UNHR in Mondoweiss: Israel is Committing Genocide. Its Enablers Can Be Held to Account.

Thomas Becker and Emily Wilder

Originally published in Mondoweiss, June 2, 2024

Less than 48 hours after the world’s top court, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), ordered Israel to “immediately halt its military offensive and any other action” near the southernmost Gazan city of Rafah, Israel increased its deadly strikes on the already beleaguered area. Over Sunday night, Israel dropped massive bombs, including United States-made warheads, on an encampment of displaced civilians Israel had designated a “safe zone.”

At least 45 people were killed and 200 injured in the bombing and subsequent fires, most women and children. People were burnt beyond recognition and reduced to ash; in one video of the horrors, a man wordlessly held up a beheaded baby to the camera, the background ablaze.

This most recent attack is not Israel’s first defiance of the ICJ and basic human rights principles; nor, unfortunately, is it the last. Despite global outrage, Israel has continued to bombard Rafah in the days since. Indeed, over eight months, Israel has besieged and bombarded Gaza in a pattern of conduct that has amounted and continues to amount to genocide.

Genocide is among the most loaded charges one might levy. Often considered the “crime of crimes,” an aspiration to prevent genocide is in many ways foundational to the modern international legal system.

The conclusion that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinian people in Gaza is based on a thorough legal analysis of the international jurisprudence surrounding the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, or the Genocide Convention. Since the October 7, 2023 attacks, we at the University Network for Human Rights (UNHR), alongside scholars at programs, clinics, and projects at Boston University, Cornell, University of Pretoria, and Yale, sought to determine whether Israel’s actions meet the legal threshold of genocide. This meticulous analysis is delineated in painstaking depth and detail in a report published earlier this month. In it, we found the evidence of genocide was clear and overwhelming.

Our analysis, which joins warnings by other leading and authoritative experts on international law and genocide about impending and ongoing genocide in Gaza, puts the world on notice of Israel’s grave breaches of the Genocide Convention and other human rights and humanitarian law. The International Criminal Court chief prosecutor’s application for warrants to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Yoav Gallant is a step toward accountability for Israel’s war crimes and crimes against humanity. But it’s crucial to note that when it comes to the paramount prohibitions on genocide, it is not just Israel that is in violation. 

Genocide is the only crime in which all nations have a duty to prevent and punish and a responsibility not to be complicit. For countries aiding Israel’s operations in Gaza, such as the United States, which supplies much of Israel’s weapons and military aid, actively abetting genocide is its own breach of the Convention.

The legal bar for genocide is a very high one to meet. The standard, according to the Genocide Convention and developed since by the ICJ and other international criminal tribunals, is that a perpetrator kill, seriously harm, or inflict conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of a group, in whole or in part, with the intent to destroy the group as such. Since October 7, Israel has done precisely that to Palestinians in Gaza, a protected group under international law that forms a substantial part of the Palestinian people. 

Israel has killed more than 36,000 Palestinians, 15,000 of whom are children, and injured over 81,000, a combined total of over 5 percent of Gaza’s population. Israel has executed Palestinians in Gaza wherever they are – in their homes, hospitals, “safe zones,” refugee camps, UN schools, mosques, and elsewhere. The destruction of nearly every facet of civilian infrastructure has displaced 75 percent of Gaza’s population. The devastation has been unprecedented: more children were killed in the first four months of Israel’s assault than in all conflicts over the past four years combined; Israel’s assault has resulted in the fastest starvation rate the world has ever seen; and Israeli forces have targeted those who respond to the devastation, killing the highest number of journalists and aid workers ever recorded in war.

To fulfill the element of “intent to destroy, in whole or in part,” case law on the crime of genocide sets out that this intent must be the only reasonable inference from the totality of the facts. The conduct of Israel’s military forces – and indeed the expressions of Israel’s leaders – leave no other reasonable interpretation than an intent to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as such. 

In dozens of statements since October 7 documented in our report, Israeli leaders at all levels have dehumanized Palestinians in Gaza as Israeli forces have carried out egregious rights abuses. Netanyahu has referred to Palestinians in Gaza as “sons of darkness,” and Defense Minister Gallant and others have called them “human animals” – textbook methods of genocidal dehumanization that parallel evidence in prior genocide cases. 

Meanwhile, Israel’s heads of state, government, and military, and others who have decision-making power in Israel’s operations, have explicated intentions to destroy Palestinians and Palestinian society in Gaza; to collectively punish Palestinians and cause them to suffer; to not distinguish between civilians and combatants; to encourage the Israeli military to cause massive death and destruction; and to enact another Nakba, the violent dispossession of 800,000 Palestinians from their homes between 1947 and 1949. 

These genocidal statements have been flagrant. Officials have urged troops to “erase all of Gaza from the face of the earth” and boasted, “I am proud of the ruins of Gaza, and that every baby, even 80 years from now, will tell their grandchildren what the Jews did.” Netanyahu and other leaders have referenced biblical passages to call for the wholesale annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza, while Defense Minister Gallant succinctly and candidly described Israel’s intentions in Gaza: “We will eliminate everything.”

It is rare in history and in the case law for those who commit genocide to be so frank about their intent. With such candor, Israel’s enablers can no longer bury their heads in the sand. 

In the wake of the Holocaust, the United States was central to the construction of the legal framework on which the prohibition of genocide is based. The U.S. guaranteed its commitment to genocide prevention when it ratified the Genocide Convention in 1988 and reinforced this duty before the ICJ only two years ago. While Biden’s “red line” for providing assistance to Israel continues to shift, the legal obligations of the U.S. do not. If the U.S. continues to facilitate Israel’s genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, it too may become vulnerable to international liability.