Today, Explained - Gaza’s humanitarian crisis

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

Cut off from water and power and recovering from a communications blackout, Gaza is plunged deeper into crisis. It’s not just a humanitarian problem, says leading human rights attorney Kenneth Roth — it’s a violation of international law. This episode was produced by Haleema Shah and Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Amina Al-Sadi and Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Serena Solin and Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We are literally terrified. All we hear is explosions and the sky is lighting as if it's rain and thunder. I'm watching and I see where the explosions are happening and it's a place surrounding my neighborhood and in another area in the north of the Gaza Strip. And we don't know if we're going to make it till the morning. We have six more hours for the sun to shine and rise, and it's very dark, and the electricity is off,

and it's a complete blackout. hodari a palestinian journalist in a voice memo there from gaza on the night of october 27th coming up on today explained gaza's humanitarian crisis bet mgm authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level

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about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Nick Schifrin is the foreign affairs and defense correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. I asked Nick to tell us, as the Israeli Defense Force says it's expanding ground operations in Gaza, how he would characterize the situation right now. So generally, the Israeli instinct is to use walls of artillery and walls of tank fire in order to expand kind of a frontal assault. smaller guns, less reservists who don't really particularly have the training to do this kind of warfare, and more special forces operators who are relatively more trained in this kind of urban

combat that they're going to face. So the idea here is that by using these tactics, the U.S. hopes there's fewer civilian casualties. I think from the Israeli perspective, their priority is fewer Israeli casualties who's been under constant aerial bombardment from Israeli Air Force. You know, all of this is a little bit moot. Their lives are upended regardless of the tactics the Israeli ground forces are using. What have conditions been like in Gaza since this war started about three weeks ago? What are you hearing from your sources there? It's catastrophic. It is catastrophic. You

know, I think for any Gazan parent, it is a nightmare. So many children have been killed. So many families have been killed. People who have left Gaza City with 1.1 million residents, by far the largest part of the strip moving south, a lot of them feel like they've been targeted by Israeli airstrikes in the very part of Gaza that Israel told them to flee to. Since Saturday, October 7th, we've been here. We've received six warnings to evacuate the hospital. We told them, identify safe places and we will leave the hospital. There's no safe place, not in the south, nor in the whole of Gaza. And, you know, the

perspective on this from the Israeli side is, well, they're firing at Hamas rockets, which I personally have seen are fired from apartment complexes right next to hospitals, right next to hotels where foreigners typically stay. And Hamas officials live in the neighborhood, in the communities, and these are high-rises. So when you target one, you're going to take down a high-rise with lots of families. But from the Ghazan person's perspective, from the family's perspective, who's trying to flee, it's total catastrophe. No food, no water, no reliable safety whatsoever. I wish God will have mercy on us and the war stops.

We've reached a state where we wish we had died under the rubble just to find some rest. Our life is torture. The United Nations and others in the international community have expressed real concern about hospitals in Gaza. Why is that? Why is this a particular area of such concern? Well, humanitarian law requires that hospitals are not targeted purposely. So the Israeli military, by law, is not allowed to target a hospital. Period. Full stop.

I think where the nuance comes in here is multiple ways. One, the humanity that is in the hospital goes way beyond just the scenes of the injured that we see every minute of every day, and also the use of hospitals as morgues. So many Gazans don't feel safe in their neighborhoods, and therefore they flee to the hospitals. Hospitals have become shelters, even though they're not equipped for that at all. So the parking lot of the hospital that suffered that explosion about a week ago, where it seems like hundreds died, the hospital itself was undamaged by the explosion, which U.S. officials believe was a misfired rocket. Israel says the same. But the parking lot was where these people were staying and hundreds died because of the explosion in the parking lot. What do civilians in Gaza need if this conflict is to continue?

Everything. I mean, they need everything. I mean, they don't have reliable food. They don't have reliable water. So many Gazans are drinking water from the Mediterranean Sea that is not desalinated because there's no power. And on top of that, they have no sense of safety. So it is on a scale that even Gazans have never experienced. The Israeli decision to besiege Gaza, to lay siege to Gaza's daily life, that is what is making things extraordinarily difficult for everyone who lives in the Strip. Even if you have fled south, the reliability of food, water is very, very little.

