Talia Sasson i Haaretz 4. november 2024, se HELE artikkelen nederst under Kilde:
"Israeli Army Generals Want to Starve Gaza. Here's Why That's Illegal"
Den pågående utsultingen av folket i Nord-Gaza er tema.
Talia Sasson gjennomgår saken og konkluderer:
- Utsultingen er ulovlig.
Skudeneshavn 4. november 2024
Jan Marton Jensen
Kilde:
4. november 2024
https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2024-11-04/ty-article/.premium/israeli-army-generals-want-to-starve-gaza-heres-why-thats-illegal/00000192-f33d-de0c-a7db-fb7db84e0000
15. desember 2012
Intervju Talia Sasson
https://www.timesofisrael.com/talia-sasson-we-had-no-state-for-2000-years-why-are-we-now-jeopardizing-its-jewish-democratic-essence/
Talia Sasson
Israeli Army Generals Want to Starve Gaza. Here's Why That's Illegal
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Palestinians gather to receive food cooked by a charity kitchen in Jabalya in the northern Gaza Strip, in August.Credit: Mahmoud Issa / Reuters |
Last Friday, Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland published an article in Haaretz titled, "Laying siege to Israel's enemy isn't a war crime," in which he sought to respond to an editorial published in the paper the previous week.
The editorial criticized his plan, known as "the generals' plan," and deemed it a criminal proposal for ending the war.
Eiland is considered one of the key people behind the generals' plan, both on his own behalf and as an agent for others. The plan calls for moving civilians from the north to the south of the Gaza Strip, then imposing a siege on anyone who remains in the northern part and starving them for the sake of defeating Hamas. Effectively, this is Eiland's plan for total victory.
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Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland.Credit: Daniel Tchetchik |
Eiland knows that behind this plan stand politicians who seek to entrench an Israeli occupation of northern Gaza and build settlements there, in violation of international law.
Eiland claimed that he doesn't agree with the idea of building settlements. Yet he knows that it exists. Consequently, in my view, from the moment he proposed the plan, he bears responsibility for it in its entirety.
The proposed plan, which advocates starving residents of occupied territory, violates international law, according to both the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Hague Convention of 1907.
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Palestinians inspect the site of an Israeli strike on a school sheltering displaced people in Gaza City, in October.Credit: Ayman Al Hassi/Reuters |
Eiland argues that it's possible to separate the "innocent" civilian
population from Hamas by allowing people to leave Gaza's occupied north.
Yet whether or not they actually leave, he says, it's permissible to
starve anyone who remains.
He bases this argument on the claim that prior to October 7, 2023, Gaza was a state, so we have the right to treat it just as we would any other state, and to treat its entire population as a single unit.
But in fact, Eiland, Gaza isn't a state and never was a state; it is completely dependent on Israel for its supply of water and electricity. Most of its residents fled from Israel in 1948, and since then, they have lived in large refugee camps in Gaza. Israel surrounds the territory on three sides and controls the crossings through which food and medicine can be supplied to its residents. Consequently, let's not play dumb by calling it a "state."
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Displaced
Palestinians queue to receive food rations, offered by a charity, in
Gaza's Al-Shati refugee camp in October. (Photo by Omar AL-QATTAA / AFP)Credit: Omar Al-Qattaa/AFP |
Gaza is a hybrid territory where the civilian population is controlled by a terrorist organization and gangs. Its economy and infrastructure are dependent on Israel. Moreover, as long as a civilian population is living in occupied territory, it is illegal to starve it, even if it refuses to evacuate southward.
As for the claim that it's permissible for an occupying army to move a civilian population from place to place within an occupied territory based on the occupier's military needs, Eiland appears to be ignoring the fact that Israel is now reoccupying northern Gaza for the second or third time since the war began.
Israel knew before it first entered Gaza that if it occupied territory but didn't ensure that somebody other than Hamas would control it once the Israeli army left, Hamas would return.
Consequently, the claim that an occupying power is permitted to go in and out of a territory as it pleases, oust the civilian population from its homes each time it does and even starve it through a siege is extremely dubious, even though Eiland claims he copied the idea of a siege from the U.S. Army's field manual.
Every jurist knows that you can't just copy rules; you have to examine their appropriateness to the situation.
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Israeli
soldiers stand at the entrance to a tunnel leading to Egypt in the
Philadelphi Corridor area in southern Gaza in September.Credit: Amir Cohen/Reuters |
Nobody disputes Israel's right to defend itself against a brutal terrorist aggressor like Hamas. But it still has an obligation to act reasonably toward the civilian population of any territory it occupies, regardless of the needs of the war.
Israel, however, has long since exceeded the bounds of reasonableness in its behavior toward Gaza's residents, as evident from the International Court of Justice's harsh criticism of its behavior.
We have long since ceased to comply with international humanitarian law. And the generals' plan is the diametric opposite of compliance with that court's provisional orders.
So far, Israel has managed to escape by the skin of its teeth from those seeking a ruling that it's perpetrating a genocide in Gaza. But now, along comes Eiland and uses his lofty titles – major general in the reserves and a former head of the National Security Council – to promote a morally unacceptable plan that deserves to be roundly condemned.
Moreover, this plan is likely to serve as a tool for Israel's enemies and for all those who seek to gnaw our very right to exist down to the marrow of the bone.
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