As we enter 2025, and Israel’s genocidal violence against Palestinians in Gaza continues to increase in both scale and intensity, Al-Haq publishes a new report. ‘How to Hide a Genocide: The Role of Evacuation Orders and Safe Zones in Israel’s Genocidal Campaign in Gaza’ examines the central role played by unlawful “evacuation orders” to alleged “safe zones”, which constitutes the war crime and crime against humanity of forcible transfer, in Israel’s genocidal acts.
Palestinians in every corner of the Gaza Strip are quickly losing all means of survival. This is especially so in the North, which has been placed under a complete siege for eleven weeks as the Israel Occupation Forces (IOF) carry out repeated raids across Beit Lahiya, Beit Hanoun and Jabalya, targeting United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) premises sheltering hundreds of displaced women, children and men. After weeks of repeated attacks on Kamal Adwan Hospital, northern Gaza’s last partially functioning health facility, all hospitals in the North are now damaged and unable to provide crucial health services to trapped, injured, and sick Palestinian civilians who remain subject to constant shelling and bombardment. These mass atrocities are all taking place amidst regular evacuation orders instructing the entire population of the North to move south immediately so it can resettle the area.
Since the very first week of its genocide, Israel has methodically cleared vast stretches of the Gaza Strip of its inhabitants through its unlawful issuance of evacuation orders. These are presented to the public as proof of its efforts to minimise civilian casualties and to support its alleged compliance with fundamental principles of international humanitarian law (IHL). However, they achieve the direct opposite. Over 90 per cent of Gaza’s population (including the elderly, disabled, sick, injured, and expectant and breastfeeding mothers) has been forcibly displaced from their homes and temporary shelters, the majority countless times, to alleged “safe zones”. Contrary to their label, these zones only further endanger Palestinians in Gaza. With insufficient space, shelter, sanitation facilities, food and water sources, or medical care, these “safe zones” are intentionally designed to ensure the destruction of all life sheltering there.
Despite being unilaterally established by Israel, the Israeli military routinely targets both the zones themselves as well as the routes it has instructed forcibly displaced Palestinians to use as they flee in search of ever-evasive safety. Crowded together with no place of refuge, Palestinians are either killed by Israeli strikes, severely physically and mentally injured by the IOF’s physical and psychological warfare, or subjected to a slow death from the environment of total deprivation into which they have been plunged.
Al-Haq’s report ‘How to Hide a Genocide: The Role of Evacuation Orders and Safe Zones in Israel’s Genocidal Campaign in Gaza’ reveals Israel’s lethal tactic of disguising its mass forcible transfer and targeting of Palestinians in Gaza with humanitarian language which misleadingly depicts these acts as preventative measures designed to protect civilians. In reality, the illegal evacuation orders and ensuing forced displacement of over 1.9 million Palestinians to areas that make up less than 20 per cent of Gaza’s territory only serve to facilitate and fuel its genocide. As shown throughout the report, by applying humanitarian terms to its practice of forcibly transferring Palestinians, without any legal basis and in a manner that breaches international law, and labelling areas as “safe zones” despite being constantly attacked and lacking in all essentials for survival, Israel argues that it is acting in accordance with its legal obligations when in fact it is providing further evidence of its genocidal intent as it uses these measures to commit and contribute to the genocidal acts of killing, causing serious bodily and mental harm, and creation of conditions calculated to destroy Palestinians in Gaza.
Please find the report attached here.
Al-Haq is an independent Palestinian non-governmental human rights organisation based in Ramallah, West Bank. Established in 1979 to protect and promote human rights and the rule of law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), the organisation has special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council.
