- UN rapporteur Balakrishnan Rajagopal highlights claims of plans by Israel to expel Gaza’s population, labeling situation as genocide and complete failure of international community
- Rajagopal emphasizes unprecedented scale of destruction in Gaza, with over 70% of homes unlivable, posing significant challenges for reconstruction, sustainable peace
- Over 1M people in Gaza have fled to Rafah, facing severe shortages in basic necessities like food, water, and sanitation, with concerns about disease outbreaks.
GENEVA
Food, water, sanitation, and other basic needs are in unprecedented shortage for over 1 million people who have fled from across the Gaza Strip to the territory's southern city of Rafah, a UN special rapporteur told Anadolu.
"More than 1 million people are concentrated into Rafah, having fled from other parts of Gaza. They are lacking very seriously in the basic necessities of life, from food and water and sanitation with the threat of diseases beyond anything that we have seen in any conflict in recent decades around the world, severe as those conflicts were.
"You never had a situation where a population was not even allowed to flee," said Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the UN special rapporteur on the right to housing.
Rajagopal pointed out that even Israel does not know where these people are expected to go, recalling many statements from sources within Israel indicating “a desire to entirely expel them from Gaza.”
Pointing to serious claims that top Israeli officials and other leaders are planning to completely eliminate the population of Gaza, Rajagopal emphasized that these claims, considered as “rantings of random people within Israel” cannot be ignored.
“Unfortunately, everything that we thought was not possible is becoming more and more possible by the day. We have to judge the actions of Israel not by what they say, but by what actually happens,” Rajagopal said.
“What's happening is that people have been displaced multiple times, and they have been concentrated in Rafah. They're being bombed now,” he added.
‘UN system designed to protect Israel’
Underlining how UN rapporteurs wrote numerous reports on the “genocidal” dimension of Israel’s attacks in Gaza, Rajagopal noted that they mentioned a “serious risk of genocide” in their initial report.
Rajagopal further said they published another report that included the possibility of ongoing genocidal acts, stating: “Since then, we have confirmed that in fact, what’s happening in Gaza constitutes genocide.”
On a genocide case brought against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), Rajagopal said interim ruling by the top UN court was that South Africa, which filed the charges, was “largely correct” in its petition.
“The actions taken by Israel to create conditions where Gaza becomes uninhabitable for the population of people living there, together constitute in my view, acts of genocide, in without any doubt,” he added.
Comparing the situation in Gaza to the Bosnian War of the 1990s, Rajagopal pointed out that the ICTY had also ruled that the massacre of Muslim Bosnians by Serb forces in Srebrenica had also amounted to “genocide.”
“During the Srebrenica massacre, in the former Yugoslavia, and in that conflict, about 8,000 to 9,000 people died. If that case was genocide, I find it hard to believe that what’s happening in Gaza is not genocide,” he said.
Israeli attacks have killed more than 28,000 people in the Gaza Strip, mostly women and children.
Highlighting the Gaza issue represents a “complete failure” for the international community, Rajagopal said the mechanism for collective action was completely frozen and the international community has done nothing.
“The UN Security Council or the UN General Assembly have passed very weak resolutions that have not been carried out. Even in a proforma manner, the International Court of Justice ruling, while morally and symbolically an important one, didn’t actually order anything concrete that actually led to specific actions or inactions on the part of Israel.
“Basically, institutionally, I think the world has failed. It has failed Gaza. And once again, Israel has shown that it is protected by what I have been calling an institutionalized impunity. Israel seems to be protected no matter what the transgression … In other words, the system is designed to protect Israel from any consequences,” he added.
Destruction scale in Gaza hasn’t seen in other conflict
Pointing out that many buildings in Gaza have been destroyed as a result of the attacks, Rajagopal stated that assessments based with satellite data and field reports show that more than 70% of homes in Gaza have been destroyed or severely damaged, rendered unusable.
Rajagopal noted that data for areas in northern Gaza indicates that 82% to 84% of these areas may have been completely wiped out.
“We are talking about a very vast level of destruction, the kind that we haven’t seen in other conflicts, like for example, even in Mariupol, which was the most severely destroyed city by the Russian bombing in Ukraine, or by conflicts in Syria,” he said.
Rajagopal highlighted that homes in Gaza were not only destroyed by bombing or heavy artillery attacks but also by Israeli forces moving into the bombed area from the air and destroying homes and public buildings.
He underlined that the reconstruction of Gaza will be extremely challenging and will take years of persistent effort, drawing parallels with the rebuilding of other countries destroyed during conflicts.
“I wonder how long does it take to clear the rubble alone in in Gaza. The rebuilding of Rotterdam took almost two decades. That is, by the way, under the most ideal circumstances that we were ready for a very, very significant investment of resources and time to rebuild the place.
“The second thing is more important: Make sure that conditions are established for a sustainable peace in the region before rebuilding can actually happen. Because otherwise, it’s not possible to expect rebuilding to go forward in any meaningful way,” he said.
*Writing by Esra Tekin in Istanbul
