Updated on Tuesday, September 2 at 11:13 am EST
The world’s largest association of genocide scholars has concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, passing a resolution making the determination with the approval of 86% of its members who voted.
The International Association of Genocide Scholars said in the resolution that Israel’s “policies and actions in Gaza meet the legal definition of genocide in Article II of the United Nations Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).”
IAGS President Melanie O’Brien said 28% of the group’s 500 members voted on the resolution, a rate that’s typical of the group’s resolutions.
The resolution recognized that since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023, the Israeli government has committed “systematic and widespread crimes against humanity, war crimes, and genocide, including indiscriminate and deliberate attacks against the civilians and civilian infrastructure.”
It said that Israel’s actions against Palestinians have included “torture, arbitrary detention, and sexual and reproductive violence; deliberate attacks on medical professionals, humanitarian aid workers, and journalists; and the deliberate deprivation of food, water, medicine, and electricity essential to the survival of the population.”
The resolution recognized Israeli officials making “statements of ‘intent to destroy’, characterizing Palestinians in Gaza as a whole as enemies and ‘human animals’ and stating the intention of inflicting ‘maximum damage’ on Gaza, ‘flattening Gaza,’ and turning Gaza into ‘hell.'”
The conclusion of the IAGS aligns with many leading human rights organizations, including Israeli groups, and determinations that genocide and Holocaust scholars have reached individually. “People who are experts in the study of genocide can see this situation for what it is,” Melanie O’Brien, the president of the IAGS and a professor of international law at the University of Western Australia, told The Associated Press.
Antiwar.com asked the State Department for a comment on the IAGS resolution and has yet to receive a reply. The US government has repeatedly denied that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza since US officials would be implicated due to Israel’s reliance on US military aid to conduct military operations.
The IAGS resolution also noted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s support for President Trump’s previous calls for the removal of Palestinians from Gaza. The resolution said it recognized that “Netanyahu has endorsed the current US President’s plan to forcibly expel all Palestinians from the Gaza Strip, with no right of return, in what Navi Pillay, head of the UN Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, has said amounts to ethnic cleansing.”
