Statement by Palestinian civil society
The decision by Human Rights Watch (HRW) to issue a massive, substandard report accusing Palestinian armed resistance groups of committing abuses and crimes against Israeli civilians and soldiers on October 7th while failing for over nine months to produce one coherent report condemning Israel’s ongoing, live-streamed genocide as such against 2.3 million Palestinians in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip says everything about the organization’s political bias.
The fact that HRW has failed to even call for a permanent ceasefire, let alone name Israel’s crime as a genocide, as have many UN experts and prominent scholars of genocide, further exposes the organization’s racist and colonial devaluation of Palestinian lives. It has chosen to abstract the actions of the oppressed from the context of oppression in the service of Israel’s colonial domination over all Palestinians and its genocide in the Gaza ghetto.
Though this is by far the most dangerous attempt by HRW to indirectly justify Israel’s genocide in Gaza, it is not the first. Its infamous report on the massacre of hundreds of Palestinians at the Al-Ahli Baptist Hospital, for instance, concluded without any evidence that a Palestinian fired rocket was responsible for the killings, despite concrete evidence presented by prominent media and human rights organizations to the contrary. As Palestinian legal and human rights experts have said in response:
"The unspoken starting point of HRW’s analysis has been that the problem with Israel’s genocidal onslaught against Palestinians is a matter of disproportionality in dispersed ‘incidents’ to be investigated. In most of its reports or articles, HRW’s analysis starts with absolute language on the ‘heinous,’ ‘vile,’ and ‘unspeakable’ October 7 attacks by Palestinian armed groups, with a clear determination that these are crimes. Yet, when reporting on Palestinian victims of [Israel’s] atrocity crimes, the killing of at least 15,523 Palestinians in Gaza, it is either entirely absent or otherwise not acknowledged as unlawful. What can explain the violence inherent in such double standards, the devaluing and near erasure of Palestinian life and suffering, other than racism and white supremacy?
"In a similar vein, when the current report is forced to mention the mass killing fields of Gaza, it hides the perpetrator, dealing a fatal blow to the report’s not just professional credentials but also the organization’s claimed ethical integrity. It says: “Between October 7, 2023, and July 1, 2024, the hostilities resulted in at least 37,900 Palestinians killed, and 87,060 others injured, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry.” [Emphasis added]
"The report pays lip service to “root causes,” failing to contextualize October 7th in decades of Israel’s regime against Palestinians as fundamentally one of settler-colonialism since the 1948 Nakba, that uses apartheid and military occupation as tools to further its ultimate goal of eliminating the Indigenous Palestinian people and controlling our entire land. By deliberately ignoring this essential context of colonial oppression, the report ignores that the right of all peoples resisting foreign occupation and colonization to resort to armed struggle is recognized in accordance with international law. Even when referring to Israeli soldiers held captive by Palestinian resistance forces, the report calls them “hostages,” erasing any distinction between them and civilian captives.
"The scope defined in the report is skewed because it says it only examines Palestinian armed groups on that day. So, there is a level of abstraction whereby neither a geographical scope nor a temporal scope is defined, as both should be in human rights reporting. It does not look into all violations on that day, or all violations in the same locations in question; it solely focuses on violations by Palestinian armed groups against Israelis. Even in this evidently biased scope, the rights of Palestinian combatants captured by the Israeli occupation forces on that day are excluded from the report.
Betraying the core values that should govern human rights work, this HRW report’s content and timing can only serve as an attempt to indirectly justify, enable and to divert attention from Israel’s ongoing genocide. Genocide is not mentioned in the report, and neither is the International Court of Justice or its decision about the plausibility of genocide. Also omitted is any reference to the report by UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese showing that Israel’s actions in Gaza amount to genocide. Grossly failing to uphold minimal standards of professionalism, political impartiality, and evidence-based investigation, the report largely lacks integrity, reliability, objectivity, and even honesty.
"It relies extensively on thoroughly debunked Israeli propaganda sources and talking points, even while repeating that much of the used information could not be independently verified. The result is a repeated pattern of assertions presented as “facts” and contradictory conclusions, stripping Palestinians of humanity and indirectly portraying us in typical colonial tropes of “savagery” and “criminality” while erasing the context of a nuclear-armed settler colony subjugating an Indigenous people.
While acknowledging that some assertions of Palestinian violations from the day have been proven false, the report fails to address the now well-exposed, systematic campaign of propaganda by Israel, its organs, and officials, which was echoed by deeply complicit Western leaders and media outlets before being retracted by most. By deliberately ignoring the orchestrated campaign to dehumanize Palestinians, the report attempts to revive that misinformation campaign.
"This is particularly glaring in the case of gender-based violence. The report admits that “despite considerable efforts, Human Rights Watch was not able to gather verifiable information through interviews with people who were survivors of or witnesses to rape during the assault on October 7.” Yet, the report still concludes that gender-based violence was “systematic” and “pursuant to an organizational policy.”
