Close to 70% of casualties in Israel’s assault on #Gaza are women and children, the UN Human Rights Office says

 The UN is calling it “a systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law”.

 

There must be “due reckoning” for horrific violations, possible atrocity crimes in Gaza – UN Human Rights Chief

08 November 2024

GENEVA - The UN Human Rights Office today published a report detailing the horrific reality that has unfolded for the people of Israel and Gaza since 7 October 2023, and said justice must be served with respect to the grave violations of international law that have been committed.

The detailed analysis of violations covers the six-month period from November 2023 to April 2024, and broadly examines the killing of civilians and breaches of international law that in many instances could amount to war crimes. If committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against a civilian population, further to a State or organizational policy, these violations may constitute crimes against humanity, it adds. And if committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, they may also constitute genocide, the report warns.

“The International Court of Justice, in its series of orders on provisional measures, underscored the international obligations of Israel to prevent, protect against and punish acts of genocide and associated prohibited conduct,” it says.

UN Human Rights Chief Volker Türk stressed the imperative for Israel fully and immediately to comply with those obligations. This is even more critical and urgent, given the totality of conduct set out in the report and taking into account most recent events, including Israel’s operations in North Gaza and its adoption of legislation affecting UNRWA’s activities, he said.

“It is essential that there is due reckoning with respect to the allegations of serious violations of international law through credible and impartial judicial bodies and that, in the meantime, all relevant information and evidence are collected and preserved,” he said.

Türk recalled States’ obligations to act to prevent atrocity crimes, and urged them to support the work of accountability mechanisms, including the International Criminal Court, in relation to the current conflict; exercise universal jurisdiction to investigate and try crimes under international law in national courts, consistent with international standards; and comply with extradition requests pertaining to suspects of such crimes to countries where they would receive a fair trial.

The report points to repeated statements from Israeli officials positing the end of the conflict as contingent upon Gaza’s entire destruction and the exodus of the Palestinian people. Furthermore, it documents efforts to rationalize discrimination, hostility and violence towards, and even the elimination of, Palestinians.

The report shows how civilians have borne the brunt of the attacks, including through the initial “complete siege” of Gaza by Israeli Forces, as well as the Israel Government’s continuing unlawful failures to allow, facilitate and ensure the entry of humanitarian aid, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and repeated mass displacement. This conduct by Israeli Forces has caused unprecedented levels of killings, death, injury, starvation, illness and disease, the reports says. Palestinian armed groups have also conducted hostilities in ways that have likely contributed to harm to civilians.

On 7 October 2023, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups also committed serious violations of international law on a wide scale, the report states, including attacks directed against Israeli and foreign civilians, killing and mistreatment of civilians, sexual violence, destruction of civilian objects, and taking of hostages. These acts could amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity, it says. Following 7 October, Hamas and other armed groups also celebrated the attacks of that day, which was deeply troubling and totally unacceptable.

“The rules of war, in force now for 160 years, were designed to limit and prevent human suffering in times of armed conflict,” said Türk. “Their wanton disregard has led to the current extremes of human suffering which we continue to see today. It seems inconceivable that the parties to the conflict refuse to apply universally accepted and binding norms developed to preserve the very bare minimum of humanity.”

The UN Human Rights Office has been verifying the personal details of those killed in Gaza by strikes, shelling and other conduct of hostilities. Of those fatalities, it has so far found close to 70 per cent to be children and women, indicating a systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law, including distinction and proportionality.

The continuation of these attacks, killing evenly across the population, “demonstrates an apparent indifference to the death of civilians and the impact of the means and methods of warfare selected”, the report states.

The most represented of verified fatalities are children. The three categories of age most represented were children aged from 5 to 9 years old, children from 10 to 14 years old, and babies and children from 0 to 4 years old.

Of the verified fatalities, about 80 per cent were killed in residential buildings or similar housing, out of which 44 per cent were children and 26 per cent were women.

Monitoring by the UN Human Rights Office indicates that the high number of fatalities per attack was principally due to the Israeli Defense Forces’ use of weapons with wide area effects in densely populated areas, although some of the fatalities may have been the result of errant projectiles from Palestinian armed groups dropping short.

