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In my article in the 18 July 2025 issue of the New Statesman, I suggested that the conduct of Israel in the Gaza Strip amounted to genocide. This view has been disputed, but it is now widely held by international lawyers and genocide scholars. More recently, a United Nations Commission of Inquiry has reported that it is “clear that there is an intent to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza through acts that meet the criteria set forth in the Genocide Convention”. The commission is not a court, nor are its conclusions binding on the United Nations. The force of its conclusions depends entirely on the quality of its factual research and legal reasoning. However, it has to be said that this is a measured report, which makes a formidable case.

Genocide is perhaps the most serious of all international crimes, and it is correspondingly hard to prove. The Genocide Convention of 1948, to which Israel is a party, defines it as doing specified acts “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. The acts in question are: killing members of the group; causing them serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; or forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. It is not difficult to prove that such acts have occurred. In today’s world, they are depressingly common and widely publicised. The main problem about proving genocide against a state is that it requires evidence of a specific intent by responsible authorities of the state to do these things with the conscious intention of wholly or partly destroying the relevant group.

Two kinds of evidence of intent are potentially relevant. First, there may be direct evidence of the state’s intentions, derived from the words of its responsible authorities. Secondly, the facts themselves may rule out any other explanation. Most allegations of genocide are based only on an inference from the operational facts. They commonly fail because the standard laid down by international tribunals in the cases arising out of the civil wars of the former Yugoslavia is a tough one to meet. Genocidal intent must be the “only reasonable inference” from the facts cited.

The strength of the UN commission’s report is that it states the law in the way that is most favourable to Israel. It accepts all the reservations of international tribunals about the dangers of inferring genocidal intent from the operational facts alone. If there is a real strategic or military objective that sufficiently explains what the aggressor is doing, other than the elimination of the target population, then the state may be guilty of war crimes. But it will not normally be guilty of genocide.

The commission has set out its factual findings in detail, with references to the evidence at each stage. They focus on the sheer scale and indiscriminate character of the killing, the attacks on civilians including women and children, the blocking of food supplies and humanitarian aid, the targeting of hospitals, schools and housing, and the deliberate shooting of hundreds of Palestinians waiting at food distribution centres or trying to get there. Israel claims to be carrying out “surgical” strikes. It is therefore fair to assume that operations like the attacks on each building of Gaza’s only fertility clinic was deliberately intended. These things cannot be explained by any ordinary strategic or military purpose. The destruction of Hamas, if it was achievable at all, did not require violence as extreme or as widespread as this.

What makes the commission’s case so powerful is the availability of direct evidence of Israel’s purpose in the shape of statements by responsible authorities of the state from the president and the prime minister downwards. This is the most comprehensive survey to date of this material. The Israeli president, Isaac Herzog, has stated that “it’s an entire nation out there that is responsible”. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has promised to inflict “mighty vengeance” on “all of the places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in, that wicked city, we will turn them into rubble. I say to residents of Gaza: leave now because we will operate forcefully everywhere.” The head of Israeli military intelligence until April 2024 recently declared that “the fact that 50,000 have already been killed in Gaza is necessary and required for future generations”, and that for every Israeli killed on 7 October 2023, 50 Palestinians should die, and it does not matter if they are children, noting that “they need a Nakba from time to time to feel the price”. Some of the operations, for example against civilian housing and humanitarian aid agencies, have been explained by Israeli ministers as an attempt to force the Palestinians out of the Gaza strip. These statements, and there are many others, dehumanise not just Hamas but the entire people of Gaza. And they are not just words. On the face of it, they describe what the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) are actually doing.

Israel’s only official response has come from its ambassador to the United Nations, who described the report as a “libellous rant”. Unreasoned statements like these have become such a familiar response to any criticism of Israeli operations that they no longer carry much weight. The nearest that one gets to a reasoned response has come from the pro-Israeli lobbying group UN Watch, which has published a paper entitled “Legal Analysis of Pillay Commission’s September 2025 Report”. This contests some of the commission’s facts, generally by reference to IDF sources. It also offers a rather contrived interpretation of the statements of Israeli leaders. But it does not confront the fundamental problem that the scale and character of Israeli operations in Gaza go well beyond anything that can reasonably be explained by legitimate military objectives. This is why responsible organisations have concluded that the targeting and elimination of at least part of the Palestinian population is the only reasonable explanation of what is happening.

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[Further reading: A question of intent]

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