And then for about 36 hours, they had no internet. They had no phone system at all. And that isn't just about advertising to the world what's going on. That is calling the bakery. That is calling the neighbor saying, hey, are you okay? Or God forbid, calling the ambulance system saying, can you pick up the wounded? And that was even unavailable for 36 hours. So it's less about what Gazans need going forward.

It is what Gazans need 100% right now. And they need everything. Now, every time we lose the connection, it is another form of horror, basically. We just anticipate that any moment we could get attacked and bombed in our houses. And now, even if we think of going south, there is no way to. We can't leave our houses. We just hear the bombs around us and when we lose the service and the connection, we have absolutely no idea what's going around us. But we just anticipate what's going to happen. Lastly, Nick, can and will Israel continue fighting this war in this way if the humanitarian situation in Gaza remains as cataclysmic as it is today? Will the international

community allow this? You know, it's an interesting question to put at that angle, because the answer to that question is, well, the international community has struggled to get Israel to do what it wants for decades. Israel doesn't particularly respect the UN or the EU or lots of international institutions because it feels, it believes that it has to act a certain way in its neighborhood. It has particular enemies who have particular traits. And obviously Hamas showed its true colors on October the 7th with that terrorist attack. So it is less about whether the international community can do it as to whether the United

States government, whether the president of the United States decides to put enough pressure on Israel to change its plans. Right now, I think what we've seen is Israel responding to U.S. suggestions. Will at some point the United States' willingness to sit by and watch this erode? There's no evidence of that in Joe Biden's history, but, you know, there's a lot of people internally who want the policy to change. But the bottom line is that Israel believes it is fighting an existential war, and it needs to overwhelmingly destroy Hamas in order to prevent Iran from attacking Israel, from Hezbollah attacking Israel. So Israel's motivations are a complete total war that eliminates Hamas's political ability to run Gaza,

let alone its military objectives. Whether the United States facilitates that in the long run, I think it's way too early to tell. But most people in Washington and in Israel, the officials who are designing this, believe that this is going to be a very long war. That was Nick Schifrin, foreign affairs and defense correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. Coming up, how to define what's happened in this war. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp. Thank you. finance team's unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month. And now you can get $250 when you join Ramp. You can go to ramp.com slash explained

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Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca. This is Today at Splat. Kenneth Roth is a visiting professor at Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Ken, tell me why we're talking to you today. Tell me about your expertise. Well, I ran Human Rights Watch for almost three decades. And so I am experienced in monitoring and reporting on human rights violations around the world in some 100 countries. I have spent extensive time reporting on both sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I have long specialized in applying international humanitarian law or the laws of war

in conflict situations around the world. What got you into this line of work? I think my introduction to the evil that governments can do came from my father, who grew up in Nazi Germany and fled Frankfurt as a 12-year-old boy in July 1938. So I kind of grew up with Hitler stories, and it has this very personal connection to these kinds of atrocities. You have found yourself on the opposing end of several governments. Oh, governments hate me. I mean, just to put this in perspective, you know, I have been personally sanctioned by both the Chinese government and the Russian government, which I take as a badge of honor. You know, I have been blocked at the border in Hong Kong and in Egypt. The Rwandan government,

the Saudi government, I mean, there's a long list of governments who, you know, clearly personally dislike me. Now, I'm going to note here that Ken Roth has been critical of the Israeli government. And earlier this year, he publicly said that a fellowship he'd expected to receive from Harvard's Kennedy School was revoked because of comments he made about Israel. I asked him to tell me what happened. When I announced about a year ago that I was going to be stepping down from Human Rights Watch, I got a phone call from friends at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, which is part of the Harvard Kennedy School, asking whether I would be interested in going there as a senior fellow to work on a book that I'm in the process of finishing. And we talked about it, and in principle, I agreed. It was all

contingent on approval by the dean of the Kennedy School, Douglas Allmendorf. And we had a chat over the summer, what I thought would be just pro forma. He asked me, though, you know, similar to what you asked me, do I have any enemies? And, you know, among the enemies I mentioned was, you know, that the Israeli government doesn't like me either. And a couple weeks later, I got this phone call from the Carr Center sheepishly telling me that the dean had vetoed my fellowship because of my criticism of Israel. Now, when word of this got public, there was a huge outcry, not only in the media, actually, around the world, but also on the Harvard campus, where students, faculty, alumni were outraged.

