Israeli authorities have caused massive and deliberate forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza, in what amounts to a war crime, a new report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) has found.

The international human rights organization analyzed satellite imagery, Israeli forced evacuation orders and statements by senior Israeli officials to show that authorities in Israel are deliberately and permanently making returning to large areas of Gaza effectively impossible for the Palestinian population, Al Jazeera reported.

“Israeli forces have destroyed the majority of Gaza’s water, sanitation, communications, energy and transport infrastructure as well as its schools and hospitals” and “systematically razed orchards, fields and greenhouses,” report author Nadia Hardman told journalists in a news conference in advance of the report’s release on Thursday.

“So much civilian infrastructure has been destroyed that much of Gaza has been rendered uninhabitable,” Hardman said.

In addition to the widespread destruction carried out by Israeli forces across the besieged enclave, HRW found that Israel has continued to expand three so-called “buffer zones” by razing large areas of Gaza’s cities, including Rafah, and building Israeli military access roads and structures to make them permanent features in the Palestinian territory.

“A new road constructed by the Israeli military that bisects the north and south halves of Gaza and runs east to west – this ‘Netzarim Corridor‘ as it’s called – is more than 4km [2.4 miles] wide and at the time of publication keeps expanding towards north Gaza and the south, beyond Wadi Gaza,” said Hardman.

The Human Rights Watch report said that the razing and destruction of the vast majority of Palestinian homes, fields, orchards, wooded areas and infrastructure in these so-called “buffer zones” was “one of the clearest examples of forcible transfer in Gaza”.

Notably, the rights group said that to qualify as a war crime, the forcible transfer of a population must be carried out intentionally. The report’s authors provided almost two dozen statements from senior Israeli ministers supporting the forcible transfer of Palestinians.

For example, on April 29, 2024, Israel’s far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, “There are no half measures. [The Gaza cities of] Rafah, Deir el-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihilation.”