Gaza genocide

According to a United Nations special committee, Amnesty International, and many other experts and rights organisations, Israel has committed genocide against the Palestinian people during its ongoing invasion and bombing of the Gaza Strip as part of the Gaza war. Various observers, including the UN Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices, Francesca Albanese the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, and Human Rights Watch have cited statements by senior Israeli officials that may indicate an "intent to destroy" Gaza's population in whole or in part, a necessary condition for the legal threshold of genocide to be met.
By mid-August 2024, it was confirmed that the Israeli military's actions had caused the deaths of at least 40,000 people in the Gaza Strip—1 out of every 59 people—averaging 148 deaths per day. Most of the victims are civilians, of whom at least 50% are women and children. Compared to other recent global conflicts, the numbers of known deaths of journalists, humanitarian and health workers, and children are among the highest. Thousands of more dead bodies are thought to be under the rubble of destroyed buildings. The Lancet has estimated more than 70,000 deaths due to traumatic injuries. The number of injured is greater than 100,000; Gaza has the most child amputees per capita in the world. As of August 2024, only 17 of Gaza's 36 hospitals were partially functional; 84% of its health centers have been destroyed or suffered damage.
Over 1.9 million Palestinians—85% of Gaza’s population—have been forcibly displaced. An enforced Israeli blockade heavily contributed to starvation and the threat of famine in Gaza, while some Israeli civilians have blocked or attacked aid convoys delivering humanitarian supplies across the border. Early in the conflict, Israel cut off Gaza's water and electricity supply. Israel has also destroyed numerous culturally significant buildings, such as all of Gaza's 12 universities, 80% of its schools, and numerous mosques, churches, museums, and libraries.
The government of South Africa has instituted proceedings, South Africa v. Israel, against Israel at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), alleging a violation of the Genocide Convention. In an initial ruling, the ICJ held that South Africa was entitled to bring its case against Israel, while Palestinians were recognised to have a right to protection from genocide. The court ordered Israel to observe its obligations under the Genocide Convention by taking all measures within its power to prevent the commission of acts of genocide, to prevent and punish incitement to genocide, and to allow basic humanitarian services into Gaza. The court also later ordered Israel to increase humanitarian aid into Gaza and to prevent genocidal acts during the Rafah offensive. The Israeli government has denied South Africa's allegations.
The 1948 Palestine war saw the establishment of Israel in most of what had been Mandatory Palestine, with the exception of two separated territories that became known as the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, occupied by Jordan and Egypt respectively. Following the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel occupied the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The subsequent period witnessed two popular uprisings by Palestinians against the Israeli occupation; the First and Second Intifadas, in 1987 and 2000. The latter ended with Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza in 2005.
Since 2007, the Gaza Strip has been governed by Hamas, an Islamist militant group, while the West Bank remained under the control of the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority. After Hamas took over, Israel imposed a blockade of the Gaza Strip that significantly damaged its economy. Israel justified the blockade by citing security concerns, but international rights groups have called the blockade a form of collective punishment. UNRWA reported that, due to the blockade, 81% of Gazans were living below the poverty level in 2023, with 63% food insecure and dependent on international assistance.
Since 2007, Israel and Hamas, along with other Palestinian militant groups based in Gaza, have engaged in conflict, including four wars in 2008–2009, 2012, 2014, and 2021. These conflicts killed approximately 6,400 Palestinians and 300 Israelis. In 2018–2019, there were large weekly organised protests near the Gaza-Israel border, which were violently suppressed by Israel, whose snipers killed hundreds and injured thousands of Palestinians. Soon after the 2021 Israel–Palestine crisis began, Hamas's military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades, started planning the 7 October 2023 operation against Israel. According to diplomats, Hamas had repeatedly said in the months preceding October 2023 that it did not want another military escalation in Gaza as it would worsen the humanitarian crisis that occurred after the 2021 conflict.
On 7 October 2023, Hamas led an attack into Israel from Gaza, resulting in at least 1,139 deaths, most of them civilians. Israel responded with a highly destructive bombing campaign followed by an invasion of the Gaza Strip on 27 October. Some scholars argued that there was genocide against Palestinians before the 7 October attacks, but the Israeli military campaign in Gaza has been characterised as genocidal by South Africa and other supporters of the genocide argument.
Hamas officials said that the attack was a response to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, the blockade of the Gaza Strip, Israeli settler violence against Palestinians, restrictions on the movement of Palestinians, and the detainment of thousands of Palestinians, many without charges, whom Hamas sought to release by taking Israeli hostages. Numerous commentators have identified the broader context of Israeli occupation as a cause of the war. The Associated Press wrote that Palestinians are "in despair over a never-ending occupation in the West Bank and suffocating blockade of Gaza". Several human rights organisations, including Amnesty International, B'Tselem, and Human Rights Watch have likened the Israeli occupation to apartheid; Israel's supporters dispute this characterisation. An advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice published in July 2024 affirmed the occupation as illegal and said it violated Article 3 of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, which prohibits racial segregation and apartheid.
