Despite Gaza ceasefire, ‘we haven’t seen the worst’: B’Tselem chief

Washington, DC – Yuli Novak, the executive director of the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, has a warning for politicians in the United States and across the world: The situation in Israel-Palestine is “disastrous”.

Despite the US-brokered ceasefire that scaled back the Israeli attacks in Gaza, Novak told media this week that the conditions are more dangerous than ever.

“Our warning is that we haven’t seen the worst,” she said, stressing that Israel must be held accountable for its abuses in Gaza.

Over the past two years, numerous human rights groups have released reports accusing Israel of carrying out a genocide in Gaza — a campaign to destroy the Palestinian people.

United Nations investigators, for instance, determined that Israel’s actions in the territory matched the definition of genocide under international law.

But B’Tselem provided another layer of analysis with its landmark report, called Our Genocide, in July.

It dissected the decades-long history of Israeli policies that laid the groundwork for the carnage in Gaza, including the apartheid system, demographic engineering, the systemic dehumanisation of Palestinians, and a culture of impunity for abuses.

Those conditions, Novak said, have been further entrenched since the war began.

“As long as these things are still in place, we are very concerned that the violence that we’ve seen is not over,” she said.

Killings continue

Since the ceasefire started, Israel has killed at least 360 Palestinians in Gaza, including 32 in a wave of air strikes across the territory earlier this week.

The Israeli government has also continued to impose restrictions on humanitarian aid to the enclave, including on temporary shelters needed to replace tents for tens of thousands of Palestinians who faced flooding earlier this month.

Israel’s war on Gaza has killed more than 69,000 Palestinians and turned most of Gaza into rubble.

In the occupied West Bank, conditions have been worsening, with intensifying settlement expansion and deadly Israeli military raids.

On Thursday, Human Rights Watch released a report documenting that Israeli forces forcibly displaced 32,000 Palestinians from their homes in Jenin, Tulkarem and Nur Shams.

Israeli settlers have also increased their attacks, regularly descending on Palestinian villages to torch homes and vehicles and at times kill civilians — often with the protection of the Israeli military.

Novak stressed that settler attacks are a form of Israeli state violence.

“They are Israeli civilians living in the West Bank being armed by the state. Sometimes, many of them wear [army] uniforms. Sometimes these are soldiers on reserve duty that are on a break,” she said.

Some Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, have condemned settler violence, but Novak dismissed the move as a ploy to blame Israel’s policies on a “small group of crazy settlers”.

Novak also highlighted that most of the killing and destruction in the West Bank is carried out by official Israeli forces, not settlers. “So this is another arm of the violence that Israel inflicts on Palestinians,” she said.

Meeting US lawmakers

Novak and her B’Tselem colleague Kareem Jubran have been in Washington, DC, this week, where they met with US lawmakers, including Democratic Senators Peter Welch, Jeff Merkley and Chris Van Hollen, as well as Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.

Novak said the group wants to stress the need for accountability for the genocide in Gaza.

“We are talking about a governing system, the Israeli system, that conducted genocide for two years — war crimes on a daily basis — and got away with it with no accountability,” she said.

“The current situation is probably the most dangerous that we’ve ever been in because not only this violence and this criminality took place, it was also normalised, and in any moment, it can start again, go back to the same scale.”

US President Donald Trump has falsely claimed that there is peace in the Middle East for the first time in 3,000 years because of the truce he helped broker in Gaza.

And earlier this week, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution backing the US president’s 20-point plan for Gaza, which calls for an end to the fighting, gradual Israeli withdrawal and the deployment of an international force to the territory.

The plan would also see Hamas disarm and Gaza’s governance handed over to an international commission, dubbed “the Board of Peace”.

It has no accountability or compensation mechanism for the horrors that Israel unleashed on Gaza for two years.

Novak said Trump’s plan is disconnected from the reality on the ground.

“It just allows everybody to move on, instead of dealing with the situation and demanding Israel not only to be held accountable but also stop this kind of systematic oppression over the Palestinians,” she said.

Trump’s plan

Since the Security Council embraced the ceasefire deal, Israel has faced less international pressure. Even the push for measures like suspending the country from the Eurovision singing contest and European football have lost momentum.

On Monday, Germany announced it was lifting restrictions on weapons exports to Israel, citing the truce.

“That is probably what scares us the most because we see regression here,” Novak said.

Jubran, B’Tselem’s field research director, also stressed the need for accountability, saying that the previous rounds of wars on Gaza from 2006 onwards enabled the genocide.

“That’s what allowed the genocide system to be more brazen in order to do its crime against the Palestinians in Gaza,” he told media.

Despite the lack of political or legal accountability, Novak hailed the growing international public awareness of Israel’s atrocities, which she said politicians are choosing to ignore.

“If there is something that gives us hope in this really, really terrible moment, it is the fact that many people around the world are able to see through the Israeli propaganda and just to make sense of what their eyes saw, and some of the voices of the victims were able to come out from Gaza and from the West Bank,” she said.

“So people do understand. We are in the moment where people need to demand their leaders and politicians to hold Israel accountable.”