The High Commissioner calls on Member States, consistent with their obligations under international law, to assess arms sales or transfers and provision of military, logistical or financial support to a party to the conflict, with a view to ending such support if this risks serious violations of international law.

The report also raises concerns with respect to forcible transfer, attacks on hospitals, in apparent systematic fashion, and journalists. It also points to the reported use of white phosphorus munitions.

“Our monitoring indicates that this unprecedented level of killing, and injury of civilians is a direct consequence of the failure to comply with fundamental principles of international humanitarian law – namely the principles of distinction, proportionality and precautions in attack,” Türk said. “Tragically, these documented patterns of violations continue unabated, over one year after the start of the war.”

“The trends and patterns of violations, and of applicable international law as clarified by the International Court of Justice, must inform the steps to be taken to end the current crisis,” said the High Commissioner. “The violence must stop immediately, the hostages and those arbitrarily detained must be released, and we must focus on flooding Gaza with humanitarian aid.”

Gaza: 'From Ground Zero' - Rashid Masharawi

 

So honoured to have met and interviewed Gaza-born Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi - founder of the Masharawi Fund for films and filmmakers in Gaza, and producer of the series of films 'From Ground Zero'.

Born out of a project to support displaced artists and filmmakers who have survived Israel’s nearly year-long assault, the series of 22 short films will represent Palestine at the Oscars in 2025!  

More soon. 

#FromGroundZero

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FROM GROUND ZERO Trailer | TIFF 2024

'La Pompe Afrique'

 

Adieu Paul Stephenson

 

Paul Stephenson, the Caribbean British pioneering civil rights leader who led the Bristol Bus Boycott in 1963, has died at the age of 87...

Paul Stephenson | A Journey to Justice

Latest interview on Gaza: with the UN's rapporteur for Palestine Francesca Albanese

 

International report - podcast

UN rapporteur says Israel's war in Gaza is 'emptying the land completely'

Issued on: 01/11/2024

A year of war in Gaza has undermined international law and threatens to make the strip uninhabitable, according to the United Nations special rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese. She tells RFI why she is making the case for Israel's offensive to be classified a genocide.

By: Melissa Chemam

More than 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza are experiencing extremely critical levels of hunger, according to the UN. Seventy percent of crop fields and livelihoods have been destroyed during the Israeli military offensive. 

The war, which has claimed 42,000 lives in Gaza and left hundreds of thousands wounded, has also spread to the West Bank and Lebanon. Civilians as well as UN peacekeepers have been targeted by Israel's forces.

"I used the word 'catastrophe' for the first time back in October 2023," Albanese told RFI, "when Israel had killed 8,000, 6,000 people in the first weeks of the conflict and destroyed entire neighbourhoods, bakeries, churches, and targeted UN buildings and universities. "This is not the way wars are conducted."

For more and to listen:  https://www.rfi.fr/en/podcasts/international-report/20241101-un-rapporteur-says-israel-s-war-in-gaza-is-emptying-the-land-completely 

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Albanese was speaking as she prepared to launch her latest report on the situation in Gaza and the other Palestinian territories, which she presented to the UN General Assembly earlier this week.

In it, she takes a long view of the current conflict, arguing that Israel's military actions form part of a systematic attempt to displace Palestinians that goes back decades – and which she calls a genocide. 

"Israel occupies that land, according to the International Court of Justice, unlawfully," Albanese said.

"So Israel unlawfully occupies a territory, oppressing its people, who of course retaliate. Then they wage a war against them. It doesn't work that way."

Washington and others argue that Israel has the right to defend itself – though Albanese questions whether its military operations are truly making it safer. 

"Is it protection?" she asked. "How is what Israel is doing going to make its citizens protected? This is the question. And the blindness at the political level is mind-blowing." 

By: Melissa Chemam

Algeria 1954-2024

'TOUSSAINT ROUGE' 

Seventy years after the start of the Algerian war on 1 Nov. 1954, relations with France are still strained

On the night of 31 October to 1 November 1954, a series of attacks occurred in different regions of colonial Algeria. Claimed by an organisation then unknown to the French intelligence services, calling itself FLN (for National Liberation Front), these attacks marked the beginning of the independence uprising, known 70 years later as the Algerian War.

Between midnight and 3am, different regions of the French colony Algeria were shaken by no fewer than 70 attacks, some of which deadly: 10 settlers lost their lives.

