The conditions that led to genocide in Gaza have remained precarious due to a lack of accountability, says rights advocate Yuli Novak.
Washington, DC – Yuli Novak, the executive director of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, has a warning for politicians in the United States and across the world: The situation in Israel-Palestine is “disastrous”.
Despite the US-brokered ceasefire that scaled back the Israeli attacks in Gaza, Novak told media this week that the conditions are more dangerous than ever.
“Our warning is that we haven’t seen the worst,” she said, stressing that Israel must be held accountable for its abuses in Gaza.
Over the past two years, numerous human rights groups have released reports accusing Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza — a campaign to destroy the Palestinian people.
United Nations investigators, for instance, determined that Israel’s actions in the territory matched the definition of genocide under international law.
But B’Tselem provided another layer of analysis with its landmark report, called Our Genocide, in July.
It dissected the decades-long history of Israeli policies that laid the groundwork for the carnage in Gaza, including the apartheid system, demographic engineering, the systemic dehumanisation of Palestinians, and a culture of impunity for abuses.
Those conditions, Novak said, have been further entrenched since the war began.
The Israeli government has also continued to impose restrictions on humanitarian aid to the enclave, including on temporary shelters needed to replace tents for tens of thousands of Palestinians who faced flooding earlier this month.
Israel’s war on Gaza has killed more than 69,000 Palestinians and turned most of Gaza into rubble.
In the occupied West Bank, conditions have been worsening, with intensifying settlement expansion and deadly Israeli military raids.
On Thursday, Human Rights Watch released a report documenting that Israeli forces forcibly displaced 32,000 Palestinians from their homes in Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams.
Israeli settlers have also increased their attacks, regularly descending on Palestinian villages to torch homes and vehicles and at times kill civilians — often with the protection of the Israeli military.
Killings continue
Novak stressed that settler attacks are a form of Israeli state violence.
“They are Israeli civilians living in the West Bank being armed by the state. Sometimes, many of them wear [army] uniforms. Sometimes these are soldiers on reserve duty that are on a break,” she said.
Novak and her B’Tselem colleague Kareem Jubran have been in Washington, DC, this week, where they met with US lawmakers, including Democratic Senators Peter Welch, Jeff Merkley and Chris Van Hollen, as well as Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.
Novak said the group wants to stress the need for accountability for the genocide in Gaza.
“We are talking about a governing system, the Israeli system, that conducted genocide for two years — war crimes on a daily basis — and got away with it with no accountability,” she said.
“The current situation is probably the most dangerous that we’ve ever been in because not only this violence and this criminality took place, it was also normalised, and in any moment, it can start again, go back to the same scale.”
US President Donald Trump has falsely claimed that there is peace in the Middle East for the first time in 3,000 years because of the truce he helped broker in Gaza.
And earlier this week, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution backing the US president’s 20-point plan for Gaza, which calls for an end to the fighting, gradual Israeli withdrawal and the deployment of an international force to the territory.
The plan would also see Hamas disarm and Gaza’s governance handed over to an international commission, dubbed “the Board of Peace”.
It has no accountability or compensation mechanism for the horrors that Israel unleashed on Gaza for two years.
Novak said Trump’s plan is disconnected from the reality on the ground.
“It just allows everybody to move on, instead of dealing with the situation and demanding Israel not only to be held accountable but also stop this kind of systematic oppression over the Palestinians,” she said.
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