By AHA
“Investigating War Crimes in Gaza,” an Al Jazeera TV documentary film, available on YouTube.
There is something peculiar about mass killings; they can be systematic and subtle. It is usually the victims who claim that the mass killings are not random, that there is a pattern to it, and that since there is a systemic targeting of certain groups and identities, the killings amount to genocide. The perpetrators generally contest these claims, while at some point the international arbitrary institutions jump in and decide the matter based on evidence. This has been a general outline of the politics and polarization around mass killings.
Take, for instance, the Armenian genocide of 1914-1917, which coincided with the onset of World War I. Today, the Turkish government acknowledges that the scale of the killings was massive but denies outright that it was genocide. This neatly ties in with what the poet and essayist Peter Balakian has said: “Genocide denial is the last phase of genocide.“
Today, we see an act of genocide once again in progress. This is the genocide that has been taking place in Gaza since at least Oct. 7, 2023. This brutality is raw, naked, and targeted mainly at the civilian population. From Israel’s highest officials down to IDF combatants on the ground, there is a general agreement to wipe out the Palestinian people. And yet, true to the pattern, they try to mask their genocidal violence with the spurious claim that the Israeli military is merely acting in self-defense against the actions of Palestinian “terrorists.” Similarly, the Western powers, led by the U.S., join in the process of denial—as military aid to Israel keeps flowing.
Nevertheless, abundant evidence of Israel’s depredations in Gaza is available for public viewing. Footage of bombings and the targeting of civilian populations has been collected by Al Jazeera TV in its investigative documentary, “Investigating War Crimes in Gaza.” This one-hour and 20-minute documentary is available on YouTube.
The huge quantity of evidence of genocide is in no small part due to the fact that Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers have recorded it with phone cameras and bragged about it on social media. This has created a new, Internet-enabled window into the systematic dehumanization that is genocide. In the TV film, this is precisely what makes Palestinian novelist Susan Abulhawa describe the assault on Gaza as the “first livestreamed genocide in history.” She goes on to point out that IDF soldiers often accompany the filmed atrocities with catchy music tunes when they post the videos on social media. “Ordinary Israelis see these videos and celebrate the killings,” says Youmna Elsayed, a Palestinian journalist, as the documentary shows hundreds of Israeli citizens dancing and shouting, “May your village burn!”
In the aftermath of Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant appeared in a press conference and announced the imposition of a “complete siege” on Gaza—with no food, water, fuel, or electricity. “Everything closes. We are fighting human animals [author’s italics].”
The intentions of the perpetrators have been very clear. They want to annihilate Gaza and purge it of the last Palestinian—not only through military means but also through starvation and through restricting access to essential materials and basic health care. Most of the hospitals in Gaza have been bombed into rubble.
The documentary pieces together live footage recorded by IDF soldiers that have been put on social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube. Al Jazeera’s investigative unit has compiled photos and videos taken from more than 2000 social media accounts operated by Israeli soldiers. The videos are interspersed with commentary by independent journalists, human rights activists, and UN peace ambassadors, all of whom describe these atrocities as a blatant violation of international and human rights law.
In one of the videos, for instance, an IDF soldier is seen breaking kitchenware with a huge hammer inside an already destroyed house. In another, a soldier is plundering shops in a civilian neighborhood. One video shows an IDF combatant throwing kisses while a bulldozer in the background razes a house to the ground.
In any relatively “civilized” conflict, at least under international law, a distinction must be made between a war zone and a residential area. ‘This is not personal lack of discipline by the Israeli army, it is institutional lack of discipline,” says Charlie Herbert, a retired major in the British army, as he sifts through the videos on his Mac. Let’s assume for a moment that residential neighborhoods in Gaza are indeed war zones. International law prohibits combatants from carrying any recording devices inside the site of combat. For this simple reason, the Israeli soldiers should be tried under war crimes; but this is not where the story ends.