"The absolute majority of the “evidence” of war crimes and crimes against humanity presented in the report is not professionally verified or verifiable. Israel has methodically destroyed almost all the forensic evidence and refused to give independent access to examine existing forensic evidence. Though the report itself admits that Israel has obstructed human rights investigations, that did not prevent its authors from pretending as if they had solid evidence on their far-reaching conclusions.
"In some sections, the report cites literally only a couple of examples of abuses to emphatically and absolutely conclude that a “crime against humanity” was committed. To do that, it bases its entire argument on the unproven premise – often repeated uncritically in Western media and by Western politicians – that Palestinian armed groups attacked Israeli civilians intentionally, because of racist motivations, and according to preset plans. Yet the report, again, fails to provide any evidence of such a plan, save for some obviously fabricated documents supposedly captured by the Israeli occupation’s army and which the report explicitly says cannot be verified.
"Contradicting this baseless claim of intent, senior leaders of Palestinian resistance groups are cited in the report emphasizing consistently that the plan was strictly to attack the Israeli military’s Gaza division and that civilian casualties were unintended and resulted from operational complications or, when intentional, were committed by some civilians, not fighters. So what HRW fails to acknowledge is that any unjustifiable acts according to international law committed that day must be seen in the wider context of an overarching attack on military targets of a foreign occupation, which international law recognizes as legitimate resistance.
"The report recycles propaganda claims made early during the genocide by Israeli authorities only to be later refuted by Israel’s own military reports. For instance, the HRW report claims, without as much as attempting to provide proof, that Palestinian armed groups were responsible for all civilian deaths (736 Israelis and 79 foreigners) recorded by Israel’s authorities on October 7th, ignoring the by now-established fact even in the Israeli mainstream media that the Israeli military employed its infamous Hannibal Directive en masse, targeting Israeli civilians for the first time, not just military personnel as originally stipulated in this heinous doctrine.
"Recent media reports from several Israeli military sources have confirmed, for example, that the Israeli army and airforce fired extensively and indiscriminately on persons and vehicles headed towards Gaza, killing an unknown number of Israeli civilians and combatants, along with many of the Palestinians holding them captive. In one case, an Israeli survivor told the state TV Kan that an Israeli tank shelled a house in her Ikibbutz knowing that there were many Israeli civilian captives inside.
Another assertion the report makes is that Palestinian armed groups had deliberately planned and executed the attack on the Nova festival, despite Israeli military reports refuting this claim in November 2023. The widely covered report published in Yedioth Ahronoth where an Israeli helicopter pilot admits firing indiscriminately at all cars at the Nova scene, “possibly” killing Israeli civilians, is ignored entirely by HRW’s politically-motivated report. A truly independent, competent, and professional investigation into what exactly happened that day is clearly needed to reach the truth.
"In sharp contrast, HRW’s reports on Israel’s assault on Palestinians in Gaza have systematically whitewashed the genocide, using the most conservative terms to describe Israeli violations, never emphatically condemning them as war crimes or crimes against humanity. Ignoring the asymmetry of this colonial relationship, HRW never once inferred criminal intention so clearly and conclusively to Israel and Israelis as it has repeatedly done with Palestinians, despite the fact that the former’s decades-old crimes outweigh any crimes attributed to the latter many times.
"A recent letter in the Lancet concludes that a conservative estimate of the total number of Palestinian deaths due to Israel’s genocide may reach the shocking figure of 186,000. Extrapolating current ratios, roughly 163,000 of those would be civilians, that is at least 200 times the number of Israeli civilians killed, according to Israeli government sources. It seems HRW not only ignores Israel’s settler-colonial reality and the oppressor-oppressed relationship of power and resistance; it also values every civilian Israeli life 200 times more than any civilian Palestinian life. Human rights for some!
Israel's genocide in Gaza is armed, funded, rationalized, and defended by the colonial West, headed by the US. It is also enabled by the complicity of states, institutions, corporations, and racist mainstream media outlets – as well as organizations claiming the mantle of human rights yet engaging in an unethical attempt to whitewash the most grotesque, systematic violations of human rights. This HRW report does exactly that.
Palestinian civil society demands that Human Rights Watch retract and apologize for publishing this propagandistic, genocide-enabling report. If it fails to do so, we call on Palestinians, all peoples in the Arab region, as well as people of conscience worldwide, to reconsider their relations with HRW, including by refraining from cooperation with it. It must face serious accountability for aiding and abetting genocide, the crime of crimes.
Council of National and Islamic Forces in Palestine
Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC)
Palestinian Bar Association
General Union of Palestinian Women
General Union of Palestinian Workers
Palestinian Union of Postal, IT & Telecommunications Workers
Federation of Independent Trade Unions
General Union of Palestinian Teachers (GUPT)
Palestinian Federation of New Unions
Union of Professional Associations
Coalition for Jerusalem
Grassroots Palestinian Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign (STW)
Union of Palestinian Charitable Organizations
Palestinian Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI)
Women Campaign to Boycott Israeli Products
Civic coalition for Human rights defenders
Secretariat of Students Frames - Gaza
Federation of Workers Unions Palestine - Gaza
Ouneh Initiative
Rawa
Palestinian Institute for Public Diplomacy
Community Action Center - Al Quds University