Navi Pillay lays out the evidence from a new U.N. report that finds that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza:
Establishing genocide requires not only the act but also the intent. Here, too, the evidence is clear. Senior Israeli leaders, including the president, the prime minister and the former defense minister, have dehumanized Palestinians. Yoav Gallant, the defense minister at the time of the Oct. 7 attacks, said, “We are fighting human animals,” while President Isaac Herzog proclaimed that the entire Palestinian nation was responsible. Their words have been matched by deeds: indiscriminate bombardment making Gaza uninhabitable, the blocking of humanitarian aid, sexual and gender-based violence and a siege we concluded was designed to starve the population to death. Together these constitute a pattern that demonstrates genocidal intent.
When the Israeli government began its military campaign in October 2023, it was clear from the start that they intended to inflict collective punishment on the population of Gaza. This was obvious from what they said and what they did in the very first days of the war. Israeli leaders wrongly blamed everyone in Gaza for the October 7 attack, and then proceeded to pummel and starve them. As a result, at least 83% of those killed by Israeli forces have been civilians and more than two million people are being deliberately starved to death.
The war was never one of self-defense, properly speaking. For one thing, an occupying power can’t fight a war in self-defense against the people of the occupied territory. It was always a massive reprisal by an occupying government that aimed to devastate the population and leave Gaza a wasteland. That is what has happened over the last two years while the rest of the world looked on.
The evidence supporting the charge of genocide is overwhelming. The genocide in Gaza is one of the most well-documented crimes of its kind. No one can honestly deny what the Israeli government has done and continues to do. The only argument genocide deniers have left is to reject the genocide label for the murderous policies they support, and that argument has no merit.
The Commission of Inquiry’s findings confirm what many other human rights organizations and experts have said:
The Commission has been investigating the events on and since 7 October 2023 for the last two years, and concluded that Israeli authorities and Israeli security forces committed four of the five genocidal acts defined by the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births.
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Daniel Larison is a contributing editor for Antiwar.com and maintains his own site at Eunomia. He is former senior editor at The American Conservative. He has been published in the New York Times Book Review, Dallas Morning News, World Politics Review, Politico Magazine, Orthodox Life, Front Porch Republic, The American Scene, and Culture11, and was a columnist for The Week. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Chicago, and resides in Lancaster, PA. Follow him on Twitter.
