" Ever since the failure to implement the 1948 UN resolution 194, which gave Palestinian refugees the right to return to their homes in what became Israel, we have been disappointed again and again." Yes, Israel’s plan for Rafah would be a crime – but international law has never protected Gaza Raja Shehadeh

Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip – the planned site of Israel’s internment centre. Photograph: Eyad Baba/AFP/Getty Images

Yes, Israel’s plan for Rafah would be a crime – but international law has never protected Gaza

Raja Shehadeh

Palestinians continue to hold on to the practice we call sumoud – refusing to give up or leave – despite the world turning its back on us

Over the past 21 long months of Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, voices all over the world have decried the demise of international law and the rule-based order. And indeed, the facade of Israel’s adherence to international law has vanished and policies that constitute war crimes are now brazenly declared.

This week, Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz, has shared plans to forcibly move Palestinians into a camp in the ruins of Rafah. Once they enter, they cannot leave. In other words, a concentration camp, which by definition is an internment centre for members of a national group (as well as political prisoners or minority groups) on the grounds of security or punishment, usually by military order. Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights lawyer, was quoted in the Guardian as saying that Katz “laid out an operational plan for a crime against humanity”. Hundreds have been killed and thousands wounded trying to access food.

I have tried hard to understand the incomprehensible suffering endured by Palestinians in Gaza and how it is that most Israelis do not acknowledge their humanity. How are they able to show no remorse for what their army is carrying out in their name? I believe the seed of our dehumanisation was planted during the Arab-Israeli war in 1948. Palestinians were violently deprived of land, property and belongings in what we would come to call the Nakba (Arabic for “the catastrophe”), on the grounds that the land was God-given to the Jewish people. From that time, Israelis have been able to use Arab homes, lands and orchards without any feeling of guilt. The 7 October attacks were the starting point of the war, but Israel has been systematically degrading and dispossessing the Palestinian people for decades.

Such violations of international law lead to a feeling of despair about the inability of institutions to prevent the horrors of Israeli actions in Gaza and the West Bank and to hold perpetrators to account. The UN-backed international criminal court has issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant over allegations of “the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare; and the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution and other inhumane acts”. No arrests have been made. The west continues to supply military and political support to Israel. I ask myself: should we Palestinians feel helpless in the face of this failure?

And yet the truth is that international law, though used as a measuring stick and point of reference by human rights organisations, has... READ MORE https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/12/israel-rafah-plan-crime-international-law-palestinians

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