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TEMPO.CO, Jakarta - Amnesty International accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza in a report published on Thursday, December 5, 2024, Reuters reported.
The report, titled 'You Feel Like You Are Subhuman': Israel's Genocide Against Palestinians in Gaza, is based on research and legal analysis carried out since October 2023 and concludes that Israel's war on the enclave is being carried out with "the specific intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza."
The London-based human rights group said it reached the conclusion after months of analyzing incidents and statements of Israeli officials. Amnesty said the legal threshold for the crime had been met in its first such determination during an active armed conflict.
What is Genocide?
The 1948 Genocide Convention, enacted in the wake of the mass murder of Jews in the Nazi Holocaust, defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group."
Israel has repeatedly rejected any accusation of genocide, saying it has respected international law and has a right to defend itself after an attack by the Palestinian resistance group, Hamas, on October 7, 2023, that escalated the hostilities in the enclave.
Israel targets civilians, not Hamas fighters
Amnesty International said they had analyzed the overall pattern of Israeli actions in Gaza, including reviewing genocidal statements by Israeli officials, as quoted from The New Arab.
The group found that Israel had failed to lawfully target Hamas fighters like they said they would, instead harming and killing civilians as well as blocking essential aid into the strip.
It also asserted that Israel had failed to take precautions to spare civilians when allegedly targeting Hamas members and had carried out disproportionate and indiscriminate attacks.
The report found that Israel had carried out multiple crimes under international law, adding that at least 102 statements issued by the Israeli government or military had dehumanised Palestinians, called or justified genocidal acts, or other crimes against them.
It also found that many of Israel's attacks on Gaza had no military objective, citing the results of its investigations into 15 strikes carried out between October 7, 2023, and April 20, 2024, which killed at least 334 civilians, including 141 children.
Some airstrikes killed multiple generations at once, including an attack on April 20, 2024, which killed three generations of the Abdelal family in eastern Rafah.
Amnesty stated that these attacks were "conducted in ways designed to cause a very high number of fatalities and injuries among the civilian population.".
Nightmare for Palestinian residents
Presenting the report to journalists in The Hague, Amnesty International Secretary General Agnes Callamard said the conclusion had not been taken "lightly, politically, or preferentially."
She told journalists after the presentation: "There is a genocide being committed. There is no doubt, not one doubt in our mind after six months of in-depth, focused research."
Callamard said Amnesty had not set out to prove genocide, but after reviewing the evidence and statements collectively, she said the only conclusion was that "Israel is intending and has intended to commit genocide."
She added: "The assertion that Israel's war in Gaza aims solely to dismantle Hamas and not to physically destroy Palestinians as a national and ethnic group—that assertion simply does not stand up to scrutiny."
Call for prevention of genocide
Israeli forces have killed nearly 45,000 Palestinian residents in 14 months of war in Gaza, with many more missing and presumed dead under the rubble.
Nearly 70 percent of the victims are children and women, according to the UN.
Israeli onslaught on the enclave has led to the displacement of 90 percent of Gaza's population, with homes, mosques, historic sites, hospitals, UN buildings, farmlands, and other facilities being destroyed by attacks.
Furthermore, Israel's war has killed more journalists in the past year compared to any other conflict in the last three decades.
"Every single one of these attacks hit civilian objects, including homes. In all but one case, Israel gave no warning before carrying out the attack," said Callamard.
"And in the last case, although Israel did give a warning, it was not effective. In none of these attacks did Amnesty, despite really looking, find evidence there was any legitimate military objective in or near the location struck."
With regards to "specific intent," Amnesty International pointed to comments made by a range of Israeli officials as proof that they were "deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction in whole or in part" and contradicted Israeli claims to be acting in self-defense.
"One of the reasons we are publishing this report is to issue a wake-up call to the international community and ensure states recognize this is genocide and it has to stop now," Amnesty's senior legal expert, Grazia Careccia, told Middle East Eye.
Western support for Israel's heinous actions
Several Palestinian advocacy groups have characterized Israel's actions in Gaza as genocide, while a case is also pending at the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The ICJ issued a preliminary ruling in May that it was plausible that Israel had violated the Genocide Convention.
As an emergency measure, the ICJ ordered Israel to ensure its forces refrain from acts of genocide against Palestinians and cease its attacks in the city of Rafah, southern Gaza.
Israel has never complied with the ICJ's orders and denigrated the world's highest court as antisemitic.
A spokesperson for the International Center for Justice for Palestine (ICJP) said they welcomed Amnesty International's findings and hoped they would be taken seriously.
“Western states must act on this evidence and the evidence put forward by innumerable other NGOs and UN bodies," the ICJP's Jonathan Purcell told MEE.
However, Israel's Western allies have repeatedly pushed back on the accusation, saying that the country is defending itself.
REUTERS | MIDDLE EAST EYE | THE NEW ARAB
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