Rights and Accountability 21 June 2024
Wedad Al-Ghaf, a survivor of an Israeli bombing in Gaza, who lost her mother and brothers.
Al JazeeraThe head of Amnesty International says that Israel’s unprecedented violence in Gaza has proven international law to be “frankly useless.”
“We are really as close to the abyss as we have ever been,” Amnesty’s secretary general Agnès Callamard told Al Jazeera.
Callamard’s comments feature in a new film titled The Night Won’t End, an uncompromising examination of Israeli war crimes during the genocide in Gaza.
The new documentary is part of the Qatar-based channel’s Fault Lines series.
The film examines the genocide through the lens of four Palestinian families in Gaza and the massacres Israel has carried out against them. You can watch the full film in the video embedded below.
One of the families is that of Hind Rajab, the 6-year-old Palestinian girl murdered by Israeli troops in January while she was on the phone to the Palestine Red Crescent Society desperately calling for help.
Trapped in a car surrounded by the bodies of her dead family, Hind was the sole survivor of an Israeli massacre. The family were fleeing their Gaza City home.
The film includes harrowing audio of that phone call as well as interviews with Hind’s mother and Red Crescent workers as it details the doomed efforts to save the girl while she was pinned down in the car.After detailed coordination with Israeli occupation authorities, they sent paramedics to evacuate the surviving girl. Despite traveling along the exact route dictated by the Israeli military, the two paramedics were instantly shot dead by the Israeli soldiers when they arrived on the scene.
The bodies of Yousif Zeino and Ahmad al-Madhoun were only found two weeks later, along with the bodies of Hind and her six relatives.
Hind’s mother Wissam Hamada says in the film that she never had any faith in international law in the first place.
“I never felt that international laws or international organizations ever did anything for Gaza,” Hamada says. “It’s just ink on paper. They didn’t protect paramedics, journalists, children or civilians. Hind, Layan, my uncle, his wife and children were executed in cold blood.”
Hind’s killing caused outrage around the world.
In April student activists at Columbia University in New York renamed the building they occupied on campus “Hind’s Hall.” The hip-hop artist Macklemore later released a song of the same name.Speaking to Al Jazeera, Nisreen Qawas from the Palestine Red Crescent Society headquarters in Ramallah also relives the trauma of that day.
“What makes it more difficult for me: Is it only Hind?” she says. “Is there another one thousand [of] Hind’s story? Ten thousand Hind’s stories? That did not have a name and a story on the TV, on the news, was not spread?”
“They have opened the door to hell”
Israel’s genocidal war against the population of the Gaza Strip has so far killed more than 37,000 people since 7 October 2023 – a number thought to be a significant underestimate due to the large number of bodies that remain trapped under the rubble.
According to the film, by the end of 2023, “more journalists and aid workers had been killed in Gaza than in any other conflict of the last few decades.”
Amnesty’s Callamard has given similar warnings about the dire state of international law before.In April she told Democracy Now! that “the international system is on the brink of collapse” due to the refusal by the US and others to hold Israel accountable for its crimes.
In The Night Won’t End, Al Jazeera journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous also says that Israel’s assault on Gaza has “upended the system of international laws” created since 1945.
“The rules that were supposed to bind us together to prevent the worst from happening … those rules are no longer applicable,” Amnesty’s Callamard says. “Everything we created after World War II: that’s up for rewriting. And trust me it will not just be the United States and their allies who are gonna do that. They have opened the door to hell.”
Executive producer and co-writer of the film Laila al-Arian will speak to The Electronic Intifada livestream on Wednesday next week.
Tags
- Hind Rajab
- Al Jazeera
- Amnesty International
- Agnès Callamard
- Palestine Red Crescent Society
- Nisreen Qawas
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