There is a more insidious way of inflicting pain on Palestinians. A lot of Israeli social media influencers make fun of the victims by filming themselves in costumes that appear to be crude caricatures of “Palestinians.” In one of the videos posted online, an Israeli influencer throws tomato sauce on her face to show how Palestinians are faking their injuries. In the same video, the influencer holds a pumpkin in her lap to suggest how Palestinian mothers are making up dead children. Another Israeli user puts his mouth to a free-flowing tap to mock how Palestinians have lost access to the water. In another video the same user laughs while a light keeps blinking in the background to express his contempt for Palestinians who have been living without electricity. This is nothing but a coarse display of dehumanization of Palestinian lives.
The dehumanization aspect has many layers to it. When, for instance, IDF entered the north of Gaza, they gave five minutes to the residents to evacuate the sector. In the video, children, people with disabilities and women can be seen carrying white flag in their one hand and an ID in the other as they walk out of their homes and into the streets. ‘They [IDF soldiers] make an announcement pointing to the color of shirt someone is wearing and ask them to leave all the rest. They are taken to separate location, where they are stripped naked and then killed,” says Youmna Elsayed, as videos are shown of young men being stripped, beaten, and dragged on the ground.
The United Nations Human Rights Commission makes it very clear that all prisoners shall be treated “with respect due to their inherent dignity and value as human beings.” But this has not been the case with Palestinian detainees. The documentary shows multiple videos in which Palestinian detainees are being abused, paraded naked, and then killed. “A soldier made me lie on my belly; there was a repugnant smell coming out of the decomposed corpse [beneath me],” says Fadi Bakr, a survivor of Israeli detention.
There is a strong gendered dimension to the dehumanization. The documentary shows a whole deluge of videos in which IDF soldiers enter Palestinian homes, take women’s lingerie from closets and drawers, and put it on display. Levi Simone, a British national and a soldier in the Israeli army, can be seen going through a closet and removing women’s underwear. Shay Yifrah, another IDF combatant, is shown standing inside a house wearing women’s underwear over his courier pants and posing for the camera. In one of the photos posted online, Sgt. Liam Levi of the 601 (ASAF) Battalion is seen with a bra wrapped around his chest. This obsession with women’s bodies and private clothing is nothing but a careful technique to humiliate Palestinians and then make a spectacle out of it.
One of the constant cries in Western media outlets, especially The New York Times, has been the treatment and torture of women and the alleged use of ordinary Palestinians as human shields by Hamas. “Investigating War Crimes in Gaza” carefully exposes the reality by showing how both of these crimes have been committed by the Israeli soldiers, and how they have been putting the blame on Hamas to deflect media attention. Hadeel Dadouh, a mother of two, describes the horrific experience of being in an Israeli detention center: “I was beaten regularly and was kicked in the abdomen quite often.” Hadeel was squeezed into the back of a truck along with male prisoners, mostly naked, and her headscarf was removed. As for the use of ordinary people as human shields, the documentary demonstrates beyond doubt that it is the IDF soldiers who have been capturing children and using them for this purpose.
“Investigating War Crimes in Gaza” is a resource for anyone who is interested in investigative journalism, and especially in reporting on war. It is a step-by-step account of the genocide that has been unfolding since the forced displacement of the Palestinian people in 1948 and which attained new heights in the aftermath of Oct. 7, 2023. It carefully rips through a denial regime that is on full display in mainstream Western media by relying on first-hand accounts and on the hundreds of thousands of photos and videos put online by IDF soldiers themselves.
In an age of journalism that is supposedly based on evidence, this documentary relies on firsthand evidence to destroy the myths around Palestinian genocide—a genocide that is different from all the others because much of it has been recorded and livestreamed by the perpetrators. It is therefore hard to deny. The West has spent centuries on “creating a rule-based order, and it has finally been laid bare as a big sham,” says Susan Abulhawa.
The film is dedicated to the memory of the media workers killed by Israel.