Human Rights Watch (HRW) has a 30-year history of systematic false accusations and strident advocacy in its reports and statements regarding Israel. Many of the individual staff members who have written these documents have been shown to lack the qualifications and knowledge of the issues, including with respect to international law, that they claim to address. HRW also takes at face value factual claims from terror organizations such as Hamas, with no attempt at verification, while automatically rejecting Israeli claims, and on this basis, they express judgements regarding “military necessity”, proportionality, and similar legal terms despite the total absence of any knowledge regarding the military situation. 

The latest publication, “‘Hopeless, Starving, and Besieged’: Israel’s Forced Displacement of Palestinians in Gaza” (November 14, 2024) is another blatant example in this series. 

The central claim of the report is HRW’s alleged determination that “There is no plausible imperative military reason to justify Israel’s mass displacement of nearly all of Gaza’s population, often multiple times.”

This is not only speculative – HRW admits that “it is impossible for Human Rights Watch to fully interrogate the military strategy of the Israeli military” – but also arbitrarily dismisses explicit statements from Israeli officials as to the military rationale given the specific conditions and threats emanating from Gaza: 

Israel justified the mass evacuation order as being for the safety of the civilian population and stated military reason for displacing the population was centered on the presence of Hamas fighters and military infrastructure, including Hamas’ extensive tunnel infrastructure, which the Israeli military identified as a threat. Israel’s evacuation order claimed that Hamas fighters were utilizing civilian areas for military purposes, thereby necessitating the displacement of civilians to minimize casualties during military operations.

At no point in the report does HRW substantively and factually address these essential dimensions of combat in Gaza following 16 years of Hamas preparation for underground combat. Instead, HRW diverts attention by manipulating quotes – entirely removed from the context in which they were made – from Israeli officials that are interpreted to imply non-military motives. 

If this were a serious report and HRW a serious organization, it would devote considerable space to investigating the extent of Hamas’ embedding in and beneath civilian infrastructure throughout Gaza, analyzing the phenomenon of Hamas fighters returning to areas where combat operations had subsided, and examining realistic military options to counter these formidable challenges. HRW does nothing of the sort. The term “tunnel” – assuredly a main element of any valid analysis of confronting Hamas Gaza – appears only four times in this report, and only when quoting or paraphrasing IDF claims; HRW did not in any way evaluate the role of tunnels in this report. The single example brought by HRW of Hamas exploiting civilian areas for military operation is “Human Rights Watch understands and has criticized Hamas and other Palestinian groups for firing rockets from populated areas.”

This deliberate erasure of Hamas’ deeply-embedded terror infrastructure is particularly disingenuous given that the Commentary on Article 49 of the IV Geneva Convention and the Additional Protocol (a central pillar of International Humanitarian Law – IHL) lists “the presence of protected persons in an area hampers military operations” as a legitimate reason for displacing civilians. 

Rather than conduct meaningful and credible human rights and international legal assessments, HRW is blatantly painting an entirely false picture and abusing these frameworks as pretexts to advance its political agendas promoting BDS (arms embargoes,¹ “suspension of bilateral agreements with Israel,” “travel bans and asset freezes, against Israeli officials) and lawfare (one-sided ICC investigations, and UN Commissions of Inquiry).