Jew World Order

On November 26, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) each published a report. Both reports make serious allegations against Palestinians, claiming that they have engaged in war crimes and potentially crimes against humanity. The HRW report, “Findings on October 17 al-Ahli Hospital Explosion,” alleges that the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza was hit by a misfired rocket by Palestinians on October 17, while the PHRI report, “Gender-Based Violence as a Weapon of War during the October 7 Hamas Attacks,” accuses Hamas of committing sexual violence, including rape. 

To be clear, sexual violence and rape allegations during October 7 should be investigated. Guided by antiracist and feminist commitments, I assert that perpetrators of gender-based violence must be held accountable. Victims, all victims — including Palestinians who are subjected to sexual violence — deserve justice. The victims at the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital deserve justice, too. But this is not what these reports do.

A close reading of these reports shows that neither meets the best practice standards of human rights reporting and research in the industry, which HRW and PHRI tend to uphold. This time, however, the two organizations have knowingly applied a different and significantly lower threshold of evidence with regard to Palestinians. These reports are based on speculations rather than evidence and a flawed methodology that amounts to unethical conduct. Neither of the reports provides reliable or sufficient evidence to substantiate the serious allegations they make.

While the headlines and executive summaries of the reports are conclusive, in the reports, one can find disclaimers where the organizations effectively admit that the reports are inconclusive. HRW, for example, writes that a “full investigation is needed” into the Al-Ahli explosion. Likewise, PHRI writes that the report “does not attempt or aim to meet legal thresholds” — a caveat they do not include in any of their other reports, including reports dealing with gender-based violence.

HRW and PHRI are respected in the human rights community and would have never published reports with such a weak evidentiary basis if the object of investigation was Israel. The unethical conduct of HRW and PHRI is made possible by anti-Palestinian racism. These reports represent and feed into a global context of white supremacy, Islamophobia, and anti-Palestinian racism. These organizations know that when it comes to Palestinians, they will not face serious scrutiny or demands for accountability by Western governments, media, and civil society. 

The reports cannot be viewed in isolation from current events, and they dangerously feed into the orchestrated propaganda campaigns that Israel is running, which aim at dehumanizing Palestinians as a means of deflecting attention from and justifying the genocide in Gaza.

In what follows, I scrutinize each report in detail to demonstrate where they fall short of human rights reporting standards.

Timing 

HRW and PHRI’s engagement with international law has always taken a liberal and narrow approach, often ignoring context and politics. One significant example is the HRW Apartheid report, which ignores the root cause of apartheid in Palestine — the racial ideology of Israeli settler colonialism. Instead, they see all parties as equal, drawing a symmetry between “parties to a conflict” (as they see it) regardless of power relations. 

The timing of the release of the reports should be understood within this context of refusal and erasure. On November 26, when the reports were published, more than 12,000 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza by Israel, and 4,000 more were estimated to be trapped under the rubble. More than half of the population was already displaced and denied access to water, food, and medicine. 

Instead, these organizations chose to invest their time, resources, and capital in making Palestinians — who are massacred and starved on a daily basis — a target. Since October 7, HRW has published two reports on Palestinian atrocities and has also sent a team to Israel to investigate allegations of sexual violence, while PHRI has published a report about Hamas attacks on health facilities in addition to their current report. 

HRW’s report on Al-Ahli Hospital came out as Israel declared war on the health sector in Gaza as one of its main military objectives. Israel has denied the entry of medicine and other medical equipment and has been systematically targeting ambulances and medical teams and bombing hospitals, including Al-Ahli, Al-Shifa, the Indonesian hospital, al-Awda, the cancer hospital, and other hospitals, taking most of Gaza’s hospitals out of operation. The bombing of Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, which is run by the Anglican church, has served, according to the Palestinian surgeon Ghassan Abu Sitta, as a “litmus test for what they had planned to do to the rest of the health system.” 

Palestinian civil society groups responded to the HRW report — and rightly so — with outrage. The BDS movement pointed out: “The content and timing point to political motivation, not human rights advocacy. US-based HRW has yet to take meaningful action to stop the Gaza Genocide or call for a ceasefire”. Similarly, a collective statement of two dozen organizations stated that “at a time when public trust in independent fact-finding institutions is of paramount importance, this HRW report weakens the credibility of human rights organizations and places Palestinian lives at risk.”

