From Srebrenica to Gaza, why ‘never again’ keeps failing

The raw statistics speak to the scale of the suffering in two places, separated by decades.

Israel has killed more than 58,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 2023, many of them women and children, and injured more than 138,000.

With constant bombardment, man-made famine, and tactics like declaring a safe zone and then bombing it, experts say what Israel is doing amounts to genocide.

In the Bosnian War from 1992 to 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed some 68,000 Bosniaks, rounding people up based on ethnicity.

On July 11, 1995, Serb fighters rounded up and killed more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in a United Nations-declared “safe zone” in the town of Srebrenica.

That was the only legally recognised genocide of the Bosnian War.

On the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide and as Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza continues, Al Jazeera spoke to Iva Vukusic, assistant professor in international history at Utrecht University, and Nimer Sultany, Palestinian legal scholar at the University of London, about the parallels between the two.

Safe zones that aren’t

Israeli Defence Minister Israel Katz has said his country intends to round up some 600,000 people who are in what Israel once designated as a “safe zone” – and subsequently violated several times – and push them into a “concentration zone” in Rafah.

People would only be allowed to leave this “concentration zone” if they were “voluntarily emigrating” from Gaza.

“We have seen … Israeli academics, legal scholars, really objecting to this plan and calling it a manifest example of a war crime,” Vukusic explained.

“It is a concentration camp. I am sorry,” former Israeli Prime Minister said bluntly about the Katz announcement in an interview with the Guardian on Sunday.

Implied in Israel’s claim that it would secure this concentration zone from the outside, and that aid would be distributed within, is the idea that this zone will be yet another Israeli “safe zone” in its war on Gaza.

A unilaterally declared safe zone, however, does not include the external controls and mechanisms that were part of the Srebrenica safe zone 30 years ago, Vukusic pointed out. These controls included international peacekeepers as well as UN Security Council Resolution 819, declaring Srebrenica a safe area.

The UN declaration of the safe zone came after thousands of Bosnians streamed into Srebrenica, seeking safety from relentless attacks by Bosnian Serb fighters acting under “Directive 7” to cut Srebrenica off from any other areas.

Hemmed in and starving, people were trapped.

The external mechanisms monitoring it did not prevent the massacre of thousands of Bosniak boys and men, a failure of the international community’s pledge to “never again” allow mass atrocities. And, in Gaza, even the appearance of UN protection mechanisms is lacking.

“We see that failure of ‘never again’ when it comes to Gaza, because Israel has systematically expelled and dismantled any kind of UN presence and prevented international organisations from performing their minimal humanitarian objectives,” Sultany said.

In Bosnia, as in Gaza, people were forced to flee for their lives in the face of relentless violence by the attacking forces.

Israel has issued expulsion order after expulsion order, pushing people out of one part of Gaza into another, then back again. It declared certain areas as “safe zones”, then proceeded to bomb them as refugees slept in flimsy tents that Israeli bombs turned into infernos in seconds.

Displacement and its physical and psychological toll on refugees have been studied in various contexts, with scientists finding that displaced people suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, and anxiety disorders at much higher rates due to the uncertainty of displacement, the destruction of social support systems, and the inability to maintain a semblance of “normal life”.

Add to that the forced starvation Israel is imposing on Gaza, which takes a physical and mental toll, as people watch their loved ones die of malnutrition or from curable diseases that their bodies are too weak to fight.

Sultany pointed out that “forcible transfers, in which Palestinians are being forced into increasingly shrinking spaces with limited ability to survive and dire humanitarian conditions”, have been a hallmark of Israel’s war on Gaza.

Therefore, while Katz’s comments were a continuation/extension of what was already being seen on the ground, this now resembles an official plan.

“The question of forcible transfer is part of the declared objectives of the so-called Gideon’s Chariots military campaign in early May 2025 [and] it was also part of the so-called General’s Plan in northern Gaza in October till December 2024,” he clarified.

How to make a society accept genocide

Israel’s actions in Gaza are widely documented, with daily accounts of unarmed Palestinians being shot by snipers or bombed from above.

Israel has been denounced for its indiscriminate killing of civilians, especially after investigations showed that its army had allowed itself a higher “margin of error” when it came to killing civilians in this conflict, compared to its past wars on Gaza.

Both experts argued that this is widely accepted within Israel because Palestinians have been dehumanised, much as Bosniaks were during the 1990s.

Sultany said, in both Bosnia and Gaza today, civilians have been stripped of their civilian status, or innocence, through repeated messaging to society at large.

