Two prominent Israeli human rights groups have accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza, adding to a small but growing chorus of domestic critics warning their country is carrying out war crimes.
B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights Israel released separate reports on Monday saying they had reached the conclusion after documenting 21 months of Israeli military activity and public statements from political leaders.
The reports cited what B’Tselem said was the “mass killing” of Gazans and “large-scale destruction of infrastructure”, while PHRI described “a deliberate and systematic dismantling of Gaza’s health and life-sustaining systems”.
The authors said these actions, taken alongside the severe restrictions on the entry of food and medical supplies for large stretches of the war, were designed by the Israeli government to make Gaza unlivable for Palestinians.
“Israel is acting in a deliberate, co-ordinated and systematic way to destroy the Palestinians in Gaza, in an attack that is aimed at the entire group, as such,” said Yuli Novak, executive director of B’Tselem.
“This has been declared countless times by Israeli politicians, this is what is happening on the ground, and this is precisely the definition of genocide.”
The reports come amid a wave of growing anger over Israel’s conduct during the war, which began after Hamas’s October 7, 2023 attack on southern Israel.
Dozens of Israel’s allies, including the UK and European powers, this month condemned “the drip feeding of aid and the inhumane killing of civilians” in the strip, after months of Israeli restrictions on the entry of food pushed Gaza to the brink of famine.
Israel is also battling the allegation of genocide at the International Court of Justice, the UN’s highest court, in a case brought by South Africa and backed by nearly 100 other countries.
The Israeli government and military did not immediately reply to a request for comment on the allegations.
But Israel has vehemently denied the suggestion that it is committing genocide — or any war crimes — in Gaza, saying that it acts under the restraints of the laws of war; that civilian casualties are unavoidable because of how Hamas operates in a dense urban environment; and that there is no shortage of food in the enclave.
Ron Dermer, one of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s closest advisers, told a podcast last week that the claim Israel was committing genocide was “absurd”.
Domestic criticism of Israel’s war conduct has long been overshadowed within the country by the collective trauma that followed Hamas’s October 7 cross-border raid, the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.
Hamas killed at least 1,200 people, injured tens of thousands, and took some 250 hostages, according to local officials. Some 50 hostages remain in the strip, about 20 of whom are believed to be alive.
Israel’s retaliation has killed nearly 60,000 Palestinians, destroyed nearly all civilian infrastructure, and pushed Gaza to the point of mass starvation.
Israel buckled to international pressure over the weekend, saying it would create humanitarian corridors to facilitate the entry of more trucks carrying aid.
In recent months, former military chief Moshe Ya’alon and former prime minister Ehud Olmert have separately said that Israel’s military is ethnically cleansing northern Gaza.
Historians of the Holocaust, like Amos Goldberg at Hebrew University and Omer Bartov at Brown University, have also said that the Israeli military’s actions amount to genocide.
But the allegations are far from mainstream opinion in Israel, which was founded as a sanctuary for the Jewish people after 6mn Jews were murdered during the Holocaust.
Danny Orbach, a military historian at Hebrew University who is publishing a report rebutting the accusation of genocide, argued that Israel is being unfairly judged by the results of a messy, urban war in which Hamas uses civilians as a shield.
Israel’s creation of “humanitarian” zones, accompanied by evacuation orders to civilians — although far from perfect — indicate that it was seeking to avoid civilian casualties, he said.
“If a power is trying make a genocide, at the very least, you have to want to maximise civilian casualties, because you want to destroy or kill as many people as you can from the target group,” Orbach said.
The term “genocide” was coined in 1944 by a Polish lawyer who fled the Nazis, and is now defined by the United Nations “as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”.
B’Tselem argues that the October 7 attacks generated such existential anxiety in Israeli society that policies towards Gazans have transformed “from repression and control to destruction and annihilation”.
PHRI said that assaults on Gazan hospitals, the killing of nurses and doctors and preventing the entry of life-saving medical equipment and supplies was “not incidental to war, but rather part of a deliberate policy targeting Palestinians as a group”.
Aseel Aburass of PHRI estimated that life expectancy in Gaza had already dropped by 35 years, and warned that hunger, infection and lack of medical care meant that it would continue to fall.
Israel denies that it is targeting healthcare infrastructure, claiming that Hamas hides its fighters among medical personnel and operates in tunnel complexes underneath Gazan hospitals.
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