The timing for the report of PHRI is no better. In mid-November, Israel launched a well-orchestrated international campaign, claiming that Hamas systematically used rape as a weapon of war on October 7. Netanyahu himself has used allegations of sexual violence to dehumanize Palestinians as enemies of civilization and appealed to “civilized leaders, governments, nations” to support Israel’s war on Gaza. 

As part of this campaign, Israel’s foreign ministry announced that it would leverage the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women on November 25 to boost its campaign. PHRI released its report on November 26. 

Israel’s propaganda campaign is not about seeking justice for victims who deserve justice. In fact, Israel is ranked last in the OECD index for equality between men and women and is currently widely distributing guns to citizens, a move that women’s groups have warned puts women at risk of domestic violence. Israel’s sudden concern for women is not about caring for their well-being and rights but about weaponizing women’s bodies in order to justify war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.

Decontextualized and racist framing

Israel is doing all in its power to destroy everything in Gaza that can sustain human life with the aim of making it uninhabitable. It is eliminating and destroying everything: the people, the health sector, infrastructure, universities, mosques, churches, libraries, houses, residential towers, bakeries, markets, grocery shops, municipality buildings, archives, cultural centers, schools, entire neighborhoods, and refugee camps. Yet, the two organizations refuse to engage with mounting evidence of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and HRW is yet to call for a ceasefire.

During the current phase of the genocidal campaign, the two organizations have refused to locate Gaza within the broader history and present of settler colonialism in Palestine and, importantly, within Israel’s goals of making Gaza uninhabitable and expelling its residents.

They published their reports while Israeli leaders were calling for and carrying out another Nabka. This includes Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, who instructed his Minister of Strategic Planning, Ron Dermer, to explore ways to “thin out” the Gaza population to the possible minimum.

These reports serve the liberal obsession of HRW and PHRI for appearing objective by focusing on “Palestinian atrocities” in order to appeal to and appease Israeli and Western liberal audiences. But releasing these reports should be understood as more than just a cynical well-calculated move. Rather, they reflect an exceptionalist viewpoint, where violence against Israelis is considered unconscionable, barbaric, and monstrous, while Israeli violence against Palestinians is described in sanitized and cold terms. Palestinians, as non-white, are treated as statistical and common-sense figures of suffering, displacement, dispossession, and death, while Israelis, due to their proximity to whiteness, are seen as common-sense figures of life. Palestinian death is unfortunate — Israeli death is unacceptable.

However, the questionable timing and framing of both reports that play into narratives Israel is promoting to assist its campaign in Gaza are not the only issues with these reports. A specific analysis of each one also shows how they fail to meet the professional standards of the human rights community.

HRW: Undermining Palestinian testimonies, ignoring credible evidence 

The HRW report into the Al-Ahli hospital strike decontextualizes the attack from the ongoing Israeli violations against the hospital, ignores Palestinian accounts of the bombing, and disregards other credible investigations into the events of October 17.

HRW did not visit the Al-Ahli Hospital site, nor did it have access to the shrapnel, and was unable to make a “conclusive identification of the munition.” Yet it pointed accusatory fingers towards Palestinians, basing its determination on “the sound preceding the explosion, the fireball that accompanied it, the size of the resulting crater, the type of splatter adjoining it, and the type and pattern of fragmentation visible around the crater are all consistent with the impact of a rocket.” 

Hamas stated that it would welcome HRW into Gaza and would cooperate with an independent investigation and share the evidence they have once the genocide is over, and conditions allow. HRW refused to wait even though nothing in this report was urgent nor represented an original investigation.

Consistent with racist attitudes towards “the natives,” HRW failed to consider the many testimonies that emerged in the following days from medical staff, including doctors and ordinary citizens who were sheltering in the hospital. HRW did not reach out to the director of the hospital, nor did it contact the doctor who received Israeli orders for evacuation. Moreover, when the report mentions Palestinian sources (without actually bothering to speak to these sources), it questions their credibility. For example, “The Archbishop of the Episcopal Church of Jerusalem and the Middle East said that on October 14, 15, and 16, Al-Ahli hospital received at least three phone warnings to evacuate, though he did not provide details about the source or content of the warnings.” 

This refusal to give due weight to the Israeli bombing of Al-Ahli Hospital on October 14, nor to the threats that Israel made against the hospital, decontextualizes the eventual incident of October 17. 

HRW also ignored available and credible investigations: the first by Forensic Architecture, Al-Haq, and Earshot, and the second by Al Jazeera, which contradicted their findings.

