Israeli soldier, beware – You are walking into a war crime

IDF soldiers in Gaza, December 2024.

Michael Sfard writes in Haaretz on 5 June 2025:

Last month, Israel began to carry out Operation Gideon’s Chariots. The Israel Defense Forces instructed Gaza residents to move southward, and as Yaniv Kubovich in Haaretz wrote, one of the IDF’s goals, as defined in the operation orders, is “concentrating and moving the population.” Stop for a moment and roll on your tongue the term “concentrating the population.”

It looks as though someone in the IDF euphemism plant failed to arrive for his shift.

The important point is that “concentrating and moving the population” is defined as a goal, rather than as a means of achieving other goals. In other words, this isn’t a forced transfer of civilians to another area temporarily until the fighting ends. It’s a target for implementation. If the operation achieves its goals, two million Gazans eventually will be crowded together in the area south of the Morag Corridor, less than a quarter of the area of the Gaza Strip.

As law professors Eyal Benvenisti and Haim Gans wrote in Haaretz Hebrew edition, such a forced transfer at such a huge scale isn’t just a war crime; it’s a crime against humanity.

And what will happen to the millions of Gazans crowded between the Philadelphi and Morag corridors? Well, our leaders are talking about “encouraging emigration,” and last week it was even reported that the U.S. administration is conducting negotiations with Libya, a country collapsing under its own wars and terrorism, to absorb a million Gazan “emigrants.”

There’s no way of describing the way Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his gang view those living in Gaza other than as “human waste” whom we want to export and toss into other countries.

To the male and female soldiers participating in the operation, those of you who by chance read Haaretz, I would like to contribute a piece of legal advice, free of charge: Mass deportation, which is a crime against humanity, can be carried out not only by loading human beings onto trucks under the threat of a rifle. International law is very clear – even the use of coercive measures that will cause people to want to flee from their home is considered deportation. My father, who was active in the student demonstrations in March 1968 in Warsaw, was ousted from his university by the Polish government and imprisoned without trial. My grandfather, who supported the protests, was fired from his teaching job.

The first secretary of the Communist Party at the time, Wladyslaw Gomulka, said in an antisemitic address to the nation that Jews who aren’t loyal to the government are invited to leave. The Polish government “encouraged” them to emigrate. Without starving them, without blowing up their houses, without destroying the health, education, food and sewage infrastructure and everything else that makes human life possible. Of course, there’s no comparison between the political, economic and social pressure placed on the Polish Jews to leave and the violent campaign of killing and destruction experienced by the Gazans. Nevertheless, my family is considered to have been deported from Poland.

Gazans won’t leave voluntarily. Under current circumstances, there’s no such thing as voluntary emigration. Those who leave, if they do, will do so because a crime against humanity was committed against them. They won’t emigrate; they’ll flee. And Israel will be responsible for criminal ethnic cleansing in the 21st century.

The truth is that I am running out of words. What else can be said? Must it be made clear that an order to carry out a crime against humanity is also a patently illegal order? That’s self-evident. Must it be said that the Jewish officers and political leaders who speak of population “concentration” and the deportation of hundreds of thousands and allow the starvation of children, women, the elderly and innocent men have cleansed their souls of the most important ethical lessons that Jewish history should have embedded in each of us?

Everyone knows that the continuation of the war is designed to keep the Israeli government alive and eventually cancel Netanyahu’s trial, and that it would lead to the death of our hostages who have been suffering for over 600 days in Hamas captivity. Generations of Israelis will bear the Mark of Cain that is etched on our foreheads these days, when we continue to bomb, starve and deport helpless human beings. What has become of us? How can we live with our deeds?

Michael Sfard is a lawyer who specializes in International Human Rights Law and the Laws of War.

This article is reproduced in its entirety