Why Are We Ignoring Human Rights Criticism of Israel?
Major international organizations condemn Israel’s conduct in Gaza—and they’re not getting enough attention.
On the last day of 2024, when the United Nations Human Rights Office issued a critical report about Israel’s destruction of hospitals in Gaza, my expectation was that the following day’s headlines would prominently feature the alarming findings.
“The destruction of the healthcare system in Gaza, and the extent of killing of patients, staff, and other civilians in these attacks, is a direct consequence of the disregard of international humanitarian and human rights law,” the report stated.
I began New Year’s Day with the BBC Newshour, and it indeed carried this news in the first segment of its broadcast. But when I turned to U.S. newspapers over my morning coffee—the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal—I found no mention of the U.N. report. The same was true of the cable news I scanned, as well as the radio bulletins and public television broadcasts I followed later in the day.
It is possible, of course, that I missed something in the moments I was not monitoring the news. But the lack of widespread coverage underscores a broader trend in U.S. outlets’ reporting on Israel’s war in Gaza.
Throughout the 15 months of the war, many analysts have condemned the Biden administration for failing to criticize Israeli tactics that have wrought utter devastation on Gaza; losing its voice about the moral tragedy of the militarized killing of more than 45,000 people; and even using its authority to muffle criticism of Israel, such as when it pushed a U.S.-funded organization to retract a report of impending famine in north Gaza. But the administration is not alone. The U.S. media has also badly underplayed the grim nature of this crisis.
This was evident in the coverage that was muted or missing altogether in early December, after Amnesty International, a human rights organization that is treated with the highest respect when it reports on non-Western countries, accused Israel of genocide in Gaza. Its report concluded that Israel had “deliberately inflicted conditions of life on Palestinians in Gaza intended to lead, over time, to their destruction.”
Front-page news, right? Not really. And in some instances, coverage of Amnesty’s findings placed Israel’s vehement rejection of the charges ahead of the substance of the alleged violations of international law itself.
It would be wrong to say that the U.S. media has ignored the war or has not levied serious criticisms of Israel’s conduct. On Dec. 26, for example, the New York Times published a lengthy investigation showing that Israel loosened its own rules on warfare and allowed mid-ranking Israeli officers to drop bombs on suspected low-level Hamas members, even if those strikes risked killing their family members or other nearby civilians. But this has been infrequent.
To find much more unblinking coverage of the nature and toll of this war, however, one must look abroad to outlets such as the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.
In one recent dispatch, unnamed Israeli military officers told Haaretz that their division’s goal was the forcible displacement of the approximately 250,000 Palestinians remaining in northern Gaza. The officers said that their commander, Brig. Gen. Yehuda Vach, told them, “Only by losing land will the Palestinians learn the necessary lesson from the massacre Hamas perpetrated in southern Israel on October 7.” One officer also recalled Vach saying that they “needed to make things hard on the [humanitarian aid] convoys that entered and harass them” and that “there are no innocents in Gaza.”
It was Israel’s policy of obstructing humanitarian aid that persuaded Neier. He wrote:
As early as October 9 top Israeli officials declared that they intended to block the delivery of food, water, and electricity, which is essential for purifying water and cooking. Defense Minister Yoav Gallant’s words have become infamous: “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 act accordingly.” The statement conveyed the view that has seemed to guide Israel’s approach throughout the conflict: that Gazans are collectively complicit for Hamas’s crimes on October 7.
As this week’s U.N. report noted, Israel repeatedly justifies the death and destruction in Gaza by saying that it solely targets Hamas members. Yet, as Neier wrote, “The obstruction of humanitarian assistance is unlikely to affect Hamas combatants directly.” He added, “All access to the territory is controlled by the Israel Defense Forces, which have denied entry to Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations and to international organizations like HRW and Amnesty International. Limiting the ability of these organizations to gather information and make detailed reports on the conflict hardly insulates Israel from criticism for its abuses.”
HRW weighed in with its own assessment last month, concluding that Israel is committing “acts of genocide.” This came after South Africa submitted its main legal claim accusing Israel of genocide to the International Court of Justice in The Hague in October. Fourteen other countries have said that they intend to support South Africa’s case, which Israel has dismissed as “blood libel.”
As an individual journalist, I have no standing to adjudicate whether Israel’s behavior in Gaza constitutes genocide. What I do know, though, is that there is no graver charge in human affairs, and if society allows itself to become inured to claims from serious people and serious organizations like these—dismissing them as off base or partisan, or brushing off their mounting chorus and downplaying the news—humanity as a whole, not just Palestinians, are likely to suffer.
Howard W. French is a columnist at Foreign Policy, a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and a longtime foreign correspondent. His latest book is Born in Blackness: Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War. X: @hofrench