In early May, the security cabinet of Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met and agreed that Israel would ‘capture’ Gaza and remove its Palestinian population ‘to protect it’. To achieve this policy of annexation of Gaza, the Israelis tightened their siege by preventing the entry of food, water, electricity, and other humanitarian aid (they had already enforced a blockade of aid since 2 March 2025). Then, the Israelis began to bomb Gaza with increased ferocity, with Israeli ground forces gathering at the edge of Gaza and entering in short bursts. By 18 May, these Israeli ground forces began measured entries into Gaza. After intense pressure, the Netanyahu cabinet agreed to allow ‘basic amounts’ of food into Gaza. Meanwhile, the Israeli army released a ‘forced displacement’ order for the people in Khan Younis.
There is a tangle of war crimes in the paragraph above: 1. Population transfer in an occupied territory is illegal. 2. Deprival of food, water, and electricity for civilians is illegal. 3. Annexation of an occupied territory is illegal. 4. Deliberately killing civilians in a war zone is illegal.
It would be meaningless to recite chapter and verse to prove this, since it is by now well known that the Israelis have violated every single one of the laws of war and that their violations have been meticulously documented by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967 Francesca Albanese in her annual report (and in recent statements, where she has spoken of a ‘[tragedy] foretold and [a] stain on our collective humanity’) and by Amnesty International in their report, ‘You Feel Like You Are Subhuman: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza’. In Amnesty’s recent annual report, there is the chilling sentence: ‘the world has been made audience to a live-streamed genocide’.
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