Two major Israeli human rights groups released separate reports on Monday concluding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, joining a growing number of international voices that have made similar accusations against the country that has been destroying the Palestinian territory over the last 22 months.
In their comprehensive reports, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights lay out how Israel, as an occupying power, has used its government and military to systematically obliterate Gaza in a way that both destroys the Palestinian people and renders the territory completely uninhabitable.
“We are seeing a combination of genocidal practices – meaning mass killing, starvation and destruction of civilian infrastructure, and you can add destruction of cultural institutions – and a policy whose aim or declared aim is ethnic cleansing, all combined with statements by many senior Israeli officials throughout the war that the goal is destruction of Gazan society as a group,” genocide researcher Shmuel Lederman said in a B’Tselem video announcing the group’s report, “Our Genocide.”
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As with previous allegations of genocide, the Israel Defense Forces said Monday that the reports’ claims are “unfounded” and that the Israeli military is rooting out Hamas while “taking unprecedented measures to prevent harm to civilians.”
Both human rights groups have said that wanting to take down Hamas does not justify the mass starvation and killing of Palestinians.
B’Tselem explains that while decades of Israeli occupation and dehumanization of Palestinians set the stage for the current catastrophe, a genocide requires a trigger or rationale — and for the Israeli government and its Western allies, that was Hamas’ attack that killed more than 1,200 people in Israel and took hostage about 250 more on Oct. 7, 2023.
“The trauma fell on fertile ground for the most extreme right-wing government Israel has ever had. A messianic government that believes this is ‘a miraculous time,’” said Sarit Michaeli, the group’s international advocacy director. “It’s simply their chance to advance an agenda.”
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Both reports detail the violence by Israeli soldiers and U.S. bombs that has killed more than 55,000 Palestinians — a Gaza Health Ministry figure believed to be a gross undercount — and led to mass starvation, displacement and disease. The Israeli airstrikes, Gaza’s destroyed health system, Israel’s blockade of humanitarian aid and mass arrests that have essentially resulted in torture camps reveal an effort to exterminate the Palestinian people, the groups argue.
“Systemic failure became self-reinforcing: displacement led to overcrowding, overcrowding accelerated disease, and disease spread unchecked amid collapsing sanitation,” PHRI said in its report, “A Health Analysis of the Gaza Genocide.”
“The siege deepened this collapse: medical evacuations were halted, crossings were sealed and the little remaining humanitarian aid dried up entirely,” it continued. “Malnourishment surged – especially among children, whose bodies deteriorated rapidly in the absence of food, water and medical care.”
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The reports conclude that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza has met at least some of the articles of the U.N.’s 1948 genocide convention, but stress that the world must also recognize the violence as genocide and stop it, even if the International Court of Justice has yet to issue a final ruling on South Africa’s charge that Israel is committing genocide.
PHRI warns that even if Israel stopped its offensive today, the decimation of health care and life-sustaining infrastructure has already ensured the Palestinian people in Gaza won’t recover for years. B’Tselem warns that unless the world immediately puts a stop to Israel’s campaign of violence, the genocide it concludes has been occurring in Gaza will also encompass the Palestinian people in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and in the State of Israel.
“Preventing genocide is not just a moral duty. It is also a legal obligation. So the leaders cooperating with Israel’s policies are accomplices to this crime,” Michaeli said. “People and governments must use every means available under international law to make the Israeli government stop the genocide in Gaza now.”
