
2024: The Deadliest Year Amid the Escalating Israeli Genocide and Stark International Inaction
Date: January 13, 2025
Press Release
2024: The Deadliest Year Amid the Escalating Israeli Genocide and Stark International Inaction
The International Commission to Support Palestinian Rights (ICSPR) has launched its annual report on the genocide crimes in Gaza and the grave violations in the occupied Palestinian territories for the year 2024.
The ICSPR held a press conference at the Martyrs of Al-Aqsa Hospital in Deir al-Balah to present its annual report for 2024, discussing the genocide in Gaza and other crimes committed by the Israeli occupation in the occupied Palestinian territories.
The press conference featured speeches by Dr. Ali Al-Attar, a member of the ICSPR Board of Directors, lawyer Rana Hdeib, Director of the Legal Department, and researcher Lubna Deeb.
The press conference began with a statement from Dr. Ali Al-Attar, a member of the ICSPR Board of Directors, who highlighted that:
2024 witnessed the continuation of the Israeli occupation forces’ genocide campaign in Gaza and its serious violations of human rights and international humanitarian law across all Palestinian territories. The Palestinian people were subjected to a series of systematic crimes committed by the Israeli occupation, supported and partnered by some international powers, notably the United States and certain European countries with colonial histories. This partnership reflected the international double standards, with the absence of real accountability and the international system’s failure to take effective steps to stop these crimes.
Despite important UN resolutions and decisions from international courts supporting the Palestinian cause, these resolutions have not been translated into effective enforcement mechanisms, revealing the weakness of international protection mechanisms and their paralysis, in addition to the lack of international protection for the Palestinian people. Nevertheless, the Arab and international solidarity from free people around the world and the humanitarian aid provided to the Palestinians are positive signs worth appreciating.
Al-Attar emphasized the need to form an international humanitarian alliance to support the humanitarian response, halt the genocide, and hold the Israeli occupation accountable in Palestine, ensuring the flow of relief and medical supplies amid the deteriorating humanitarian conditions, especially in Gaza, weak political will from third countries, and the lack of serious international intervention to stop the genocide.
Al-Attar also pointed out that, alongside the Israeli crimes and its international partnerships, Palestinians are also suffering from clear shortcomings in Palestinian national performance and internal human rights violations, where:
- Gaza was not declared a disaster area in a manner that would impose entitlements on national budgets.
- The Palestinian Authority failed to fulfill its duties in supporting, assisting, and relieving the people of Gaza.
- There were no serious efforts from the Ministry of Justice to form a national committee to follow up on genocide crimes, including referring these crimes to the International Criminal Court.
- The Palestinian Authority did not take effective actions within the international system, such as filing international lawsuits like South Africa’s, referring the genocide to the International Criminal Court, or calling on high contracting parties to activate their legal obligations towards the protection of Palestinians.
- Palestinian diplomacy appeared ineffective at a time when the Palestinian cause needed strong diplomatic leadership to push for international accountability.
- The violations were not limited to the occupation; they extended internally within Palestine, where internal killings, infighting, and security chaos increased, threatening civil peace, particularly in the Jenin camp during the last month of 2024.
The lack of national unity and the failure to implement national reconciliation agreements, such as the Beijing and Cairo agreements, weakened the Palestinians’ ability to confront the occupation’s crimes and manage the transitional phase, ensuring the resilience of citizens or responding to humanitarian needs, and will destroy the hopes of Gaza’s residents for reconstruction.
Al-Attar called for national and international efforts to confront the plans aimed at liquidating the Palestinian cause and the Israeli occupation’s crimes, along with other national and humanitarian challenges.
This was followed by lawyer Rana Hdeib, the Director of the Legal Department, presenting the report’s main points and the most critical Israeli crimes against Palestinian civilians.
Genocide Crimes in Gaza and Israeli Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
In 2024, Israeli violations in the occupied Palestinian territories continued and worsened. The Israeli occupation escalated its destructive genocide against Gaza, causing immense human losses and catastrophic damage to infrastructure, homes, and civilian institutions. This war indiscriminately targeted civilians, in addition to using starvation as a weapon and obstructing the entry of humanitarian aid and the work of international organizations, especially UNRWA, which was a gross violation of the UN Charter, international humanitarian law, the Hague Conventions, the Geneva Conventions, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, and human rights conventions, including the Genocide Convention, all while the international system failed to provide the necessary protection for civilians.