And so after about two weeks of uproar, the dean reversed himself. I was granted the fellowship, and I'm actually still a senior fellow at Harvard, although this past September I began working also as a visiting professor at Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. As the head of Human Rights Watch, what was your position, the organization's position on the Israeli government, that made the Israeli government feel as though you were a fierce critic of theirs? Well, in any conflict situation, Human Rights Watch, as a matter of principle, always reports on both sides. In the case of Israel, that required, you know, not simply looking at Israeli government conduct,

but also at the conduct of Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, Hezbollah periodically when there was conflict there. And we did that, and we reported as factually and conscientiously as we could. But inevitably, that required criticizing the Israeli government, not only the way they conducted wars, but also between wars, the way they treated the Palestinian civilian population in the occupied territory, where reluctantly a couple of years ago, we concluded that the Israeli government was imposing apartheid on the millions of Palestinians in the occupied territory.

I should add that Human Rights Watch was the first major international group to reach that conclusion. But every serious human rights group that has looked at the issue has come to the same conclusion. Is there a legal definition of apartheid, Ken? Yes, there is. And indeed, we made it quite clear that we were not simply making an historical analogy to South Africa, but rather we were applying international law. And in essence, what it requires is an intention by one racial, ethnic, religious group to dominate another, and then systematic oppression coupled with instances of that oppression in practice. And in the case of Israel and Palestine, we found that they came together,

all three elements, in the occupied territory. You know, we're not just a group with an opinion. There are lots of groups with opinions. Rather, we begin by conducting, you know, detailed, factual research, ideally going to the scene of the crime, if not speaking to people who were there. But then the standards that we apply are the standards of international human rights or humanitarian law. The Secretary General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, says, I'm deeply concerned about the clear violations of international humanitarian law that we are witnessing in Gaza. What are the international laws we're talking about here? And who has to abide by those laws? Well, let me start with the second part of your question, because every party to an armed conflict

must abide by those rules. Governments ratify these treaties. So, you know, Israel, or in this case, the Palestinian Authority, too, because the UN General Assembly has recognized Palestine as a non-member state. So it, too, has joined these treaties. But once the government for relevant territory is committed, these rules then bind any armed force. And so, you know, you often have a rebel group, you know, like Hamas, which doesn't have any international status, but it nonetheless is bound by these rules. The rules, you know, are complicated in a sense. I mean, there are hundreds of pages, but they really are simple in their essence. One is you can't deliberately target or kill civilians. And so, you know, what Hamas did on October 7th, you know, going into Israeli territory

and randomly killing as many Israeli civilians as they possibly could, clear war crime, not even a question. You know, similarly abducting civilians back into Gaza, a blatant war crime. The indiscriminate firing of rockets by Hamas or Islamic Jihad into civilian populated areas in Israel is also a war crime.

Now, a basic rule of humanitarian law is that war crimes by one side do not justify war crimes by the other. And so Israel is bound by these rules, even though Hamas has flouted them. And then when you look at Israeli conduct, a few of the relevant rules, you know, one is that you're not allowed to fire indiscriminately into a civilian populated area. And so what that means is that, you know, there may well be a military target in this area. You could have a group of Hamas troops there. You could have a Hamas command post. Whatever it is, you have a duty to target them specifically. You can't fire upon a whole area.

The flattening of certain neighborhoods in Gaza suggests that the Israeli government is not abiding by that rule. Another rule is that even if you are targeting a military target, you cannot fire if the harm to civilians will be disproportionate. And so to give an example of that, the Israeli government has been bombing and destroying huge apartment buildings. These look like, you know, clearly disproportionate attacks because in one fell swoop, you have 100 families who are homeless. There is also a rule, which the Israeli government is just ignoring, which requires allowing access to humanitarian aid for a civilian population in need. And there's no question that the Palestinian civilian population of Gaza is in need.

