Amnesty International on Wednesday said that it had gathered “sufficient evidence to believe” that Israel’s conduct during the war in Gaza amounts to genocide against the Palestinian people – a charge the Israeli government has vehemently denied.
The 296-page report details evidence gathered over nine months, outlining numerous instances in which Amnesty says Israeli forces and government authorities have committed three of five acts prohibited under the United Nations’ Genocide Convention – including the mass killing of Palestinian civilians, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life “calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part.”
“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,” Amnesty International Secretary General Agnès Callamard said in a statement.
Amnesty said that Israel is responsible for extensive and often indiscriminate aerial and ground attacks, widespread destruction of civilian infrastructure, the forced mass displacement of Palestinians across the besieged enclave, and the obstruction of humanitarian aid.
“There is only one reasonable inference that can be drawn from the evidence presented: genocidal intent has been part and parcel of Israel’s conduct in Gaza since 7 October 2023, including its military campaign,” Amnesty’s report states.
Israel launched the war in Gaza after Hamas-led militants carried out an attack on southern Israel on October 7 last year, killing 1,200 people and taking another 251 hostage. In a little over a year, more than 44,000 people in Gaza have been killed and 104,000 injured as a result of Israel’s ongoing military onslaught, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.
Israeli government lawyers, speaking earlier this year at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, rejected what they called “grossly distorted” accusations of genocide leveled against it by South Africa. The lawyers argued that the convention was adopted only to “address a malevolent crime of the most exceptional circumstances,” and was “not designed to address the brutal impact of intensive hostilities” on civilians during warfare. It called South Africa’s accusation “a concerted and cynical effort to pervert the meaning of the term ‘genocide’ itself.”
The report is the latest in a string of accusations over Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Over the weekend, former Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’lon – who served for three decades with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) – described the Israeli military’s actions in northern Gaza as “ethnic cleansing.” A United Nations Special Committee warned in November that Israel’s conduct in Gaza was “consistent with the characteristics of genocide.” And Human Rights Watch said last month that the forced mass displacement of Palestinians in Gaza amounted to a war crime and a crime against humanity. The military rejected those accusations and said its forces act within international law.
What constitutes a violation of the UN Genocide Convention?
The 1948 UN Genocide Convention, which Israel ratified in 1950, says that genocide has occurred when any of five prohibited acts are are carried out with the intent “to destroy in whole, or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”
The organization said it believes Israel’s acts were committed with the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza. As evidence for that, it cited calls by Israeli military and government officials for the targeting of Palestinians in Gaza using language that “equated Palestinian civilians with the enemy to be destroyed.” It also noted the use of indiscriminate weapons within densely populated areas, and actions taken by Israeli authorities to obstruct or prevent humanitarian aid from reaching the besieged enclave.
The investigation – which focuses on Israel’s actions between October 7, 2023, and July 2024 – examines the repeated and consistent targeting of residential buildings and civilian infrastructure in densely populated areas, including apartment buildings, religious sites, schools and markets.
The Israeli military has said that it makes “significant efforts to mitigate harm to civilians,” and that “throughout the conflict, Hamas cynically exploits the civilian environment.”
While Amnesty says that it recognizes that Hamas has put Palestinian civilians in danger by operating from, or in the vicinity of, densely populated residential areas, the organization asserts that this does did not relieve Israel from its own obligations under international humanitarian law to spare civilians and avoid indiscriminate or disproportionate attacks.
The human rights organization also noted the use of explosive weapons with wide area effects, such as US-manufactured Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM), in some cases without warning or between the hours of 11pm and 4am, when residents would likely be sleeping.
“Even where Israeli forces targeted what could be considered military objectives, Israel’s use of explosive weapons with wide area effects, especially aerial bombs of 250 pounds to 2,000 pounds, on residential buildings and in the proximity of hospitals in one of the world’s most densely populated areas likely constitute indiscriminate and/or disproportionate attacks,” Amnesty said.
In a detailed report verifying fatalities in Gaza in the first six months of the conflict, the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) said it “found close to 70 per cent to be children and women, indicating a systematic violation of the fundamental principles of international humanitarian law” on the part of the Israeli military.
It added that of the confirmed deaths, 80% were killed in residential buildings or similar housing, of which 44% were children and 26% were women.
In a series of case studies examined by Amnesty, the human rights organization highlighted a deadly Israeli strike on a residential building in Rafah in December 2023, which killed at least 30 civilians, including 11 children. Among the fatalities was three-month-old Ayla Nasman, who was killed alongside her mother, grandparents, and two siblings – aged just five and four. Ayla’s father, Ahmad, survived the attack. He said it took him four days to retrieve Ayla’s body from the rubble, and that he found his five-year-old daughter, Arwa, had been decapitated by the blast.
“While Amnesty International’s investigation has focused only on a small fraction of Israel’s aerial attacks, they are indicative of a pattern of repeated direct or indiscriminate attacks by the Israeli military in Gaza over the nine-month period under review,” the organization said.
The report also refers to the staggering number of injuries recorded over the course of the war, which Amnesty said meets the UN convention’s criteria of causing serious bodily or mental harm. According to the UN’s World Health Organization, approximately 22,500 people were estimated to have suffered life-changing injuries requiring long-term rehabilitation by late July, with more than 3,000 limb amputations reported. Recent data from the Palestinian Ministry of Health places the total number of injuries recorded at over 100,000.
As the humanitarian situation in Gaza grows more desperate, Amnesty International says Israel has brought the Palestinian population within the enclave “to the brink of collapse,” noting the “disastrous conditions” within the strip, caused by Israel’s destruction of critical infrastructure.
Evidence featured in the report explores the deepening hunger crisis civilians in Gaza are facing, with obstructions to vital humanitarian aid reaching the strip. According to the UN, the number of aid trucks entering Gaza was critically low in November, with the number of food trucks received last month equating to just 36% of the monthly average since 2023.
Amnesty’s report also examines the forced mass displacement of Palestinians in “unsafe and inhumane conditions,” with civilians repeatedly ordered by the Israeli military to evacuate to so-called “humanitarian zones,” which offer little in the way of shelter and have repeatedly been targeted by Israeli airstrikes.
“Israel has forcibly displaced 90% of Gaza’s 2.2 million inhabitants, many of them multiple times, into ever-shrinking, ever-changing pockets of land that lacked basic infrastructure, forcing people to live in conditions that exposed them to a slow and calculated death.”
In a statement on Wednesday, Callamard said the organization’s damning findings “must serve as a wake-up call” to the international community, warning that states who continue to transfer arms to Israel could be at risk of becoming complicit in genocide.
“All states with influence over Israel, particularly key arms suppliers like the USA and Germany, but also other EU member states, the UK and others, must act now to bring Israel’s atrocities against Palestinians in Gaza to an immediate end,” Callamard said. “This is genocide. It must stop now.”