Against a backdrop of exploding violence in the Middle East, New York Magazine’s latest cover story makes the case that Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel, abetted by two American administrations, has likely committed hundreds, if not thousands, of war crimes in Gaza. In a painstakingly researched and compellingly argued 10,000-word feature, contributor Suzy Hansen looks at how Israel, with the help of the U.S., broke not only Gaza but the foundations of humanitarian law. “In its annihilative force and ambition, the Israeli campaign is unique among modern conflicts. In fact, the term war crime is not even adequate for what’s happening in Gaza, in that it suggests that there is a war happening and there are some crimes in it. Gaza is different, the number of war crimes virtually incalculable, the war not really a war but rather the ceaseless pummeling of one side by the other,” she writes.
While accusations that Israel was committing war crimes in Gaza began not long after the conflict’s start in October 2023, they have, in the new phase of the Israeli campaign that began in March, escalated; now, even allies are calling for limits, and former Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert and former State Department spokesman Matthew Miller are speaking out. Hansen’s article lays out the evidence for Israeli war crimes while explaining how difficult they can be to convict under international law. She looks closely at America’s role in both laying the groundwork for Israel’s conduct with the post-9/11 war on terror and providing weapons and moral cover during the current conflict. “What’s remarkable about the U.S. position in all this is its assumed passivity, as if somehow the most powerful country in the world were composed of people with no power. The dance of politics, the obsession with optics, the influence of lobbies, petty careerism, ambition — all of this has eroded something more fundamental: the government’s grasp of the seriousness of life,” she writes. While the U.S. has been undergoing a reckoning about Biden’s age, “few have asked how his senility affected his direction of U.S. policy in Gaza. Instead, administration veterans keep repeating that the one area in which Biden remained engaged was foreign policy, as if those policies were actually good ones and not flawed, cataclysmic, or potentially criminal.”
“I would say every person in the Biden administration who signed off on policies, decisions, and statements on Gaza completely forfeits any right to critique the Trump administration for lack of morals, lack of adherence to law, lack of respect for facts, because they laid the groundwork for it,” former State Department official Stacy Gilbert tells Hansen. “Trump and Elon Musk have absolutely terrorized government staff. But the undermining of trust of their own staff happened on the Democrats’ watch.”
Of her experience writing this deeply researched and reported feature, Hansen says: “I was surprised by how difficult it is to prove war crimes and how dispiriting the realities of the law can be. I will never cease to be surprised by the level of suffering in Gaza — it is always worse than what you remember. And someday we will find out it is worse than what we know.”
“Suzy Hansen has written an unforgettable account that, in its vivid description of slaughter and precise analysis of humanitarian law, demands our attention,” says New York Magazine editor-in-chief David Haskell. “She helps us see the vastness of human suffering that Netanyahu’s government, abetted by both Biden’s and Trump’s, has inflicted on the Gazans; it is almost impossible to read the first chapter of her article without asking yourself, How was this allowed? But as she explains, our global commitment to preventing the morally unconscionable — the legal framework that came out of the tribunals in Nuremberg and Tokyo, and has since been codified in numerous treaties and by international courts — has swiftly collapsed, and the world may be forever more barbaric, and dangerous, as a result.”
Hansen has written for outlets including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and The New York Review of Books, in addition to this magazine, and is the author of the book Notes on a Foreign Country, which was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction. She lived in Istanbul for 12 years and wrote the forthcoming book From Life Itself: Turkey, Istanbul, and a Neighborhood in the Age of Erdoğan.
Elsewhere in the issue, Kerry Howley writes an almost farcical account of the Department of Defense under Pete Hegseth, and Jessica Bennett catches up with Trump accuser E. Jean Carroll on the eve of the publication of her secret new book.