In the West Bank and Jerusalem, the Israeli violations included field executions, illegal settlement expansion, land confiscation, raids on cities and villages, house demolitions, repeated settler assaults under the protection of occupation forces, and the Judaization of Jerusalem and desecration of sacred religious sites, which contributed to undermining the Palestinians’ right to self-determination, reflecting a systematic regime of oppression and racial discrimination that demands urgent international action.
First: Human and Material Losses Due to the Israeli Genocide in Gaza:
The ongoing Israeli crimes, starting from October 7, 2023, and those from previous years, particularly the last decade, fall within the framework of international crimes and severe violations stipulated in international humanitarian law, criminal law, and human rights standards, resulting in human and material losses detailed as follows:
Human Losses:
The human losses caused by the Israeli genocide war were concentrated in the direct targeting of civilians, especially children and women, through horrific massacres against families. These crimes also included the targeting of journalists, civil defense personnel, medical teams, humanitarian workers, and experts, in a crime that spared no Palestinian from death. We will detail these losses as follows:
Killings:
According to the Palestinian Ministry of Health statistics, the aggression resulted in the martyrdom of 45,028 people, including 17,581 children, 12,048 women, 2,421 elderly, 1,060 medical staff, 258 UNRWA staff, 203 journalists, 89 civil defense personnel, and 750 educational staff. The total number of injured people reached 106,962, with 75% of them being children and women. Additionally, around 15,000 people are still missing, mostly under the rubble of bombed houses, which civil defense teams cannot retrieve.
Lawyer Hdeib pointed out the increase in arbitrary arrests of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, where the number of detainees in Israeli prisons reached 18,700. Of these, 5,300 detainees were from Gaza, including women, children, and men, while 12,000 detainees were from the West Bank. There were 26 cases of civil defense arrests in Gaza, 43 journalists arrested, and 331 medical staff arrested from Gaza. Additionally, 345 children were detained, and 89 women were incarcerated. There were 3,343 cases of administrative detention, with detainees subjected to physical and psychological torture, electroshock, sexual harassment, and rape.
Hdeib also reviewed the destruction of homes and housing units, where the Israeli forces used tons of explosives to blow up residential units in the devastated sector. The number of these destroyed units, according to the latest update from the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, reached 245,123 units, both fully and partially destroyed. 60,368 of these buildings were completely destroyed, and 185,655 were partially destroyed, leaving 96% of the population homeless. Updates are ongoing, with statistical uncertainty regarding other areas still under Israeli military operations, such as northern cities that have been completely destroyed, and Rafah, where more than 50,000 housing units have been lost on the Philadelphi Axis alone.
For more information, refer to the annual report.
Hdeib also presented the patterns of Israeli violations in the West Bank.
In 2024, Israeli violations in the West Bank continued systematically, targeting Palestinians’ lives and basic rights daily. These violations included the storming of Palestinian cities and camps, field executions, and escalating colonial settlement crimes. Settler assaults on civilians, arbitrary and administrative arrests affecting hundreds, including children and women, violated human rights. Additionally, violations against Palestinian prisoners continued, including the use of oppressive and systematic torture. The occupation continued to hold martyrs’ bodies as collective punishment for their families. In occupied Jerusalem, incursions into the Al-Aqsa Mosque escalated in an attempt to impose a new reality in line with the settlement and Judaization plans, resulting in unprecedented settlement expansion and systematic home demolitions, leading to the forced displacement of Palestinian citizens and the confiscation of their historical rights.
Attorney Hadeeb pointed out the internal violations
The year 2024 witnessed serious human rights violations within the Palestinian territories, both in Gaza and the West Bank, where internal practices undermined public freedoms and threatened civil peace. These violations included killings, arbitrary arrests, restrictions on freedom of opinion and expression, the absence of the rule of law, and the exacerbation of security breakdowns and internal fighting.
These practices come amidst the lack of national consensus and the stalled reconciliation efforts, which have increased the suffering of the Palestinian people and weakened the ability to confront the challenges posed by the Israeli occupation.