They're suffering huge bombardment. They've been under a blockade for 16 years. And since basically the beginning of this current conflict, the Israeli government has imposed a siege blocking all access to food, water, fuel, and electricity, as well as medical supplies. And they have, in the last few days, allowed in drips and drabs of aid. But this aid is less than what the UN says is the minimum required

for the needy civilian population of Gaza. So here again, there seems to be a clear violation on the Israeli government's part. One final thing worth noting is that humanitarian law requires warring parties to give what's known as effective advance warning in the case of an attack, if possible. What the Israeli government did is to say, everybody in northern Gaza, get out, evacuate south. 1.1 million people, uproot your lives and move. Now, there is, you know,

no place in southern Gaza for them to go. They're trying to move in with friends and relatives. Southern Gaza is subject to the same siege as northern Gaza. And to make it worse, there have been instances of the Israeli military bombing the route south, and there have been many cases of bombs in the south where the Israeli government has told Palestinian civilians from northern Gaza to congregate. So this has been a hugely problematic matter. You wrote an opinion piece in The Guardian newspaper in which you said Israel may, quote, begin an illegal process of ethnic cleansing.

Is there a legal definition for ethnic cleansing? And if so, what is it? No, ethnic cleansing is just a term applied in these circumstances. The legal definition is forced deportation, which is a crime. It's something, for example, that the International Criminal Court is currently actively investigating in the case of Myanmar for what the Myanmar military did to Rohingya by basically using violence to force 730,000 Rohingya next door into Bangladesh. Okay, so when you write, Israel may begin an illegal process of ethnic cleansing. Ethnic cleansing is not a legal term. But you are saying, I am concerned about something and that something is what exactly? So when I say illegal ethnic cleansing, I mean if they do ethnic cleansing, if they really do chase people into Egypt, there will be a crime.

And the technical crime is forced deportation. We're in the third week of this war. The Israeli government says more than 1,400 people were killed by Hamas in this attack on October 7th. The Gaza health ministry says Israel's response has led to a death toll in Gaza of around 8,005 people. It says more than a third of those are kids. Now, Palestinians and pro-Palestinian activists are saying this death toll to them means that this is a genocide. Turkey's president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said, quote, this is amounting to genocide. Genocide is a legal term, as I understand it. What does it mean?

Well, the definition of genocide is an intent to eradicate a national ethnic, religious, or racial group using a variety of means, including murder, as such. And to eradicate, I should say, in whole or in part is the definition. Now, as you set forth the numbers like that, there is a difficulty with that numbers game. Under humanitarian law, the gross numbers are not really the answer. You have to look attack by attack. And I think the reason that people do feel, myself included, that the Israeli military is violating humanitarian law

is when you look at the way the bombing is being conducted, flattening entire neighborhoods or attacking these huge apartment buildings, which seems to be a disproportionate attack. And obviously, the siege is only making matters worse because the death toll inevitably is going to rise as hospitals lack the fuel for their generators, as they lack the basic medical supplies to keep an injured or otherwise medically needy population alive. So there are many elements of what the Israeli government is doing which are wrongful contributions to the civilian toll. And humanitarian law really requires that kind of more refined assessment rather than just the gross numbers game. I think I hear you saying at this moment, in your view, Israel's actions in Gaza are not genocidal, not by the legal definition of the term.

I tend to restrict my use of the term genocide to situations where there really are large numbers. You know, something like what happened in Bosnia, what happened in Rwanda, conceivably even what's going on in Ukraine today. But I tend to be conservative before I jump to the conclusion that there is a genocide. You know, sadly, there's this sort of tendency toward rhetorical inflation, which I find unhelpful. Because oftentimes people feel that, oh, unless I call it a genocide, it's not really

serious. And that's completely wrong. You know, war crimes are completely, totally serious. It should be bad enough to spotlight the war crimes that are taking place. Ken Roth, he led Human Rights Watch for almost 30 years. Halima Shah and Hadi Mouagdi produced today's episode. Amina El-Sadi and Miranda Kennedy edited it. Serena Solon and Laura Bullard fact-checked. And Patrick Boyd engineered.

I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you. you