French authorities were taken by surprise... The colonial camp first maintained it was a "tribal uprising", probably "fomented in Cairo" by Pan-Arabists.

The attacks appeared coordinated, and the next day a high-level political manifesto appeared, the "Proclamation" of 1 November, with a call to local Muslim Algerians to enlist in the armed resistance.

The events revealed that groups among the Indigenous inhabitants of the territory were launching a popular and organised insurrection.

The responsibility for these attacks was soon claimed by the National Liberation Front (FLN), a new movement, but this was not taken seriously either by the political class or by the media right away.

Roots of anger

These bloody events were called in France the "Toussaint Rouge" (Red All Saints' Day).

They marked the beginning of the Algerian War, an expression that was not used in France until much later in the decolonial war, and only officially recognised in 1999.

There had been precedents to the attacks.

'Algerians' was by then a term reserved to the French and European settlers, now known as 'pieds noirs' (black feet).

But the natives had been expecting their demands for equality to be heard since at least the 1920s, after their involvement in the First World War.

According to the historian Charles-Robert Ageron, a specialist of colonial Algeria, this process even began at the beginning of the 20th century and was forged "in the dual movement of religious fundamentalism and revolutionary populism".

Actually, most historians have shown that, from the beginning of the French conquest in 1830, officers faced increased resistance from the Algerian population, later led by the famous Emir Abdelkader.

For another French historian, Bernard Droz, since the 1930s, the rise of the Muslim population, "the unspeakable misery of the rural masses", low wages and "family burden to underemployment or exodus", and the voice of a European counting ten times that of a Muslim, within the framework of the new status of Algeria voted in September 1947, elements for complaint were mounting.

In the space of five decades, Algerian demands evolved from assimilation to emancipation, including "political autonomy as a sovereign nation with the right of oversight of France", as demanded in his 1943 manifesto by Ferhat Abbas, a representative of moderate nationalism.

But in 1937, the Blum-Violette bill supposed to grant French citizenship to the Muslim elite, was rejected by the French in Algeria. 

The successive French governments didn't succeed either in giving Algerians a greater voice in local and metropolitan political bodies,

Assimilationist hopes finally died with the Second World War.

According to Ageron, "the defeat of France and the republican ideal in which many Algerians had long placed their hope" and "the impotence of the Vichy state in the face of Nazi Germany" strengthened the Algerians in "stronger nationalist demands."

At the end of the war, Muslim fighters expected rewards and treatment showing their equal courage to the French troops.

But they didn't get heard.

On 8 May 1945, the day of the celebration of the Allied victory, a peaceful demonstration in Setif degenerated into riots, when the French police intervened.

In the following days, protests spread to the countryside, leading to attacks on farms and a hundred deaths among Europeans.

The repression by the police, joined by newly formed European militias, was violent and merciless, often striking innocent villagers.

Protesters were arrested, tortured and some executed. The toll was very heavy: some historians speak of 45,000 dead.

Historians have often described these riots of May 1945 as a "failed insurrection".

The 1946 elections were plagued by massive electoral fraud, which finally convinced young Muslim activists, eager to deal with French imperialism as soon as possible, of the dead end of the electoral path.

Messali Hadj emerged as a strong political figure, with his organisation named the Algerian People's Party (PPA).

It became the Movement for the Triumph of Democratic Liberties (MTLD) in 1946, and he, the first nationalist leader to unite the common Muslim people and members of the middle class around the ideals of democracy and egalitarianism.

The PPA's motto became: "Neither assimilation nor separation, but emancipation".

National liberation day

If 1 November 1954 remains in the memory of the French under the name of "Red All Saints' Day", for indigenous Algerians it is the day of the outbreak of the war of national liberation.

With its text, the liberation movement demands "the restoration of the Algerian state, sovereign, democratic and social, within the framework of the principles of Islam". 

But for French authorities, unlike the rest of the empire, already largely dismantled in Africa and Asia by 1954, “Algeria is France!”, in the words of the then Interior minister, François Mitterrand, who chose repression.

Among the victims of 1 November 1954 were two French Algerians, four soldiers, a police officer, a forest ranger, a pro-colonisation Algerian, and a young teacher, killed by mistake.