Forensic Architecture, Al-Haq, and Earshot conducted a 3D reconstruction and trajectory analysis of two publicly available videos — one broadcasted by Israel’s Channel 12 and the second aired by Al Jazeera — which the Israeli government claims show that it was a misfired rocket that hit the Al-Ahli Hospital. 

About the first video, Forensic Architecture writes: “This is another case of incorrect location and incorrect timing: the video documents an explosion which occurred 24s before the Al-Ahli blast, and over 1km away. ” About the Al Jazeera video, they write: “Our analysis suggests the missile originated outside Gaza near a reported ‘Iron Dome’ launch site & exploded at a height of 5km, 5.7km from the hospital. Any freefalling debris from the explosion would have taken at least 30s to reach Al-Ahli—but the blast occurred just 8s later.”

Israel has based its accusations on the Al Jazeera video. In response, the Al Jazeera digital investigations team conducted an in-depth analysis of this video, in addition to other videos from multiple sources, and created a detailed, second-by-second timeline of the events. They identified the rocket that was launched from Gaza, the rocket in question. The same rocket is also seen in the Israeli video. Al Jazeera’s live feed shows that the same rocket was intercepted and was destroyed and broken apart in the sky. According to all feeds and videos analyzed, this rocket was intercepted and was the last one launched from Gaza before the bombing of the hospital. Five seconds after that interception, the investigation shows, an explosion in Gaza can be seen, followed two seconds later by another, much larger, explosion. This is the strike that hit Al-Ahli Hospital. Al Jazeera investigations team found no ground to the Israeli claims that the strike was caused by a failed rocket launch.  

HRW does not appear to have reached out to Al Jazeera, even though they refer to their video in the report. 

In relation to the size of the crater, HRW writes: “This crater size is inconsistent with the point detonation of a large, air-dropped bomb with a high-explosive payload.” Francesco Sebregondi, a researcher and architect and a former investigator at Forensic Architecture, has addressed the weakness of this claim. Sebregondi states that while 1-ton bombs would usually create a large crater, other missiles “also used by IDF, would not leave a considerable crater.” HRW report does not consider this option seriously. Further, Sebregondi states that the likelihood that a Palestinian rocket could have caused all this damage is “extremely low.” What is clear, he adds, is that no conclusive determination could be drawn based on the size of the crater. 

PHRI: Reciting Israeli propaganda 

The first thing that human rights lawyers, practitioners, experts, researchers, and students are taught is to question information coming from governments, conduct independent research, and verify and assess the credibility of the sources they use before making serious allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity. 

PHRI failed each of these basic requirements in its report. 

A careful read of all the sources cited in the report shows that all of them, with one exception, are predominantly from media outlets (Israeli and international), and others are from civil society initiatives with strong government links. In an interview with the New Yorker, Hadas Ziv, the director of ethics and policy at Physicians for Human Rights Israel (the irony is hard to miss) and a co-author of the report, said: “We haven’t interviewed actual witnesses.” While it is understandable that it is too soon for survivors to be interviewed, it is not clear why witnesses who were already interviewed by the media were not interviewed. 

Essentially, the report is a recap and repackaging of on-and off-the-record briefings and parliamentary presentations made by Israeli government officials. The information included in the sources that they rely on is either explicitly or easily traced back to the Israeli government, especially the Prime Minister’s office and Israeli police. The report includes no indication of independent verification of evidence or an independent investigation by PHRI. This is in sharp contradiction to their own methodology in previous reports, including reports dealing with sexual and gender violence. Further, I could not find a single report published by PHRI in the past that draws exclusively on media sources. 

PHRI’s decades of work should have taught them well that the Israeli government has a long record of dishonesty, manipulation, and fabrication. A recent high-profile example is Israel’s denial that a sniper killed the Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in Jenin in May 2022. This has also been the case since October 7, when the Israeli government has repeatedly spread misinformation and outright lies about, for example, 40 beheaded babies, the presence of a Hamas “command and control” center under Al-Shifa hospital, and more. Still, this time around, PHRI found it appropriate to publish a report that relies on information traced to the Israeli government.

Below are examples of PHRI’s unprofessional conduct in the report:

1. The report relies on the testimonies aired by CNN dealing with sexual violence by Palestinians on October 7. An investigative piece that appeared in Mondoweiss shows CNN’s failure to adhere to professional and ethical journalism standards in this report. Every single witness and “expert” that CNN aired was proven to either be lacking in credibility or have ties to Israeli government officials and institutions. 

2. The report includes testimony by a Zaka volunteer, which was aired on Kan Darom Radio about “the dissection of a pregnant woman’s abdomen and the stabbing of the fetus.” This story was later reported to be a fabrication. 

