Human Rights Watch said Thursday that Israel has killed thousands of Palestinians in Gaza by depriving them of drinking water, which it said amounts to acts of genocide and extermination in law.
“This policy, carried out as part of a mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, amounts to an ongoing crime against humanity of extermination by the Israeli authorities. This policy also amounts to an act of genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention,” Human Rights Watch said in its report.
Israel has repeatedly denied any accusation of genocide, saying it respects international law and has the right to defend itself after a cross-border attack by Hamas from Gaza on October 7, 2023, that precipitated the war.
While the report described the water deprivation as an act of genocide, it noted that proving the crime of genocide against Israeli officials would also require establishing their intent. He cited statements by some senior Israeli officials that he said suggested they “wanted to destroy the Palestinians,” meaning that depriving them of water “could amount to the crime of genocide.”
“We have determined that the Israeli government is deliberately killing Palestinians in Gaza by depriving them of the water they need to survive,” Lama Fakih, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, told a news conference.
Human Rights Watch is the second major rights group in a month to use the word genocide to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza, after Amnesty International published a report concluding that Israel had committed genocide.
Both reports came just weeks after the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity. They deny the charges.
The 1948 Genocide Convention, adopted in light of the mass murder of Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, defines the crime of genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”
The 184-page report by Human Rights Watch said the Israeli government had cut off Gaza’s water supply and cut off electricity and fuel, meaning Gaza’s own water and sanitation facilities could not be used.
As a result, Palestinians in Gaza had access to only a few liters of water a day in many areas, far below the 15-liter threshold for survival, the group said.
Israel launched its air and ground war in Gaza after Hamas-led fighters attacked Israeli communities across the border 14 months ago, killing 1,200 people and taking 250 hostages back to Gaza, according to Israeli figures.
The Israeli campaign has killed more than 45,000 Palestinians, displaced most of the 2.3 million residents and reduced much of the coastal enclave to rubble, Reuters reports.
