Report from Amnesty International claims that Israel’s war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip constitutes the crime of genocide under international law, the first such ruling by a major human rights organization in the 14-month conflict.
The 32-page report examining events in Gaza between October 2023 and July 2024, published on Thursday, found that Israel has “brazenly, continuously and with complete impunity … unleashed hell” on the Strip’s 2.3 million population, noting that the “brutal crimes” against Israelis by Hamas on Oct. 7 2023 that caused the war “do not justify genocide”.
Israel has “committed acts prohibited under the Genocide Convention, namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental injury, and deliberately imposing living conditions on Palestinians in Gaza calculated to lead to their physical destruction” with “the specific intent to destroy the Palestinians ‘ in territory, the report said.
It is the first time Amnesty has alleged the crime of genocide during an ongoing conflict and builds on a March report by the UN’s special rapporteur on Palestine, which concluded that “there are reasonable grounds to believe” that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians .
“Our damning findings should serve as a wake-up call: this is genocide and it must stop immediately,” Agnes Callamard, the group’s secretary general, told a press conference on Wednesday.
Amnesty cited the deliberate obstruction of aid and energy supplies, along with “large-scale damage, destruction and displacement” leading to the collapse of water, sanitation, food and health systems, in what it called a “pattern of behaviour” in the context of occupation and blockade of Gaza.
“We didn’t necessarily start out thinking we were going to come to this conclusion. We knew there was a risk of genocide because international court said Budur Hassan, Amnesty’s researcher on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, told the Guardian. “When you put the dots together, the body of evidence, these are not just violations of international law. It’s something deeper.”
The main accusations in the report are:
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Creating living conditions calculated to lead to physical destruction, such as the destruction of medical infrastructure, the obstruction of aid, and the repeated use of arbitrary and wide-ranging “evacuation orders” for 90% of the population in unsuitable areas.
As an occupying power, Israel is legally bound to provide for the needs of the occupied population, Christine Beckerle, adviser in Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa team, said on Wednesday. She described Israel’s May offensive against Rafauntil then the last place of relative safety in the strip, as the main turning point when it came to establishing intent.
“[Israel] he had made Rafa the main relief point and knew that civilians would go there. The International Court of Justice ordered them to stop and they continued anyway,” she said. “Rafa was the key.”
At least 47 people, including four children, were killed in airstrikes in Gaza on Tuesday, according to health officials in the territory, including at least 21 who took shelter in a tent camp where displaced people near the town of Khan Younis . The Israeli army said it attacked Hamas fighters.
Amnesty called on the UN to impose a ceasefire, to impose targeted sanctions on Israeli and senior Hamas officials and for Western governments such as the US, UK and Germany to stop providing security aid and arms sales to Israel.
The rights group also called on the International Criminal Court, which last month arrest warrants issued for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Galant to add genocide to the list of war crimes they are investigating.
Finally, he called for the unconditional release of civilian hostages and for “Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups responsible for the crimes committed on October 7 to be held accountable.”
The report, “You Feel Subhuman: Israel’s Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza,” is likely to be met with outrage in Israel and spark accusations of anti-Semitism. Several legal experts and genocide scholars argue that the October 7 attack was also genocide.
The Holocaust led to the creation of the Jewish state and the Geneva Conventions, which codified and outlawed genocide as a punishable crime. Both initiatives were the international community’s “never again” response to the horrors inflicted on European Jews by the Nazis in World War II.
In its conclusion, the report said Amnesty “recognizes that there is resistance and hesitance among many to find genocidal intent when it comes to Israel’s conduct in Gaza,” which “impedes justice and accountability.”
“Amnesty International recognizes that identifying genocide in armed conflict is complex and challenging because of the multiple objectives that can coexist. However, it is extremely important to recognize genocide and insist that war can never excuse it,” it said.
Amnesty said the report was based on fieldwork, interviews with 212 people, including victims, witnesses and health workers in Gaza, analysis of extensive visual and digital evidence and more than 100 statements by Israeli government and military actors, which it said represented “ dehumanizing discourse”. It also used video and photo evidence of soldiers committing or celebrating war crimes.
Israel’s actions in Gaza were considered “in their totality, taking into account their repetition and simultaneity, as well as their immediate impact and their cumulative and mutually reinforcing consequences,” it said. The findings were shared “extensively” multiple times with Israeli authorities, the group added, but received no responses.
Thursday’s post builds on the London-based rights group’s previous bold stances on Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. In 2022 Amnesty has joined Human Rights Watch and respected Israeli NGO B’Tselem in issuing a major report accusing Israel of apartheidas part of a growing movement to redefine the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a struggle for equal rights rather than a territorial dispute. Israeli politicians called for the report to be withdrawn, claiming it was anti-Semitism.
