OCCUPIED PALESTINE — Israeli human rights group B’Tselem has said Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza in a report released on Monday.
Titled “Our Genocide”, the report said, “An examination of Israel’s policy in the Gaza Strip and its horrific outcomes, together with statements by senior Israeli politicians and military commanders about the goals of the attack, leads to the unequivocal conclusion that Israel is taking coordinated action to intentionally destroy Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip.”
“In other words: Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.”
B’Tselem’s report runs 79 pages and documents interviews with numerous Palestinians in Gaza who have lived through the last 22 months of assault.
The report examines the Israeli violations against Palestinians, going back to the 1948 foundation of the Israeli state, which “had a clear objective from the outset: to cement the supremacy of the Jewish group across the entire territory under Israeli control”.
As such, Israel exhibits “settler-colonial patterns, including widespread settlement involving displacement and dispossession, demographic engineering, ethnic cleansing and the imposition of military rule on Palestinians.
And while it looks back at Israel’s efforts to “uphold Jewish supremacy, relying on a false pretense of the rule of law while, in reality, the rights of the Palestinian subjects are left unprotected”, the report notes that this was accelerated after October 7, 2023.
The “broad, coordinated onslaught against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip” that the report points to has “enjoyed support, legitimization, and normalization from the majority of Jewish-Israelis, as well as from the Israeli legal system”.
The report also speaks about the intensified efforts since October 2024 to displace Palestinians in Gaza.
“Israel’s actions in northern Gaza were described by many experts … as an attempt to carry out ethnic cleansing. In practice, by November 2024, some 100,000 people who had lived in northern Gaza had been displaced from their homes,” the report reads.
The report goes beyond Gaza to say that Israel has intensified its violent operations in the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem since October 7, “on a scale not seen since Israel occupied the West Bank in 1967”.
B’Tselem announcement was the first time major Israeli rights group has publicly concluded that the Gaza war is a genocide, an assessment previously reached by some organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
In a 65-page report on Monday, Physicians for Human Rights Israel (PHRI) also its health-focused legal analysis found that Israel had targeted Gaza’s healthcare infrastructure “in a manner that is both calculated and systematic”.
“The evidence shows a deliberate and systematic dismantling of Gaza’s health and life-sustaining systems – through targeted attacks on hospitals, obstruction of medical aid and evacuations, and the killing and detention of healthcare personnel,” the report said.
Dr. Guy Shalev, executive director of PHRI, said: “Silence in the face of genocide is not an option. We want to stress: confronting genocide is not only the responsibility of legal and political institutions. Confronting it demands urgent action from the global health community.”
“Israel’s claim that Hamas fighters or members of other armed Palestinian groups were present in medical or civilian facilities, often made without providing any evidence, cannot justify or explain such widespread, systematic destruction,” the B’Tselem report said.
PHRI concluded that the acts it identified were “not incidental to war but part of a deliberate policy targeting Palestinians as a group”, and in a manner that fulfilled at least three acts of genocide defined in Article II of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, to which Israel is a signatory. — QNN
