Two leading Israeli human rights organizations — B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHRI) — issued reports on Monday that conclude Israel is committing the crime of genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.
The reports mark the first time Israeli rights groups have stated that Israel is conducting genocide, a conclusion that’s been reached by many other international rights organizations and genocide scholars.
“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 the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip,” B’Tselem said in its report titled “Our Genocide.”
The PHRI report said 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.”
PHRI said Israel’s action fit the criteria for genocide under international law. It said Israel is committing three “core acts” that are defined in the Genocide Convention, including “killing members of the group, causing them serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting on them conditions of life calculated to bring about the group’s destruction in whole or in part.”
B’Tselem strongly condemned Hamas’s October 7 attack on southern Israel but said it didn’t justify Israel’s genocidal assault in Gaza. “Our analysis shows how the Israeli government has cynically exploited the trauma experienced by many Israelis and used it to carry out genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip,” the group said. “One crime does not justify another – certainly not the mass killing of civilians or an attempt to erase and destroy an entire group.”
Yuli Novak, the executive director of B’Tselem, warned that the genocide could be spread to the Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. “The lives of all Palestinians, from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea, are being treated as worthless. They can be starved, killed, displaced – and the situation keeps getting worse,” she said.
