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MAYBE you remember an incident like this from your schooldays. Someone in your class has done something wrong, like pass around a caricature of the principal, and the teacher decides to punish the whole class by taking away your recess. Maybe this is done to force the culprit to confess, or to pressure you and your classmates to point the finger. It’s a clever method of drafting students to help police the classroom.

Such tactics of collective punishment have fallen out of favour for obvious reasons. They’re unfair. They don’t change behaviour. They teach all the wrong lessons and make kids hate school.

Oh, and such tactics are also against the Geneva Conventions. According to an article of the Conventions related to the status and treatment of protected persons, ‘No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited.’

It might seem ridiculous to apply the Geneva Conventions to the classroom, even if some schools resemble warzones. But there has been a recent trend to condemn the tactics of collective punishment at schools and reference the principles designed to safeguard civilians.

Even as the classroom becomes more respectful of children’s rights, the world of geopolitics has continued to embrace principles of collective punishment. What is war, ultimately, but the punishment of the entire population for the actions of the few? Economic sanctions, even the supposedly ‘smart’ variety, end up hurting people who have nothing to do with the policies of their leaders. And all those ‘beautiful’ tariffs end up raising prices for millions of consumers who are not connected in the least to the practices of government or corporations.

But there is no more egregious example of collective punishment in the world today than the tragedy currently unfolding in Gaza.

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Ongoing Violations

ON OCTOBER 7, 2023, Hamas carried out a horrifying attack on Israel that left over a thousand dead and over 200 in captivity. Israel almost immediately declared war on Hamas. It then set about forcing all the residents of Gaza to pay for the crimes of a few.

The punishment has been appalling. More than 52,000 people have been killed by Israeli forces, according to the Gaza health ministry. But this number is probably an undercount by 40 per cent, according to an article in The Lancet, if all war-related deaths like those from a ravaged health system are included. The vast majority of these tens of thousands of deaths — around 70 per cent — are women and children.

These casualty numbers must now reflect deaths by starvation, as Israel has blocked all humanitarian aid to Gaza for the last two months. Israel has deployed this tactic to pressure the Palestinian population to force Hamas to capitulate and release the couple dozen Israeli hostages it continues to hold. No food, no medicine and no fuel has made it into the enclave. In addition to starvation, people are dying because they don’t have access to common life-saving drugs.

The New York Times reports that the ‘only food available to many Gazans — particularly those among the 90 per cent of the population that is displaced and mostly living in tents — comes from local charity kitchens, some of which have been looted as the hunger crisis deepens.’ Compounding the tragedy is the fact that food and medicine is readily available nearby, but Israel is blocking its delivery.

The Israeli government claims that it is only targeting Hamas. But it continues to kill civilians indiscriminately in air strikes, including this week at a crowded restaurant and a school. It claims that Hamas fighters are hiding in hospitals, which justifies the destruction of the entire medical infrastructure of the area. Even if this assertion were true, and Israel has provided little in the way of proof, all of the civilian deaths would still qualify as collective punishment. It would still be a war crime.

Clayton Dalton was part of a medical mission that visited Gaza during the two-month ceasefire that began in January. In The New Yorker, he described this scene at a ruined hospital in northern Gaza.

‘We entered a large storage room in the corner of the ICU which was crammed with medical devices: ultrasound machines, IV pumps, dialysis machines, blood-pressure monitors. Each had apparently been destroyed by a bullet — not in a pattern one would expect from random shooting but, rather, methodically. I was stunned. I couldn’t think of any possible military justification for destroying lifesaving equipment.’

Visiting doctors also started documenting another horrifying statistic: the number of children shot in the head, as if deliberately executed. There have been dozens of such casualties, some of the children just a few years old. Adam Hamawy, a plastic surgeon from New Jersey, told This American Life:

‘These are little children that are being shot, and these aren’t stray bullets. These are aimed. They’re precise. So a stray bullet will explain one or two of them. It’s not going to explain the string of precise, targeted shootings that are being done on children since October.’

The Geneva Conventions do not seem to apply to school-age children in Gaza. They, along with so many other Palestinians, are the victims of collective punishment.

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Naming and not shaming

ISRAEL has been cited numerous times for war crimes in Gaza. Human rights organizations — Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International — have published periodic reports on Israeli violations. The United Nations has condemned Israel for crimes against humanity. The International Criminal Court has issued arrest warrants for both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defence minister Yoav Gallant.

If anything, the Netanyahu government has only increased its violations in the face of these condemnations. This week, it announced an escalation in its post-ceasefire campaign to defeat Hamas. Israel has called up more soldiers to invade Gaza, push inhabitants to a small enclave in the south, and occupy most of the strip. More extremist members of Netanyahu’s cabinet call for the expulsion of all Palestinians from Gaza, and it’s beginning to look as if this is the unstated goal of the Israel government.

Although Netanyahu faces increased protests from its own citizenry — including thousands of reservists and the former head of the Mossad spy agency — several powerful countries are standing with the Israeli leader. Even as it has axed a huge amount of US foreign aid, the Trump administration has used executive powers to skirt Congress and transfer billions of dollars of military assistance to Israel. India, too, has ignored global public opinion to continue to send weapons and technology to Israel. Other far-right wing leaders — Javier Milei in Argentina, Viktor Orban in Hungary — have also maintained good relations with Netanyahu.

Which means that Israel continues to act with impunity in its punishment of Palestinians.

Much has been written about the proper terms to describe Israeli actions in Gaza. The Israeli government defends its campaign as a ‘just war’ against Hamas. Critics have accused the government of committing genocide.

The actual conditions on the ground — the starvation, the toddlers shot in the head, the widespread displacement and destruction of communities — stand by themselves. Lawyers and politicians can throw terms at each other, ‘just war’ versus ‘genocide,’ but there is no getting around the plain, brutal facts. Even the term ‘collective punishment,’ in its abstraction, fails to capture the horror.

In JM Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous character must give a paper at a conference on evil. She’s been reading a work of fiction about the failed effort to assassinate Hitler and the cold-blooded execution of the plotters. She is taken aback by the details in the book about the manner of the execution. Why is it necessary to read these horrible details, she wonders? There is no good reason for the novelist to imagine this manifestation of evil for it is, in a word, ‘obscene.’

‘Obscene because such things ought not to take place, and then obscene again because having taken place they ought not to be brought into the light but covered up and hidden for ever in the bowels of the earth, like what goes on in the slaughterhouses of the world, if one wishes to save one’s sanity.’

The details of what’s happening in Gaza are similarly obscene. But, like the facts of the Nazi atrocities, they must not be ignored. The Israeli government has banned journalists from visiting Gaza. The Trump administration is helping out by penalizing the airing of these details and the campus protests against the US facilitation of these crimes, all under the guise of preventing ‘anti-Semitism.’ These are outrages.

In this age of ‘alt news’ and rampant disinformation, presidential fabrications and threats to defund public media, facts still matter. The world must face the facts of Israeli atrocities in Gaza, not despite but because they are obscene.

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Counterpunch.org, May 9. John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus.