Israeli Historian Produces Vast Database of War Crimes in Gaza

PALESTINE - ISRAEL, 9 Dec 2024

Nadav Rapaport and Oscar Rickett | Middle East Eye - TRANSCEND Media Service

Lee Mordechai is an Israeli historian and the author of ‘Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War.’  (Supplied)

Lee Mordechai says his country is committing genocide, as his report documents a wide range of atrocities committed by Israeli forces.

6 Dec 2024 – An internationally recognised Israeli historian has concluded that his country is committing genocide in Gaza after compiling a vast, methodical report documenting a litany of war crimes committed since Israel’s invasion began last year following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October.

Lee Mordechai, an associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who has also held a fellowship at Princeton University in the US, has published a report titled “Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War” which, in its English translation, is 124 pages long and contains over 1,400 footnotes.

Using eyewitness reports, video footage, articles, photographs, eyewitness evidence and over investigatory material, much of it recorded by Israeli soldiers, the historian has produced what Haaretz calls “the most methodical and detailed documentation in Hebrew (there is also an English translation) of the war crimes that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza”.

Some of the most shocking incidents documented by Mordechai include a Palestinian woman with a child being shot while waving a white flag, starving girls being crushed to death while queuing for bread, a handcuffed 62-year-old Palestinian man getting run over by an Israeli tank and an air strike targeting people trying to help a wounded boy.

The database includes thousands of videos, photos, testimonies, reports and investigations documenting the atrocities Israeli forces are committing in Gaza, where over 44,500 Palestinians have been killed during the war.

Mordechai also includes a section on “The media, propaganda and the war”, noting that the current war has been “enabled and facilitated by massive media efforts to shape discourse in Israel as well as in the West – in countries such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany”.

Corpses, killings and sunsets

Haaretz led its report on Mordechai’s document by drawing attention to footnote 379, which refers to a video clip showing a large dog eating the corpse of a Palestinian.

“Wai, wai, he took the terrorist, the terrorist is gone – gone in both senses,” says the Israeli soldier who filmed the dog eating the dead body. A few seconds later, the soldier pans away from the corpse to the scene around him. “But what a gorgeous view, a gorgeous sunset. A red sun is setting over the Gaza Strip,” he says.

‘What all these acts have in common is the deliberate destruction of a group.’
– Lee Mordechai, Israeli historian

Mordechai’s compendium details the killing of children by Israeli soldiers, the murder of entire families, the starvation and shooting of civilians, tanks running over prisoners and corpses, and much more.

Footnote 354 of the document shows footage of Palestinians being shot by Israeli forces while raising a white flag. The video footage, first published by Middle East Eye, shows many people waving white flags while apparently evacuating their homes. A woman with a small child is shot dead by an Israeli sniper, with the child managing to escape.

The historian first published the document in January and has been publishing updated versions of it ever since.

“I felt that I could not continue to live in my own bubble, that it was a matter of life and death, and what was happening was too big and contradicted the values I grew up with here,” he told Haaretz.

In his report, Mordechai confirms the veracity of the fatality figures published by Gaza’s Ministry of Health. According to the historian, claims that these numbers are exaggerated are groundless, and even the Israeli government treats the health ministry’s data as accurate.

Of the tens of thousands of people killed in the war, Mordechai includes in the document the death of four premature babies after Israeli forces decided to evacuate the hospital they were in. A nurse looking after five babies was forced to choose the strongest one, which was allowed to survive.

Other footage compiled by the historian – and again often filmed by Israeli forces themselves – shows a soldier forcing bound and blindfolded prisoners to send regards to his family and to say they want to be his slaves.

Israeli soldiers are photographed holding stacks of money they plundered from Palestinian homes in Gaza and an Israeli army bulldozer is seen destroying a large pile of food packages from a humanitarian aid agency.

In another clip, an Israeli soldier sings, “Next year we’ll burn the school,” while a Gazan school is engulfed in flames in the background. Numerous video clips documented by Mordechai show Israeli soldiers modelling women’s underwear they have looted.

Genocide

The links included in “Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War” also lead to graphic footage of bodies strewn about the haunted streets of the Palestinian enclave, of people crushed under the rubble and of puddles of blood everywhere.

In some footage we hear the cries of people who have lost their entire families in a single instant. There is also documentary evidence attesting to the killing of disabled people, sexual assault and humiliation, the burning of homes, random shooting, forced starvation, looting and more.

Mordechai argues that Israel’s war reached a brutal peak during the second incursion into al-Shifa Hospital in March, when the Gaza City medical complex became the site of mass killings.

The Israeli army argued that Hamas was using the hospital as a base, but did not provide sufficient evidence to back up this claim.

Another brutal peak has been Israel’s complete siege and assault on northern Gaza since early October, which has been widely described as ethnic cleansing.

In an appendix to his report, Mordechai explains why he thinks Israel’s actions in Gaza constitute genocide.

“We need to disconnect the way we think of genocide as Israelis – gas chambers, death camps and World War II – from the model that appears in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948),” he writes.

“There don’t have to be death camps for it to be considered genocide. It all boils down to the commission of acts and the intent, and the existence of both has to be established.

“In regard to committing acts, it’s killing, but not only – [there is] also wounding people, abduction of children and even just attempts to prevent births among a particular group of people. What all these acts have in common is the deliberate destruction of a group.”

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