On September 16, the International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory established by the UN Human Rights Council issued a 72-page report detailing in stark terms why it has concluded that Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip. The report makes harrowing reading in its meticulous description of how Israel’s conduct fulfills not just one, but four of the five categories of underlying acts, each one of which constitutes genocide as defined by the 1948 Genocide Convention.
Woven through the report is an account of how water was made a tool of genocide, beginning with the complete siege imposed by Israel on Gaza on Oct. 9, 2023 that “heavily restricted the population’s access to water, fuel, electricity and food.” On Oct. 10, then Israeli Minister of National Infrastructure, Energy and Water (now Defense Minister) Israel Katz declared that “In the past, Gaza received 54,000 cubic meters of water and 2,700 megawatts of electricity daily. This ends now…in a week without electricity, the sewage system will completely stop working. This is what the nation of child killers deserve.”
As documented in the report, the result is a mounting famine and health crisis, with families having “as little as one litre of water per person per day for drinking, cooking and hygiene, which is critically below the international minimum standard of 15 litres per person per day. In December 2024, Save the Children reported that people were consuming fifty-nine to eighty-nine percent less water than prior to the current escalation. According to the Global Nutrition Cluster report from February 2024, eighty-one percent of households lacked safe and clean water.”
The acute shortage of clean water has led to the rapid spread of waterborne preventable diseases, including dysentery, Hepatitis A, typhoid, chronic diarrhea, acute respiratory infection, scabies and other skin diseases, especially among children. Newborns were dying from the acute shortage of clean water. By the end of 2023, UNICEF reported that 130,000 children under the age of two were not receiving “critical life-saving breastfeeding and age-appropriate complementary feeding,” and by March 2024, “one in three children below two in the north were acutely malnourished.”
As the bombs fell and the Gaza Strip was systematically destroyed, “Palestinians in Gaza have continued to suffer the effects of the total siege, which encompassed the cutting of food and water, fuel, electricity and medical supplies into Gaza, even after occasions when Israel permitted very limited humanitarian aid to enter. At no time has the aid been adequate to sustain life in Gaza. The denial of entry for special infant milk, resulting in the starvation of new-born and young infants, is especially powerful evidence of an intention to destroy the population,” the report stated.
Design by Paul Normandia of Red Sun Press