“Extermination & Acts of Genocide”: Human Rights Watch on Israel Deliberately Depriving Gaza of Water

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: In a major new report, Human Rights Watch has accused Israel of committing acts of extermination and genocide by deliberately restricting safe water for drinking and sanitation to the Gaza Strip. Tirana Hassan, the executive director at Human Rights Watch, said, quote, “This isn’t just negligence; it is a calculated policy of deprivation that has led to the deaths of thousands from dehydration and disease that is nothing short of the crime against humanity of extermination, and an act of genocide,” she said. The report details how Israel has cut off water and blocked fuel, food and humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip. In addition, Human Rights Watch accused Israel of deliberately destroying and damaging water and sanitation infrastructure, as well as water repair materials.

Israel has rejected the Human Rights Watch findings, saying, quote, “The truth is the complete opposite of HRW’s lies.” But just in the past day, the United Nations said Israel had once again denied requests to deliver aid to Palestinians in Beit Hanoun, Beit Lahia and Jabaliya — areas that have been under Israeli siege for months.

AMY GOODMAN: We go right now to Bill Van Esveld, acting Israel and Palestine associate director at Human Rights Watch. He helped edit the Human Rights Watch report, just out today, titled “Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water.” He’s joining us from Athens, Greece.

Bill, thanks so much for being with us. Why don’t you lay out your findings?

BILL VAN ESVELD: Thank you very much for having me on this issue.

I think this report lays out a clear state policy of depriving people in Gaza of water. So, we looked at four different ways in which all access has been controlled and restricted.

First, there are the water pipelines that come from Israel to Gaza. They supply only about 20% of the water in Gaza, but about 50% of the drinking water, because Gaza’s aquifer underground has been completely contaminated over years and years of closure. So, the first thing was cutting off those water pipes.

The second thing was, there are water resources inside Gaza, so those were cut off, too. Those are desalination plants. Those are water pumps going to the aquifer. Those are water sanitation facilities, water treatment facilities. They all need energy. They need electricity. They need fuel. Israel cut off electricity and fuel within the first few days of the war. But that wasn’t enough. Four of those six water treatment plants I was talking about in Gaza had solar panel fields that were their source of electricity in case electricity got cut off, because electricity has been terrible in Gaza for many years as a result of the siege. It wasn’t enough for Israel to cut off the electricity coming from outside; they also sent in military bulldozers to systematically destroy every one of the solar panels in those solar fields, rendering those sanitation facilities completely offline.

And two more issues. One is, you know, the infrastructure of water in Gaza has been so destroyed and damaged by the hostilities that it needs urgent repair. There was a major warehouse inside Gaza with a lot of spare parts. It was bombed. And the Palestinian staff who were there, with their families, some of them were killed in that bombing.

Finally, humanitarian agencies, such as Oxfam, UNICEF and others, have been trying, since the war started, to get water and sanitation materials imported into Gaza to help purify water, chlorine tablets, all sorts of things to fix the network. Those were systematically blocked. Even at moments when the Israeli military was allowing other civilian items into Gaza, we were told those were blocked. That is a complete state policy of denial of access to water, and the results are horrifying.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Bill, just to convey, you begin the report by citing World Health Organization figures about the amount of water, minimum amount of water, that’s required per person per day to sustain life. What the WHO recommends is 247 liters per person per day. And since October 7th, 2023, people in Gaza — an individual in Gaza has access to two to nine liters per day, as against the 247 that the WHO recommends. So, if you could say, Bill, on the basis of the people that you spoke to, that Human Rights Watch spoke to, what has the impact of this been on people in Gaza? What did medical personnel that you spoke to say? Also, in terms of excess deaths, we hear, of course, of this horrific figure of 45,000 people who have been killed by direct attacks by the Israeli military, but how many more deaths are likely the result of water deprivation?

BILL VAN ESVELD: Thank you. Yeah, that’s right. So, in Israel, the average consumption per day is 247 liters per person per day of water. The minimum, absolute minimum, required for life, even in an emergency situation, is 15 liters a day. And people in Gaza have been getting two to nine liters a day on average. Now, that’s an average that — and, you know, I should say, in northern Gaza, for example, for five months, people got zero liters of drinkable water per day.

