“The people of Gaza have absolutely no way to escape the killing: they are literally a captive population.”
Chris Sidoti knows the brutality of conflict too well, his experience investigating international crimes is devastatingly comprehensive. But he sees a categoric difference in the violence in Gaza.
“People cannot escape.”
A former human rights commissioner and one of Australia’s most experienced international legal experts, Sidoti has spent the past four years – since before the 7 October 2023 attacks – as a member of the UN independent international commission of inquiry on the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel.
This month that commission of inquiry issued a report stating that the Israeli government and military were committing genocide in Gaza.
Half a world away in Sydney, in the lead-up to a speech at the National Press Club on Wednesday, Sidoti considers the genocides that have blighted global history.
Those fleeing were forced from their homes by some of the most horrific atrocities imaginable, Sidoti says.
From Rwanda in 1994, Tutsis escaped Hutu mobs to Burundi and Tanzania. As Islamic State rampaged across Syria a decade ago, millions fled to neighbouring Turkey and Lebanon. Minority Rohingya fleeing Myanmar’s military junta in 2017 crossed the Naf River into Bangladesh where hundreds of thousands remain, still, in vast camps.
Palestinians in Gaza, he says, are trapped. They have nowhere to go.
“Israel has been conducting this type of campaign from day one: of saturation bombing, mass slaughter, destruction of all infrastructure that can sustain life – healthcare, education, housing, religious and cultural sites; for significant periods it has amounted to the imposition of mass starvation.
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“And all of that is occurring in a context where people have no means of escape. They are literally a captive population. It’s distinguishable from any other conflict, certainly in recent decades and probably in my lifetime.”
Sidoti says military operations in Gaza are a “mass slaughter”. In the early weeks of the conflict, he says, more than 300 people were killed every day. With the exception of a brief, fragile ceasefire period, that rate has remained at between 75 and 100 people a day.
“In excess of 65,000 bodies have been firmly identified … half of them women and kids,” he says.
“If the Israelis were serious in talking about the evacuation of parts of Gaza or the evacuation even of women and kids, they would have been letting them into Israel. ”
Sidoti is careful to insist that the 7 October attacks by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad were “outrageous, traumatic atrocities”. An earlier report from the commission of inquiry detailed those strikes on Israel, establishing that the assaults “constituted war crimes”.
But Sidoti says the response from Israel’s government has been “a betrayal of the people of Israel”.
“Israel did fail. The government and the military failed on October 7. The strategy that has been pursued since then has not brought peace and has not destroyed Hamas.”
Sidoti argues that the overwhelming majority of hostages have been released as a result of negotiation, not military action. Meanwhile, Israel’s economy has been drained, funding an expensive conflict and pulling workers from their jobs to fight.
“Israel is not secure,” he says. “Israeli prosperity has been compromised. Israeli security has been compromised …
“It’s a betrayal that lies very much at the feet of the Israeli government, the Israeli military, because they’re implementing modes of military procedure that have broken down, that constitute crimes under international law.”
Sidoti explains that to establish Israel’s genocidal purpose, the commission relied on both direct and indirect evidence.
The direct evidence is statements made by Israeli political and military leaders, which the commission concluded were “direct and public incitement to commit genocide”. The report cites specific comments from the former defence minister Yoav Gallant, the president, Isaac Herzog, and the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.
“These are statements that have been made by people who are in positions of command in the expectation their orders would be carried out. These statements become clear indicators, direct evidence of genocidal intent.”
The indirect evidence is the totality of the Israel Defense Forces’ actions in Gaza – “mass bombardment, total destruction of infrastructure, high death rates, a strategy that constituted a war crime” – designed to destroy, in whole or in part, the Palestinian people of Gaza.
The threshold for establishing genocide is “very high”, Sidoti says, “higher than the beyond reasonable doubt” standard of a criminal trial (one of the reasons he says declarations of genocide are so rare).
Before publishing the report, the commission sent it to the Israeli government seeking its response. It received none.
In the wake of its publication, Israel’s foreign ministry issued a statement saying it “categorically rejects this distorted and false report and calls for the immediate abolition of this Commission of Inquiry”.
Sidoti says he is under no illusions the Netanyahu government will act on the report. Nor does he hold hope in the UN body charged with ensuring international peace and security.
“The security council is totally useless,” he says. “Totally dysfunctional, you’ve got to wonder why it exists.”
The commission’s report, then, is more a call to action for the international community, who have a legal obligation to prevent genocide and bring its perpetrators to justice.
Sidoti says Australia should end all defence ties with Israel and cease trade in anything with potential military application, including raw materials, technology or so-called “dual use” material, such as drones.
“We should also be looking at our responsibilities for the prosecution of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide,” he says. “These are crimes under Australian law. Anybody who is seeking to enter Australia, including Australian citizens, who have served in the IDF in Gaza over the last two years, is under suspicion: in police terms they’re a person of interest.”
Australia has done “precious little”, Sidoti says, but has not been especially laggard, rather part of a lamentable pattern of inaction by western states.
“We are certainly not at the front of the pack and the pack is now moving rapidly … the recognition of Palestine is an example of that.”
Sidoti’s first experience documenting genocide was close to home. The 1997 Bringing Them Home report found that the Australian government’s policy of removing Indigenous children from their families met the international legal definition of genocide: an attempt to destroy Indigenous Australia through the forcible transfer of children, annihilating connections to family, country and culture.
It was here, Sidoti says, he learned the value of bearing witness. In some instances he was the first authority to listen to a victim’s account.
“We have not stopped the fighting in Gaza, we have not stopped people being killed, kids being killed. But I carry with me the lesson from Bringing Them Home, that setting the historic record is the very least we have to deliver to victims.”
Sidoti and his fellow commissioners stepped down from the commission in June. Asked for his reflections on the direction of the conflict, Sidoti is unsure sure whether he lands at optimism or fatalism. For now he laments the continuing suffering.
“Killing does not go on for ever,” he says, adding: “It will be resolved because there is, in the end, no alternative to that. But I have no idea when … no idea how many thousands of people are going to die before it happens.”