As France chose to repress, the war unfolded with its share of massacres and crimes committed by the French army, supported by 'Harkis', Muslim who chose to cooperate with the colonisers.  

The worst torture methods were applied under cover of French political authorities. 

The war would end up lasting for eight years until 1962, causing more than a million deaths, colonisers and colonised included.

With the signing of the Evian Accords on 18 March 1962, a ceasefire was finally imposed between the belligerents, and Algeria regained its independence, putting an end to 132 years of French colonisation.

Seventy years after the Toussaint Rouge, the wounds of the conflict have not healed however, and still cast a shadow over the relationship between Algiers and Paris.

The trauma of the war has continuously strained ties between the two countries, whether because of disputes around archives, immigration policies, or political disagreements. 

In July, Algeria even recalled its ambassador from Paris, when French president Emmanuel Macron openly supported Algiers' rival in the region, Morocco, in a dispute over the territory of Western Sahara.

To this day however, the legacy of the war and the battles around archives cause friction between French and Algerian authorities, while historians are still trying to mend the wounds by uncovering all its complexities.

 

France - Morocco - Algeria

 

While France's Macron visits Morocco, Algeria is looking to other partners

French President Emmanuel Macron's state visit to Morocco is being closely followed in Algeria, where his position on Western Sahara is widely criticised.

With Macron's recent choice in favour of Morocco as its main partner in the Maghreb, the French president's visit to Rabat is being followed with a certain amount of suspicion in Algeria.

Algiers has cut its diplomatic relations with its western neighbour in 2021.

And in July this year, the authorities recalled their ambassador in Paris, after Macron publicly supported Morocco's sovereignty on Western Sahara.

This week, he reiterated his support directly to the King, on Moroccan soil. 

Algerian journalist Adlene Meddi said that Macron's attempt at a balanced Maghreb policy did not last long in the face of pressure from pro-Moroccan interest centres in France...

"France is sacrificing its relations with Algeria in a rather brutal and spectacular manner," he said, "and we are going to enter a new phase of crisis that will last much longer than other crises."

This opinion seems to be shared by the general public. 

Khalil Abdelmalek, a student of political sociology, believes that Paris is violating international law, as most Sarahwis and the UN recommend and expect a referendum on self-determination for the region.

"The French President deliberately ignores the aspirations of the Sahrawi people", the student said.

French support for Morocco reinforces the image of France as a state ready to sacrifice the principles of justice for its strategic interests, he and many other Algerians think.

This visit also comes at a time when Morocco is experiencing growing popular anger due to the high cost of living, unemployment, and a growing support from the royal family to Israel, while a large part of the population is pro-Palestinian.

New partnerships

The rift between Algeria and France is growing with Macron's obvious support to Rabat, but it has also endured for decades, more or less bitterly.

To mark a definite rupture, Algeria is now building new alliances, in the Maghreb with Libya and Tunisia, in an attempt to isolate Morocco in the region, and further in the Arab world.

Algerian President Abdelmajid Tebboune travelled to Egypt this week for his first foreign trip after his re-election last September.

After a two-day working stay in Cairo, he travelled to the Sultanate of Oman, for a three-day state visit. 

In these countries, the Algerian head of state seeks to consolidate bilateral relations and push them to a strategic level, which should allow Algeria to diversify its partners.

At a joint press conference on Monday, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi assured his Algerian counterpart that Egyptian companies are ready to work on infrastructure projects in Algeria and build new cities, like those built around Cairo.

Investments will also take place in the energy sector. 

Contrary to France, Algeria is preparing to adopt the largest budget in its history for 2025, thanks to its increased oil revenues. 

The country also aims to increase its exports to over 25 billion euros, seeking to strengthen its economy by diversifying its industrial sectors.

With such means, Libya, Sudan and Palestine are also on the list of Algiers' privileged diplomatic partners, countries that are not close to Paris or Rabat.

However, experts of the region estimate that Paris has no interest in neglecting Algeria, as it remains an essential partner in terms of human resources, migration, and in France's position in the Sahel.

The French daily newspaper Le Monde even dedicated an opinion piece about the President's errors.

The Algerians also form the largest diaspora living in France, with over 1,600,000 people, ahead of Moroccans (1,060,000) and Portuguese (640,000). 