The effects are as horrifying as you might expect. We spoke to 115 or more people, people in Gaza, healthcare providers. And, you know, the lack of water kills you in a million different ways. There are babies who have died directly from dehydration, but there’s also people who are dying from disease and contracting terrible illness. I mean, you cannot take — you cannot bathe if you have no water. And a quarter of a million people, at least, in Gaza now have skin disease as a result. I mean, one five-minute shower is more water than people in Gaza get in an entire week. We spoke to surgeons who said that wounds are not healing because the bodies of the patients are so dehydrated. Kids were coming in, dying in the hospital, because they were drinking from contaminated water sources. Now, if you add to this the decimation of the healthcare sector in Gaza, that means that people are coming in with waterborne diseases that can no longer be treated. So, children dying at large numbers of hepatitis A, which normally would have a death rate, but very, very small, that has ballooned horrifyingly in Gaza.

If you add all of these things up, there is a huge hidden death toll. We know that 45,000 names have been collected by the Gaza Ministry of Health, but those are almost all people who were killed directly by explosive weapons or shot directly during the course of the hostilities. That doesn’t include the hidden death toll of people dying from dehydration, starvation, disease and illness. Now, there were 99 healthcare professionals who wrote a letter to President Biden and his administration in October. And they calculated, on the basis of the international committee that tracks famine and that has sort of global standards for the numbers of deaths expected, that based on the assessment of starvation and hunger and lack of water in Gaza, at least 62,000 more people may be dead in Gaza. That is — you know, we say thousands in the report. It could easily be tens of thousands or more. We are talking about a mass death situation that is the result of deliberate policy.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to go, Bill, to one of the many comments by Israeli officials quoted in your report to determine Israel’s genocidal intent in Gaza. This is the former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant speaking just days after the October 7th, 2023, attacks.

YOAV GALLANT: [translated] I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel. Everything is closed. We are fighting human animals, and we will act accordingly.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk, Bill Van Esveld, about the significance of what he said here, again, Yoav Gallant at the time the defense minister of Israel. And actually, recently, he — well, the ICC has issued arrest warrants for him and Netanyahu. And even with those arrest warrants issued, the International Criminal Court, he just recently went to Washington, D.C., to meet with officials.

BILL VAN ESVELD: Yes, the same Yoav Gallant, an indicted war criminal by the International Criminal Court, was just meeting with the U.S. defense secretary and President Biden’s senior Middle East adviser. You know, it’s really, really shocking. This is the same man who once said, when the United States was going to sanction an Israeli military unit, “We don’t listen to the United States. No one will teach us about morality.” Really disappointing move by the Biden administration there, and others who met with him.

What that statement of his and statements by other senior Israeli leaders in positions of control and command in the Israeli army and over this issue of denial of access to water, their statements are evidence of an intent. And they were also carried out by the military and, you know, by the authorities. So it’s not just they said something and it sounds bad. No, what they said was actually what they did.

That’s extremely serious, and that is part of what led us to the conclusion of extermination. That is a crime against humanity, of deliberately causing mass death. And one of the ways that, you know, that can be committed is by depriving people of what they need to stay alive, such as water. That same crime, which we define and conclude is the crime of extermination, is the same act as one of the acts of genocide listed in the Genocide Convention and, indeed, in the International Criminal Court statute on its article on genocide: deliberately inflicting conditions of life on people calculated to bring about the destruction of that group.

Now, what Gallant said there could be evidence of genocidal intent. Genocide is an extraordinarily difficult crime to prove, because the intent must be, according to international law, that you are not just killing people in large numbers, which is extermination, but that you are killing them specifically because you want to destroy the group they are part of. And if you look at the evidence of Israeli military and government actions on water, and statements like that one on water, we think you may have evidence already of genocidal intent.

AMY GOODMAN: So, can I ask you, Bill Van Esveld, is this the first time that Human Rights Watch is accusing Israel of genocide in Gaza?

BILL VAN ESVELD: This is the first time that we’ve made a finding of genocidal acts in Gaza. It is not an accusation that we level lightly. We have not done this very often in our history. We accused the Myanmar military of genocidal acts against the Rohingya in 2017, and we found full-blown genocide against the Kurds in Saddam Hussein’s Anfal campaign in Iraq in the ’80s — sorry, in the ’90s, and we found genocide against — also in Rwanda in the ’80s. It is, you know, an extremely difficult crime to prove. It is, you know, mass killing deliberately to destroy people because they’re part of the group, not something we level lightly, but, yes, we found it here.

AMY GOODMAN: Bill Van Esveld, we thank you so much for being with us, acting Israel and Palestine associate director at Human Rights Watch. He helped edit the Human Rights Watch report, just out today, titled “Extermination and Acts of Genocide: Israel Deliberately Depriving Palestinians in Gaza of Water.” We’ll link to that report at democracynow.org. Bill Van Esveld, joining us from Athens, Greece.