The Palestinian Center for Human Rights is looking hard for novel ways to accuse Jews of heinous crimes in order to keep its European funding. The NGO, with known ties to the PFLP terror group, issued a report accusing Israel of intentionally attempting to prevent births in the Gaza Strip.
Really.
The paper takes as a given that Israel specifically intends to wipe out Palestinians, in part by actively and deliberately preventing them from giving birth.
The entire reason for this report is to shoehorn Israel into Article 2(d) of the Genocide Convention, which says, "In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:....(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group."
Hence the title of the report.
It doesn't bother trying to prove intention, because it can't. It just asserts it, and then lists several examples of pregnant women caught in a war that their side started, doing some hand waving, and pretending that they somehow proved that Israel specifically and intentionally targeted those women and that they weren't just stuck in the middle of battles.
The anecdotes given are not researched and verified. At least one is almost certainly a lie:
After being exposed to white phosphorus fired by IOF on al-Wehdah Street in Gaza, I suffered from severe suffocation and was 8-month pregnant. I fled to al-Remal Preparatory School and after two weeks, it was my due date so I went to the Patient’s Friends Clinic to check on my baby. The doctor told me that the baby was not moving and died. I was totally shocked and did not want to believe at first because I was 9-month pregnant and could feel the baby’ moving every day. I did another checkup with another doctor on the same day, but he confirmed what the first doctor said, “you lost your baby.” He asked me if I was exposed to white phosphorus and I said yes. He told me it was the reason behind my miscarriage as many women like me lost their babies for the same reason. There was a woman beside me who lost her baby in the same circumstances. I was so sad and worn out mentally as the due date of my baby marked his death.
Israel would not use white phosphorus in the middle of Gaza City. The only report I'd seen was Amnesty and HRW saying that Israel used WP in the first week of the war in the port area of Gaza City based on photographs. I have not seen the accusation since then. There would be lots of photos because WP use has a distinctive look. But suddenly, this woman is an expert on what white phosphorus looks and smells like, as opposed to any other smoke.
Another woman claims that her baby died January 18 because the NICU in Kamal Odwan Hospital had no electricity - but I cannot find any reports of babies dying from lack of electricity in that hospital in January (there were such reports in November.) I cannot find any mention of electricity shortages in that hospital in January at all in the WHO or OCHA sites; Israel arrested dozens of terrorists from that hospital in December.
PCHR does not even make a pretense of checking the facts from these "testimonies." Or even fo having a professional methodology for the interviews to begin with.
One could use the same methodology to find all mothers who miscarried in 2023 and ask how many ate cornflakes for breakfast that week, then writing a report about how the cornflakes cause miscarriages.
What is clear is that the report's conclusions were written before the report itself was, and PCHR than looked for any evidence it could make up to confirm what it already determined.
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