France - police violence: More on the case of Cédric Chouviat

 

Cédric Chouviat's death: Paris prosecutors are calling for the three officers to be tried

The Paris prosecutor's office has requested a trial for involuntary manslaughter against three police officers accused of having unintentionally caused the death of delivery man Cédric Chouviat, in 2020.  

Bittersweet news in this case of police brutality...

The French public prosecutor requested on Tuesday a trial before the criminal court for these three civil servants still in office, according to a source close to the case, confirming information from the website Mediapart.

They are now aged 28, 33 and 38.

A fourth officer, a policewoman, placed under the more favourable status of assisted witness, escaped prosecution.

They are accused of involuntary manslaughter in the case of the death of Cédric Chouviat, who died during a tense police arrest in January 2020, while repeating "I'm suffocating"...

It is now up to the investigating judge to decide whether or not to send the police officers to trial.

Emblematic case

Chouviat was a 42-year-old father, and was pinned to the ground in Paris with his motorcycle helmet on his head during a police check, causing him to faint.

According to the indictments, the delivery man was "prevented from freeing himself and then handcuffed behind his back for a minute and a half, without the slightest reaction or check of his integrity by the police officers under investigation.

His up and down leg movements were confirmed by the use of films taken by witnesses.

He was later hospitalised in a critical condition, and declared dead two days later, on 5 January.

The case progressively became emblematic of police violence in France, following revelations from the forensic examination. It showed that, when he was put on the ground and handcuffed by the police, Chouviat said "I'm suffocating" nine times in thirteen seconds, before fainting.

His pleas were similar to the ones of George Floyd, the African-American man who was suffocated in May 2020 by a white police officer in Minneapolis, a tragedy that sparked a huge wave of the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States.  

Investigations

Throughout the investigation, the police officers claimed they had believed that Chouviat was "continuously rebelling" against his arrest, they said.

"If we had heard the expression 'I'm suffocating' even once, "we would have stopped," one of the certified in July 2020 before the investigating judge.

Witnesses, on the contrary, interpreted these signs as ones of distress.

Parts of the scene were filmed, showing the police officers continuing their action despite Chouviat's distress.

They were however trained in spotting warning signals, according to the investigators.

For the family's lawyers, "a trial is necessary", but not as requested by the prosecution.

The qualification of involuntary manslaughter is, in this case, "a legal nonsense because it does not reflect the reality of the voluntary nature of the violence suffered", lawyers William Bourdon and Vincent Brengarth told the media.

"A strangulation key is in principle voluntary", added Arié Alimi, another lawyer of the family. "If the judge retains the qualification of involuntary manslaughter, the risk of acquittal is very high", he warned.

These accusations are contested by the policemen's lawyers.

French student arrested in Tunisia

 

Aix-Marseille university demands the release of a French student, arrested in Tunisia

French PhD student Victor Dupont has been detained in Tunisia on breach of state security charges for at least 12 days, reports said this Thursday.  French authorities are trying to negotiate his release, the director of his research lab said.

"This is an attack on academic freedom," Vincent Geisser, director of the French Institute of Research and Study on the Arab and Islamic Worlds at Aix-Marseille University (Iremam), told press agencies.

Victor Dupont, 27, was arrested just before midday on 19 October at his home in a suburb of Tunis along with three friends visiting from France.

He was in Tunisia to conduct sociological research on 2011 protesters.

One of his friends, Edouard Matalon, a Paris-based librarian, was also arrested but released the same day after questioning.

According to Matalon, another of their friends, who is of French-Tunisian nationality, also remains in custody on the same charges.

The family of the student and his university supervisors had until now been trying to negotiate, and kept quiet about his case.

His parents finally travelled to Tunis on 28 October, according to media reports, to meet the French Ambassador and advocate for this case.

Geisser confirmed to RFI that the family had now set up a support committee to demand his release.

Neither Tunisian or French authorities were immediately available for comments. 

'Exceptional' measures

Dupont "was detained by Tunisian police on Saturday 19 October, taken to an interrogation centre, placed in custody, and the same day brought before a military judge," Geisser said in a press release, calling the last measure "exceptional" for a French student.

Dupont hoped his interviews would provide material for a paper on the social and career paths of "people who might have been active during the 2011 revolution" that toppled longtime dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, according to Geisser.

He started his PhD in 2022. 

