(Photo by Matt Hrkac via Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED)
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As late Australian scholar Patrick Wolfe wrote, “Settler colonialism destroys to replace.”
In the initial weeks following the Hamas attacks on October 7, 2023, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, public opinion may have been split on the morals of the conflict as protesters across the world clashed over their stances. But as the war enters its sixth month, the international community has been pushed to reckon with Israel’s unequivocal terror campaign on the people of Gaza following the Hamas attacks. While protests have called for a ceasefire in a war that has claimed the lives of nearly 30,000 Palestinians in Gaza, with over 12,000 of them being children and young teens, international organizations and human rights advocates have been searching for ways to hold Israel accountable for ending the war.
Recently, countries and non-state actors alike have challenged Israel on the international stage for its onslaught on Palestinian civilians. While a recent International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling fell short of acknowledging ongoing genocide in Palestine or calling for a ceasefire, South Africa’s court appeal brought newfound international attention to rampant and well-documented human rights abuses.
War Crimes in Gaza and Human Rights Advocacy
As Spheres of Influence has previously reported, the current war in Gaza is the most recent escalation of a prolonged effort by Israel to erase and diminish the Palestinian people. In the words of author Sude Güvendik,
The Palestinian struggle cannot be reduced to a mere conflict. It is a profound historical, legal, and moral necessity deeply entrenched in the Palestinian narrative … [and] international law safeguards the right of occupied peoples to resist their oppressors, recognizing the fundamental difference between the violence of the oppressor and the resistance of the oppressed.
Since these words were published in October 2023, it has become clear that the burden of upholding international law is heavy. While the recent ICJ ruling has been considered both a victory and a loss for the people of Gaza, the work of covering the war and building evidence for international accountability lies in the hands of journalists and human rights advocates.
To learn more about the strategies human rights organizations have to contribute to holding actors accountable in the current war, I spoke with Devon Lum, a research assistant at the Human Rights Watch (HRW)’s Digital Investigations Lab. “The open source component is crucial to our research and reporting on the conflict,” he says. “We are not currently able to send researchers into Gaza and need to rely in large part on a combination of remote interviews and visual evidence.” While there is a lot of “mis- and disinformation,” according to Lum, Human Rights Watch has published its systematic process for verifying video evidence in Israel and Palestine, a five-step process guided by a methodology of open-source research.
New Challenges to a New Era of the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Since the Hamas attacks on October 7, Lum tells me that “there has been a massive influx in the resources we are dedicating to the conflict.” He says that the Israel-Palestine conflict “became the core of many of our recent outputs because of the escalation.”
Steering their efforts to the war in Gaza has not been an easy transition. On top of navigating mis- and disinformation, Lum mentions that he has found two major challenges in covering the war. One is simply keeping up-to-speed with the evolving nature of this conflict. “The scale and frequency of tragedy means there is a constant flow of new material to collect, analyze, and verify,” he says. “Being confident we have all possible information about an incident is much more time-consuming because of how much visual material is out there.”
The second challenge, says Lum, is the distressing amount of footage of children in the war. “There has been a higher proportion of wounded children I’ve seen in the footage from this conflict than any other I’ve worked on,” he reflects. “Footage of death and destruction is always hard to stomach, but it is much more emotionally taxing for me when the victim is young.”
Lum told me he had not previously worked on covering the Israel-Palestine conflict before the current escalation. While he has contributed to several HRW investigative reports, one of his most recent investigations in late 2023 spotlighted a series of unreported unlawful killings of Ethiopian migrants by the Saudi Arabian border guards. While it prompted follow-up reporting by The Guardian and the Washington Post, he tells me that HRW’s research and reporting on the Israel-Palestine war is occurring in a crowded field where there is “a wealth of information and a massive amount of different topics and angles to look at [the conflict].”
While Lum could not discuss where HRW’s advocacy campaigns come into play for legal investigations, he reiterated their unwavering commitment to objectively covering the Israel-Palestine war. “Our role does not change regardless of scale,” he says. “We defend the rights of people worldwide. We [carefully] investigate abuses, expose the facts widely, and pressure those with power to respect rights and secure justice. That is our mission year in and year out.”
Edited by Bethlehem Samson
