by NADAV RAPAPORT & OSCAR RICKETT
Lee Mordechai says his country is committing genocide, as his report documents a wide range of atrocities committed by Israeli forces
An internationally recognised Israeli historian has concluded that his country is committing genocide in Gaza after compiling a vast, methodical report documenting a litany of war crimes committed since Israel’s invasion began last year following the Hamas-led attacks of 7 October.
Lee Mordechai, an associate professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who has also held a fellowship at Princeton University in the US, has published a report titled “Bearing Witness to the Israel-Gaza War” which, in its English translation, is 124 pages long and contains over 1,400 footnotes.
Using eyewitness reports, video footage, articles, photographs, eyewitness evidence and over investigatory material, much of it recorded by Israeli soldiers, the historian has produced what Haaretz calls “the most methodical and detailed documentation in Hebrew (there is also an English translation) of the war crimes that Israel is perpetrating in Gaza”.
Some of the most shocking incidents documented by Mordechai include a Palestinian woman with a child being shot while waving a white flag, starving girls being crushed to death while queuing for bread, a handcuffed 62-year-old Palestinian man getting run over by an Israeli tank and an air strike targeting people trying to help a wounded boy.
The database includes thousands of videos, photos, testimonies, reports and investigations documenting the atrocities Israeli forces are committing in Gaza, where over 44,500 Palestinians have been killed during the war.
Mordechai also includes a section on “The media, propaganda and the war”, noting that the current war has been “enabled and facilitated by massive media efforts to shape discourse in Israel as well as in the West – in countries such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and Germany”.
Corpses, killings and sunsets
Haaretz led its report on Mordechai’s document by drawing attention to footnote 379, which refers to a video clip showing a large dog eating the corpse of a Palestinian.
“Wai, wai, he took the terrorist, the terrorist is gone – gone in both senses,” says the Israeli soldier who filmed the dog eating the dead body. A few seconds later, the soldier pans away from the corpse to the scene around him. “But what a gorgeous view, a gorgeous sunset. A red sun is setting over the Gaza Strip,” he says.
‘What all these acts have in common is the deliberate destruction of a group’
– Lee Mordechai, Israeli historian
Mordechai’s compendium details the killing of children by Israeli soldiers, the murder of entire families, the starvation and shooting of civilians, tanks running over prisoners and corpses, and much more.
Footnote 354 of the document shows footage of Palestinians being shot by Israeli forces while raising a white flag. The video footage, first published by Middle East Eye, shows many people waving white flags while apparently evacuating their homes. A woman with a small child is shot dead by an Israeli sniper, with the child managing to escape.
The historian first published the document in January and has been publishing updated versions of it ever since.
Middle East Eye for more