Early examples include Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu framing the assault on Gaza and its civilians as a “holy war” and using Biblical references to equate Palestinians to ancient foes to justify these actions by saying: “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible.”

Most recently,  far-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said in May that Gaza’s population would soon be choked into a small strip of land to make them “totally despairing, understanding that there is no hope and nothing to look for in Gaza, and will be looking for relocation to begin a new life in other places”.

Documents from the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia pointed to several instances of propaganda by Bosnian Serb leaders to dehumanise Bosniaks and brand them as “foreigners”, including claiming that Bosniaks were all assassins with “kill lists” of Bosnian Serbs.

Such descriptors, Sultany said, give aggressors a “justification for the killing of civilians” and make the killing more palatable to society.

“We see all of that now in Gaza in the last 21 months,” Sultany added.

Vukusic agreed, telling Al Jazeera that in both Bosnia and Gaza, there has been a “deep process of dehumanisation to allow for the societal acceptance of such acts where you see a people [who are] civilians as enemies”.

There becomes a “broad acceptance of acts committed by the government where only the suffering of yourself and your people [is seen] and it absolutely does not matter what the costs are for somebody else”, she added.

This shift is apparent in how freely and often Israeli officials have made openly genocidal statements.

Serbian leaders, including Slobodan Milosevic (president of the Republic of Serbia from 1990 to 1997 and Serbia and Montenegro until 2000), were tried by the International Court of Justice for genocide and war crimes. Milosevic died before he was convicted.

“If you compare what Slobodan Milosevic was saying to some of the things that Israeli ministers are saying, Slobodan Milosevic was never, ever that open and was never, ever that explicit,” she said.

Because statements by Israeli officials are so explicit, “the determination of the genocidal intent would probably be much easier to make”, she added.

Inaction, politics and the international community

Western nations were initially reluctant to involve themselves in the Bosnian War, but the horror of Srebrenica eventually moved them to action, with NATO conducting an air campaign against Bosnian Serb forces in August and September 1995, eventually leading to the Dayton Peace Agreement, which ended the war.

Yet many of the countries that led the defence of the Bosniaks after Srebrenica are some of Israel’s biggest backers.

“In many ways, this is a Western genocide,” Sultany said. “There is a US-Israel genocide, a genocide that was backed from the beginning by major European and North American powers.

“This is fundamental to understanding the Western support for and justification for the genocide in Palestine,” Sultany said.

“It’s not only that the West was a reluctant observer, and they failed to prevent the genocide. They were actively from the beginning supporting it, shielding it diplomatically and politically and financing and arming it.”

Elusive justice

What did justice look like for the victims in Bosnia, and is that a model that could be followed in Gaza?

In the case of Bosnia, there is no universal position on the question of justice among the victims.

Vukusic said some were satisfied with the prison sentences given to high-level officials convicted of genocide, while others are disappointed because not all the hundreds of people who participated in war crimes or genocidal acts were held to account.

Sultany, after a recent visit to Bosnia, is convinced that Bosnians have been failed by international justice.

“The initial case was brought in 1993, [but] was delivered in 2007, almost 14 years later,” he said. “So the wheels of justice grind very slowly.”

He added that Srebrenica, a single massacre, was singled out among years of massacres and ethnic cleansing committed by Bosnian Serb forces.

“Anyone who was killed before or after or [in] different areas is not considered a victim of genocide because of the detrimental effects of the legal delimitation of what is a genocide in the case of Bosnia,” he said.

In Gaza, where attacks against Palestinians are ongoing, justice may be difficult to envision. While the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defence minister, Yoav Gallant, in November 2024, the international community has failed to follow through on them.

Vukusic said expectations should be tempered when considering international justice, but that prosecutions are still important, allowing facts to be established in court, and messages sent about what the law does not allow.

For example, Vukusic said: “You cannot cut off a civilian population [from food and water], you cannot make them thirsty and hungry and without medicine, you cannot bomb universities, you cannot raze to the ground a whole area where two million people live.

“Those [messages] may be helpful, but nothing is going to restore what people have lost,” she said. “Nothing is going to bring back dead family members.”

“In both cases [Bosnia and Palestine], there is a failure of prevention mechanisms,” Sultany said. “And the fact that it fails again … is a miscarriage of justice in itself that requires us to rethink the international legal order.”

Sultany added that the ongoing injustices against Palestinians are down to “long-term impunity” and “the fact that the Israelis have not been held to account by any meaningful legal mechanisms”.

“Never again” has not been put into practice when it comes to Palestinians, according to Sultany.

“We need to go to the root cause of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide … to guarantee that ‘never again’ becomes an effective and practical possibility,” he said.