Both Hamas and Israel have committed war crimes over the last month, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk announced after visiting the Rafah Crossing in Egypt on Wednesday.
Between Hamas's Oct. 7 attacks in Israel that left roughly 1,400 people dead, the vast majority of whom were civilians, and Israel's significant military response aimed at disarming and overthrowing Hamas, it has set up the "most dangerous [situation] in decades, faced by people in Gaza, in Israel, in the West Bank but also regionally," he said.
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"The atrocities perpetrated by Palestinian armed groups on 7 October were heinous, brutal, and shocking; they were war crimes — as is the continued holding of hostages," Türk explained. "The collective punishment by Israel of Palestinian civilians amounts also to a war crime, as does the unlawful forcible evacuation of civilians."
Israel's conscience was shocked by the unprecedented terrorist attacks in which thousands of terrorists from Hamas and other smaller Gaza terror organizations poured into Israel and slaughtered civilians in their homes, many of whom showed signs of being tortured and brutalized. The terrorists also took more than 200 people hostage and brought them back to Gaza, where all but five remain held against their will.
The Israeli military has decided that the goal of its war is to remove Hamas from power in Gaza and to destroy their military capabilities, though those objectives are incredibly difficult to accomplish given the circumstances on the ground.
The war is "happening in a densely populated urban environment that Hamas is using civilians as human shields and because Hamas placed rockets and weapons in civilian areas while digging terror tunnels underneath civilian infrastructure and protected sites like schools and hospitals," Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East Dana Stroul told the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday.
The first portion of Israel's war was carried out mostly via the air. Thousands of Israeli airstrikes have destroyed much of Gaza's infrastructure and have killed thousands of civilians, according to United States officials. The Hamas-controlled Gaza health ministry has said the death toll has exceeded 10,000 people, but the tally does not differentiate between combatant and civilian, and U.S. officials have questioned the validity of their totals.
U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said on Wednesday there's "something clearly wrong" with Israel's military response to the civilian death toll. Israeli officials have previously criticized Guterres for remarks he's made about the conflict, while workers with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA, the U.N. agency based in Gaza, have been accused of celebrating the Oct. 7 attack.
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Israel urged more than a million people in northern Gaza to evacuate south ahead of their military incursion. Defenders of Israel argue that the evacuation order is meant to keep them safe and out of the fighting, but critics argue it amounts to collective punishment, which is illegal under international law, and is defined as inflicting punishment upon a population on the account of the acts committed by a select few.
"We must instead insist upon the universal standards against which we must assess this situation — international human rights laws and international humanitarian laws," Türk explained. "And those standards are clear: parties to the conflict have the obligation to take constant care to spare the civilian population and civilian objects, which remains applicable throughout the attacks. The actions of one party do not absolve the other party of its obligations under international humanitarian law."