As clarity on Israel’s genocide grows, so does the int’l community’s silence

More proof of Israel’s genocidal intent and actions comes from an investigation conducted by the New York Times, which discovered that since 7 October 2023, the Israeli military issued an order that allowed the killing of up to 20 Palestinian civilians with each strike. In terms of an order, the report states, the official leniency of killing Palestinian civilians was unprecedented. An anonymous Israeli senior military officer who spoke anonymously attributed the order to Israel allegedly facing an existential threat.

The following paragraph stands out amid the report:

On a few occasions, senior commanders approved strikes on Hamas leaders that they knew would each endanger more than 100 noncombatants — crossing an extraordinary threshold for a contemporary Western military.

A hundred Palestinian civilians is also considerably higher than the limit of 20 stipulated by the military order. Also notably and giving a significant nod towards colonialism, the report describes the Israeli Defence Forces as “a contemporary Western military”, which is jarring with the Israeli security narrative of having the alleged “right to defend itself”. The paragraph exposes Israel for what it is – a colonial genocidal entity which serves both its own and external purposes in the region.

According to the report, the Israeli military used unproven methods to determine targets to strike. It also did away with its so-called efforts to minimise civilian harm and, on occasions, relied on cell phone usage rather than surveillance to strike buildings. Of course, the report cites Israel saying that “Hamas’s military strategy makes bloodshed more likely” as it operates from residential areas. But in an enclosed and ever shrinking space, from where is a resistance movement to operate its legitimate anti-colonial resistance? It is Israel that has rendered bloodshed more likely by turning the entire Palestinian population into human shields, while using the human shield narrative to commit genocide.

Officers, the report states, “exercise significant discretion because the laws of armed conflict are vague about what counts as a feasible precaution or an excessive civilian toll.”

But in the midst of all the sanitising of Israel’s actions in Gaza, the word genocide is not just lacking but completely omitted. The investigation contributes as proof of Israel’s annihilation plans, but “one of the most intense bombing campaigns in contemporary warfare” sensationalises the violence without showing how Israel’s ongoing destruction of Gaza is genocidal.

The “authority to risk killing up to 20 civilians” for example, does not describe the willingness to commit such atrocities. Yet, several testimonies by soldiers have clearly shown that the intent was clearer than the parameters of possibility. Intentional air strikes on hospitals, on camps which provided the only homes for forcibly displaced Palestinians, on humanitarian aid convoys, press members, on supposedly safe paths while Palestinians were obeying forced evacuation orders … Extending the parameters of ‘collateral damage’, which is undoubtedly how the international community rationalises genocide, should be clearly called out as genocide, not merely the result of abandoning previous limits. The reports abundantly explain Israel’s atrocities, but the international community’s silence grows in proportion to the evidence unearthed, or should I say, normalised in plain sight.

As clarity on Israel’s genocide grows, so does the int’l community’s silence