‘See no tunnels, hear no tunnels, speak no tunnels’: On Human Rights Watch’s latest Gaza Report
Abstract
Nine months after the 7 October atrocities, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has published what the NGO’s leaders, PR team and allies hailed as a ‘landmark’ report detailing Hamas brutality and Israeli victims. This 245-page document consists of text, photos, and forensic analysis – including images of watches on the arms of victims that displayed the exact moment of their decapitation, rape, kidnapping and murder by the Palestinian terrorists. In addition to the documentation, most of which reiterated information known for many months, HRW included pages of solemn recommendations to the leaders of Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, the United Nations, and Israel.
However, in contrast to the hype in the press releases, social media posts and headlines praising HRW, described as ‘a harsh critic of Israel,’ for also documenting the war crimes of 7 October, a closer examination demonstrates that the publication is another in the organisation’s long history of human rights hypocrisy. Far from the comprehensive research methodology claimed by HRW, the study adds to the organisation’s previous transparent exercises in highly selective and distorted reporting. The details of the attacks that were included were already well-known and systematically ignored while HRW issued nine reports and hundreds of statements couched in the language of international law that whitewashed Hamas and its allies, vilified Israel and contributed directly to virulent antisemitism.
