Amnesty report says Israel has committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza

By Stephanie van den Berg

THE HAGUE (Reuters) – Amnesty International accused the State of Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza war in a report published on Thursday, an accusation Israeli leaders have repeatedly denied.

The London-based human rights group said it reached the conclusion after months of analyzing incidents and statements by Israeli officials. Amnesty said the legal threshold for the crime had been met, in its first such determination during an active armed conflict.

The 1948 Genocide Convention, enacted following the mass murder of Jews during the Nazi Holocaust, defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.”

Israel has consistently rejected any accusations of genocide, saying it has respected international law and has the right to defend itself following the Hamas cross-border attack from Gaza on October 7, 2023 that precipitated the war.

Israeli officials could not immediately be reached for comment on the Amnesty report.

Israel launched its air and ground war in Gaza after Hamas-led fighters attacked Israeli communities across the border 14 months ago, killing 1,200 people and taking more than 250 hostages to Gaza, according to Israeli counts.

Gaza’s Health Ministry says Israel’s military campaign has since killed more than 44,400 Palestinians and injured many others.

Palestinian and U.N. officials say there are no safe areas left in Gaza, a small, densely populated and urbanized coastal territory. Most of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been internally displaced, some up to 10 times.

In hearings earlier this year before the UN International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague, where Israel faces accusations of genocide brought by South Africa, the country’s lawyers denied the accusation. They argued that there was no genocidal intent or genocide in Israel’s conduct of the war, whose stated goal is the eradication of Hamas.

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”.

After the presentation, he told reporters: “A genocide is being committed. We have no doubt, not a single doubt in our mind after six months of deep and focused investigation.”

Amnesty said it had concluded that Israel and the Israeli army committed at least three of the five acts prohibited by the 1948 Genocide Convention, namely murder, serious bodily or mental injury and deliberate infliction of calculated living conditions. to cause the physical destruction of a protected group. .

These acts were carried out with the intent required by the convention, according to Amnesty, which said it reviewed more than 100 statements by Israeli officials.

The Israeli military accuses Hamas of planting militants inside populated neighborhoods for operational cover, which Hamas denies, while accusing Israel of indiscriminate attacks.

Callamard said Amnesty had not set out to prove genocide, but after reviewing the evidence and statements collectively, he said the only conclusion was that “Israel intends and has intended to commit genocide.”

He added: “The claim that Israel’s war in Gaza is solely aimed at dismantling Hamas and not physically destroying the Palestinians as a national and ethnic group, that claim simply does not stand up to scrutiny.”

Amnesty urged the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), who has issued arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for war crimes and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza, charges they They refuse to investigate the alleged genocide. .

The prosecutor’s office said in a statement that it is continuing investigations into alleged crimes committed in the Palestinian territories and cannot provide further comment.

(Reporting by Stephanie van den Berg; editing by Anthony Deutsch and Mark Heinrich)