Amnesty International has accused the state of Israel of carrying out genocide during its offensive in Gaza. Israel has denied the allegations in the report, which was published on Thursday.
The London-based human rights group said it reached the conclusion after months of analysing incidents and statements of Israeli officials. Amnesty said the legal threshold for the crime had been met.
The 1948 Genocide Convention, enacted in the wake of the mass murder of Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”.
Israel has consistently rejected any accusation of genocide, saying it has respected international law and has a right to defend itself after the cross-border Hamas attack from Gaza on October 7th, 2023, that precipitated the war.
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At hearings earlier this year before the UN’s International Court of Justice in The Hague, where Israel faces accusations of genocide brought by South Africa, lawyers for the country denied the charge. They argued that there was no genocidal intent and no genocide in Israel’s conduct of the war, whose stated objective is the eradication of Hamas.
This is the first time Amnesty International has issued an accusation of genocide during a conflict. The investigation focused on the period between October 2023 and June 2024. Israel has since expanded its offensive.
In the report, entitled “You Feel Like You are Subhuman”: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza, Amnesty International documents the impacts of Israel’s military offensive launched in response to the October 7th, 2023 attack by Hamas, which resulted in the deaths of 1,200 people and the abduction of 251, according to Israel. Gaza’s health authority has said that Israel has killed 44,500 Palestinians and wounded 105,500 in the conflict since.
Presenting the report to journalists in The Hague, Amnesty International secretary general Agnés Callamard said it “demonstrates that Israel has carried out acts prohibited in the Genocide Convention, with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. These acts include killings, causing serious bodily harm and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction. Month after month, Israel has treated Palestinians in Gaza as a subhuman group unworthy of human rights and dignity, demonstrating its intent to physically destroy them.”
The report said Israel has brought Gaza’s population to the “brink of collapse” by conducting “indiscriminate attacks, often wiping out entire multigenerational families”. Israel has caused “unprecedented destruction, levelling entire cities and destroying critical infrastructure, agricultural land and cultural and religious sites. It thereby rendered large swathes of Gaza uninhabitable.” It said evacuation orders have displaced “90 per cent of Gaza’s population into ever-shrinking unsafe pockets of land under inhumane conditions”.
Amnesty International analysed “the overall pattern of Israel’s conduct in Gaza [and] reviewed [120] dehumanising and genocidal statements by Israeli government and military officials”. While agreeing that Israel has “lawfully targeted Hamas” which operates from civilian areas, Amnesty International contended that Israel has not taken “all feasible precautions to spare civilians and avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks”, prohibited under international law.
Israel’s foreign ministry called the report “deplorable and fanatical” and “entirely false and based on lies”.
The Israeli press office did not reply to a request for comment by The Irish Times. – Additional reporting: Reuters