3. PHRI refers to the “Civil Archive for the Documentation of Crimes Committed Against Women by Hamas,” a body headed by Cochav Elkayam-Levy. The credibility of this Commission and of Elkayam-Levy are both questionable. Elkayam-Levy, who has become the main spokesperson of Israel’s dehumanization campaign, formerly worked for the Israeli government’s Attorney General’s Office in the International Law Department, where her job was to provide legal justification for human rights violations and crimes committed against Palestinians, and also did some work for the National Security team at the Prime Minister’s office.

   Moreover, PHRI cites a webinar hosted by Harvard Medical School, during which Elkayam-Levy showed a photo claiming it showed a woman raped by Hamas at the Nova festival. This photo was circulated by the Israeli foreign ministry and was proven to be of a female Kurdish fighter who experienced sexual abuse. In other words, Elkayam-Levy is a mouthpiece for Israeli propaganda.

   In an interview with Haaretz newspaper, Elkayam-Levy claims she does not need to provide evidence, saying: “Am I the one who needs to provide evidence for the terrorists’ deeds? What kind of travesty is it that they are imposing the burden of truth on me?” She also says that the “question of evidence…is completely secondary.” 

4. Another ‘source’ used by PHRI is MEMRI — Middle East Media Research Institute, a politically motivated body that launched the Hamas Atrocities Documentation Center (HADC). MEMRI’s president and founder is Yigal Carmon, a retired colonel in the Israel Defense Force intelligence corps who served as counter-terrorism advisor to two Israeli Prime Ministers. The report does not include any indication of the independent verification of MEMRI’s claims.  

5. PHRI draws on media reports to quote testimonies of witnesses who have worked at the Shura military base, where the bodies of October 7 victims were brought. These witnesses claim to have seen signs of rape and sexual violence, but PHRI itself says that the witnesses “are not professionally trained to determine whether rape had occurred.” This, however, did not lead PHRI to make the only acceptable decision that a serious human rights organization would make, which is not to include them in the report. In other words, what is the point of including this information from people who, in your own opinion, have no relevant expertise? 

6. PHRI mentions in its report confessions extracted by the Shabak (Israeli Security Service) — notorious for its torture of Palestinian detainees — from Hamas fighters who were caught by Israel on October 7. PHRI does mention that the testimonies are likely extracted under torture, but still found it appropriate to mention them. 

PHRI’s Jewish-Israeli supremacy 

Israeli human rights organizations, including PHRI, are implicated in the settler colonial system, and their organizational structure and work are marked by racial politics. As Haneen Maikey and I previously wrote, “The Israeli human rights sector has a Jewish-Israeli supremacy problem.” There is a hierarchy between Palestinian and Jewish staff, where senior positions, including those who write public policy reports and do public campaigning — are occupied by Israeli Jews. This is also the case at PHRI.

It should, therefore, come as no surprise that, according to anonymous sources, Palestinian staff at PHRI urged not to publish this report with no evidentiary threshold, only to be silenced and ignored by Jewish staff. 

PHRI chose to publish a report that fails to meet the common ethical standards of human rights reporting, which they have upheld in the past. It counted on the credibility, recognition, and respect it enjoys internationally, which Palestinian staff have played a pivotal role in building for decades. 

This is not to deny sexual violence allegations or to claim that these should not be investigated. However, as a human rights organization, PHRI has the responsibility to carry out research ethically and has the duty to publish credible reports. PHRI could have engaged in a thorough investigation, as it has done in its other reporting, but it willingly chose, for politically and racially motivated reasons, to engage in compromised conduct.

In the rush to please Israeli public opinion, PHRI has abandoned all ethical and professional standards and has worked in the service of Israeli propaganda and the racialization of Palestinians, especially men. It is racism and an ingrained sense of Jewish supremacy — where Jewish victims are valued more than Palestinian victims — that has allowed PHRI to publish a report with no evidentiary basis.

Accountability

The ask is simple: do not apply a lower threshold of evidence and questionable ethical standards when it comes to Palestinians. The methodology should be robust, evidence must be conclusive, and fingers should not be pointed so easily, especially not at the people who are undergoing genocide. 

HRW and PHRI published unethical reports with a sense of impunity, violating the basic principle of “do no harm,” which is the bare minimum expected in the human rights and humanitarian sectors. 

Palestinians have been demanding accountability. HRW and PHRI owe Palestinians answers.

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