioned at all.

Doesn’t Hamas bear any responsibility for all the suffering? What about Hamas stealing aid and therefore making its distribution impossible? Or Hamas preventing evacuations in order to drive up civilian casualties to exploit as propaganda and create human shields? Hamas deliberately putting its military tunnels under civilian infrastructure, and using the tunnels to shelter only its fighters but not civilians? For that matter, what about Hamas’ crimes in firing tens of thousands of missiles at Israeli civilian targets and holding hundreds of innocent hostages?

The only place any of this is mentioned is in a brief section that discusses allegations that Hamas prevented people from fleeing. This is probably because in June, a United Nations Human Rights Council report found reasonable grounds to conclude that Hamas has made attempts to discourage and potentially obstruct the evacuation of civilians, so the report had to at least bring it up.

Human Rights Watch dismisses this, though, because none of the 39 people they interviewed claimed it had happened to them (although even they acknowledge that these people may not have felt comfortable revealing derogatory information about Hamas for fear of reprisal). The report then claims that even if Hamas did obstruct the evacuations, Israel should also still be guilty.

Most telling is that the report contains a rather pompous set of recommendations, with separate sections telling Israel, Egypt, all other governments, the United Nations, and other humanitarian organizations, and the International Criminal Court what they should do to comply with international law and stop the suffering of Gazans.

But there is nothing for Hamas.

Absolutely nothing — no demands for Hamas at all. Not to release the hostages, not even to allow the hostages to be visited by the Red Cross. No demand that Hamas allow the unimpeded flow of humanitarian assistance. According to this report, Hamas isn’t doing anything wrong or in any way part of the problem at all.

That’s the bias we’ve unfortunately come to expect from Human Rights Watch. And it’s a shame. An honest, objective report reviewing the conduct of both sides in the current war should be welcomed. It would explain what humanitarian law demands, and make clear that Hamas has purposefully violated and made a mockery of everything it stands for. And it would also show that while Israel has made a tremendous effort to uphold humanitarian values, it has sometimes fallen short. But giving Israel feedback to improve is clearly not the goal of this report — leveling war crimes accusations to ramp up political pressure and hatred of Israel are all that Human Rights Watch is after.

What a pity that what is supposed to be a human rights group has sunk to that.

Shlomo Levin has a Master’s in International Law and Human Rights, and he is the author of the Human Rights Haggadah.

The post Another Report from Human Rights Watch: Ignore Hamas, Blame Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.