"It is not a political topic linked to dissidents or opponents or a security topic, but a typical sociology topic," Geisser added, calling for his student to be released.

Weakened human rights and liberties

Tunisians recently voted in a presidential election after a campaign qualified by the United Nations as troubled, marred by a crackdown on the opposition, independent activists and journalists.

Amnesty International's research has then shown that there is a significant rollback of human rights in Tunisia, especially in the last couple of years.

President Kais Saied was re-elected with more than 90 percent of votes earlier this month, three years after he made a sweeping power grab in the country.

Rights groups fear Saied will tighten his grip on this democracy, considered the only one to have emerged from the 2011 Arab Spring protests.

On atrocities in Gaza, interview with the UN's Francesca Albanese, as she releases a new report

 

'Gaza absolutely needs a ceasefire,' says the UN's Francesca Albanese

In the past days, UN agencies UNRWA, Unicef and UNOCHA have warned about unprecedented atrocities in northern Gaza and most of the Palestinian territories. As Francesca Albanese, the UN rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian territories, releases a new report, I asked her how to support humanitarian and UN work in Gaza, and how the region can escape a now region-wide conflict between Israel and its neighbours, following Hamas's attack on 7 October 2023. 

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By Melissa Chemam

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Humanitarian and international law have been undermined by a year of war against civilians in Gaza, according to the UN rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese.

On 20 October, James Elder, spokesperson for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), condemned the continued attacks on civilians after Israeli airstrikes in Beit Lahiya killed dozens.

The war is affecting the population in a 'horrific way', he added.

More than 1.8 million Palestinians in Gaza are experiencing extremely critical levels of hunger, according to the UN. Seventy percent of crop fields and livelihoods have been destroyed during the Israeli military offensive.

The war, which has claimed 42,000 lives and left hundreds of thousands wounded, has also spread to the West Bank and Lebanon. Civilians as well as UN peacekeepers have been targeted by Israel's forces.

On Monday, the Israeli parliament has also approved a controversial bill to ban the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), considered a lifeline for Gaza, from operating on Israeli territory.

The agency has condemned the Israeli parliament’s decision, calling the move “outrageous”.

UN leaders have called for a ceasefire and denounced starvation, mass displacements, atrocities, war crimes and crimes against humanity, like the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk.

In an op-ed published in The New York Review of Books released on 17 October, Human Rights Watch’s Programme Director Sari Bashi also detailed how the Israeli military’s actions in northern Gaza repeatedly risk the war crimes of forced displacement and using starvation as a weapon of war.

To discuss the implication on human rights and humanitarian work in Gaza but also beyond, this week, RFI spoke to Francesca Albanese, the UN rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian territories, for the International Report.

This week, Albanese has released her latest report on the situation in Gaza and all the the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, before presenting it in front of the UN General Assembly.

Albanese discussed with me the level of suffering, the role and failures of the United Nations and the international community, and underlined the urgency of securing a ceasefire.

"I've used the word catastrophe for the first time back in October 2023," Albanese told RFI, "when Israel had killed 8000, 6000 people in the first weeks of the conflict and destroyed the entire neighbourhoods, bakeries, churches, and targeted UN buildings and university."

"This is not the way wars are conducted," she added. "Israel occupies that land according to the International Court of Justice, unlawfully. So Israel occupies unlawfully a territory oppressing its people, who of course, retaliate. Then they wage a war against them. It doesn't work that way."

Albanese has advocated for the investigation and prosecution of the crimes that Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups or individuals had committed against Israeli civilians on 7 October, at the same time, I've said justice must come in and be delivered or is not the answer because it's against international law.

"As we speak, Israel is running extermination raids, neighbourhood per neighbourhood in the areas that was already forcibly evacuated, ethnically cleansed of nearly 1 million people in the northern Gaza, only 400,000 people remained who have been starved, abused and bombed. What the people in Gaza have gone through is really unspeakable, and now it is emptying the land completely."

Western states make the argument that Israel has the right to protect itself.

"But is it protection?" Albanese asked.

"How is what Israel is doing going to make its citizens protected? This is the question. And the blindness at the political level is mind blowing."

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Audio version : https://www.rfi.fr/en/podcasts/international-report/20241101-un-rapporteur-says-israel-s-war-in-gaza-is-emptying-the-land-completely