Attorney Rana Hadeeb warned
That the continued failure of the international community to stop the crimes of genocide and the aggression of the occupation represents a green light to continue and expand Israeli violations. She emphasized that the catastrophic humanitarian situation caused by the occupation’s aggression necessitates that the international community stop the genocide, protect civilians, provide means of living for the residents of Gaza through urgent humanitarian aid, open humanitarian corridors by land, sea, and air to save them from the horrors of genocide, famine, and disease, and ensure that the Israeli occupation state is forced to provide financial compensation to all Palestinians for the damage caused by the crimes committed against them, including physical, psychological, and economic harm. In light of the above, the International Commission to Support Palestinian Rights (ICSPR) believes that the field facts and the catastrophic humanitarian condition require declaring Gaza as a disaster area and a famine zone, with all the necessary interventions that must be undertaken by the Palestinian Authority and the international community.
Finally, Hadeeb reviewed the report’s recommendations and demands, which included:
The International Commission (ICSPR): Calls on the international community, especially the United Nations, the High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions, international and regional organizations, parliamentary unions, and all human rights and civil society organizations, as well as freedom-loving people worldwide, to take serious action to stop the genocide and ensure the occupation state fulfills its responsibilities as a belligerent occupying power, including opening crossings, implementing humanitarian aid, restoring electricity and water, and supplying the sector with all its humanitarian needs while forcing it to comply with the rules of international humanitarian law and international treaties and measures by the International Court of Justice.
The International Commission (ICSPR): Calls on the contracting parties to the Geneva Conventions to convene an international meeting to discuss genocide crimes, ensuring their legal responsibility to put an end to the expansion of the occupation, stop supplying it with weapons and ammunition, and hold those responsible for international crimes accountable using the principle of universal jurisdiction, supporting efforts to hold them accountable before the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court, thus requiring the Prosecutor’s Office and judges of the court to take judicial decisions ensuring the expansion of arrest warrants and accountability for the Israeli occupation leaders and soldiers responsible for unprecedented violations of principles, rules, and international norms.
The International Commission (ICSPR): Calls on world nations and freedom-loving people to continue their popular, diplomatic, and humanitarian efforts and intensify their pressure on governments and international organizations to stop the paralysis and failure to end the genocide and Israeli occupation crimes, which continue to aim at displacing Palestinians from their land, recalling the images of the Nakba of 1948.
The International Commission (ICSPR): Demands that the international community, the High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions, the United Nations, and freedom-loving people worldwide provide humanitarian support for Palestinians and international organizations, especially UNRWA, to ensure its continued operation and funding to enable it to deliver services to Palestinian refugees, especially in Gaza.
The International Commission (ICSPR): Reaffirms its call for forming an international coalition to guarantee international humanitarian intervention to stop the genocide in Gaza, confront the humanitarian catastrophe against civilians, provide international protection for Palestinians, impose sanctions and boycotts on the occupation state, and hold its leaders and soldiers accountable before international courts, ensuring the resolution of the root causes of the conflict by ending the Israeli occupation and its colonial apartheid system, and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital, restoring Palestinian rights, and enabling the return, compensation, and self-determination of the Palestinian people.
The International Commission (ICSPR): Calls on the Palestinian leadership to restore unity, form a government of national competencies to enhance the resilience of citizens, provide the necessary aid to Gaza, oversee reconstruction, and rebuild the political system based on partnership and democracy, supporting the Palestinian people’s struggle for self-determination. It also calls for intensifying international efforts to stop the Israeli aggression and genocide, provide international protection for civilians, and compel the occupation state to implement United Nations resolutions, the International Court of Justice, and the General Assembly to end the Israeli occupation.
The International Commission (ICSPR): Demands that the Palestinian Authority and all relevant parties protect rights and freedoms, prevent violations and assaults on citizens and their freedoms, release political prisoners in the West Bank, open investigations into all internal violations, especially murder, torture, and assaults on citizens, hold perpetrators accountable, support the rule of law, preserve civil peace, and work to contain the unfortunate events in Jenin camp to prevent diversion from focusing on Israeli crimes and ways to confront them. It also calls for enhancing dialogue, national consensus, rule of law, and prioritizing Palestinian national interests.
At the conclusion of the conference, Lubna Deeb, a legal researcher at the International Commission, presented a press statement in English, reviewing the main points of the report and the serious violations faced by the Palestinian people during 2024.