Geneva (Brussels Morning Newspaper) – On Tuesday, a United Nations Commission of Inquiry found that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and that senior Israeli officeholders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had instigated these acts in an attempt to eradicate the Palestinians.
According to the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry’s 72-page legal analysis, the strongest UN finding to date, genocide is happening in Gaza and continues to occur.
Two years after the war began in Gaza following Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023, the commission, set up to examine the rights situation in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, has published its latest report.
What did the UN Commission conclude about Israel’s actions?
According to the UN report, the scale of the killings, aid blockages, forced displacement, and destruction of a fertility clinic all serve to support its finding of genocide. This conclusion is backed by rights groups and others who have come to the same conclusion.
“Genocide is occurring in Gaza,”
Said Navi Pillay, head of the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory and a former International Criminal Court judge.
“The responsibility for these atrocity crimes lies with Israeli authorities at the highest echelons, who have orchestrated a genocidal campaign for almost two years now with the specific intent to destroy the Palestinian group in Gaza.”
How are Netanyahu’s statements linked to alleged genocidal intent?
Additionally, the commission found that statements by Netanyahu and other officials are “direct evidence of genocidal intent.” It references a letter he wrote to Israeli soldiers in November 2023, in which he drew a comparison to a “holy war of total annihilation” described in the Hebrew Bible, as seen in the context of the Gaza operation.
Which genocidal acts did the report accuse Israel of committing?
According to the report, Israeli authorities and forces have committed “four of the five genocidal acts” outlined in the 1948 Genocide Convention, since October 2023.
These are
“killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group”.
Investigators stated that explicit statements by Israeli civilian and military authorities, combined with the pattern of Israeli force, indicated conduct,
“indicated that the genocidal acts were committed with intent to destroy… Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as a group”.
How did Israeli authorities respond to the UN’s genocide report?
Israel immediately stated that it completely rejects the report, with the Foreign Ministry calling it distorted and false, and demanding that the Commission of Inquiry be abolished straight away.
Israel’s ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, Daniel Meron, called the report “scandalous” and “fake”, saying it had been authored by “Hamas proxies”.
“Israel categorically rejects the libellous rant published today by this commission of inquiry,”
Meron said.