The 1948 Genocide Convention defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group, including killing, causing harm, preventing births, and forcibly transferring children. Legal accountability for genocide has faced significant obstacles, with the ICJ never holding a state liable and the ICC facing political pressure and sanctions, particularly from Israel and the U.S. during the Gaza war. The legal threshold for genocidal intent remains a major barrier to prosecution. Raphael Lemkin's broader definition included cultural and social destruction, while scholarly definitions emphasize large-scale, organised actions targeting a group’s survival. Genocide is often considered the apex of criminality, worse than other atrocities that lead to as much civilian death and destruction. No minimum number of victims is required for a genocide ruling, as seen in the Gambia v Myanmar Rohingya genocide case.
During the first two months of bombing, Israel dropped 25,000 tonnes of explosives on the Gaza Strip. Many of these were unguided "dumb bombs" dropped in densely populated areas obliterating entire neighborhoods. Since 7 October 2023, the IDF has been accused of extrajudicial killing of unarmed Palestinian detainees, doctors, and healthcare workers. Israeli soldiers have summarily executed Palestinian civilians, often in front of their families. They have killed Palestinians waving white flags. In April 2024, mass graves were found containing corpses with their hands tied. The corpses included women and the elderly.
The UN and many news outlets have estimated that about 70% of Palestinians killed in Gaza are women and children, with at least 20,000 Palestinians having been killed in Gaza by December 2023. By 14 January 2024, 100 days after Israel began its assault on Gaza, over 23,900 people had been confirmed killed. By 10 May, deaths had topped 35,000, a third of them unidentified bodies, with over 10,000 additional bodies estimated to be buried under the rubble. Within the first three weeks, the Israeli assault killed more children in Gaza than were killed worldwide across all conflict zones in any year since 2019. Over 52,000 people had been wounded by December 2023, and by May 2024 this had risen to over 77,700.
Citing multiple Israeli field and intelligence officers from the war in Gaza, +972 Magazine and Local Call reported that, according to two sources, the IDF decided in the first weeks of the war to authorise killing up to 15 to 20 civilians per low-ranking militant, while for a senior militant such as a brigade or battalion commander, killing more than 100 civilians was authorised. An intelligence officer also said that Israel was not interested in killing Palestinian operatives when they were engaged in a military activity or in a military building only, but preferred to bomb them in their family homes "without hesitation" as a first option, saying "It's much easier to bomb a family's home" where they are easier to locate and target. Another intelligence officer said that in targeting junior militants, Israel used only dumb bombs, which can destroy entire buildings, to not "waste expensive bombs on unimportant people".
In March 2024, Haaretz reported that some Israeli commanders had set up "kill zones" ("extermination zones" in Hebrew) in which soldiers were commanded to shoot and kill anyone on sight, even if they were unarmed. In June 2024, the Associated Press found that Israel's campaign in Gaza was killing entire bloodlines of Palestinian families to a "degree never seen before".
According to testimony given to the Israeli Knesset, Israeli soldiers driving 62-ton D9 armoured bulldozers have been ordered to "run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds". The proportion of women and children among the dead has been disputed. As of 7 May 2024, total deaths quoted by the UN were 34,735, of which 24,686 were fully identified. Among the fully identified, 52% were women and children, 8% were elderly of all genders, and 40% were men. In November 2024, the UN published an analysis covering only victims verified by at least three independent sources over six months between November 2023 and April 2024. It found that 70% of the 8,119 verified fatalities were women and children.
As of 31 August 2024, per the Gaza Ministry of Health, the number of fatalities had risen to 40,691 and the number of fatalities identified by name to 34,344. Among the fatalities identified by name, 17,652 (51%) were women and children, 2,955 (9%) were elderly of all genders, and 13,737 (40%) were men.
In November 2024, the Gaza Health Ministry reported that 1,410 Gazan families had been completely erased from the civil registry as a result of Israeli bombings.
As the conflict has gone on, data collection has become increasingly difficult for the Gaza Ministry of Health (MoH) due to the destruction of infrastructure. The ministry has had to supplement its usual reporting based on hospital dead with other sources of information, including reports by the media and first responders as well as bereaved families and widows, who must formally register their husbands' deaths to qualify for government assistance. Professor of economics Mike Spagat analysed the ministry's reports and found an urgent need for a transparent methodology to reconcile its top-line death numbers—34,535 as of 30 April—with its detailed breakdowns summing to 24,653 on the same date. The ministry's figures for the total number killed have also been contested by Israeli authorities, but have been accepted as accurate by Israeli intelligence services, the UN, and the WHO.
A February 2025 study published in The Lancet estimated that life expectancy in the Gaza Strip between October 2023 and September 2024 decreased by 34.9 years, excluding indirect deaths, such as from malnutrition or disruption to health services. The study also used census and registration data to assess the reliability of the Gaza Health Ministry's death count, and found no substantial errors.
Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, and Salim Yusuf published in the correspondence section of The Lancet an estimate of the number of deaths that the conflict may indirectly cause in the coming months and years. Indirect Palestinian deaths from disease are expected to be much higher due to the intensity of the conflict, destruction of health care infrastructure, lack of food, water, shelter, and safe places for civilians to flee, and reduction in UNRWA funding. Using other conflicts as a reference point, they estimated that the total number of conflict-related deaths in Gaza will likely be three to 15 times higher than the reported death toll. By multiplying the reported deaths by five, they argued that according to a conservative estimate "186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza". Spagat wrote that their estimate "lacks a solid foundation and is implausible". Even so, Spagat allowed it was "fair to call attention to the fact that not all of the deaths are going to be direct violent ones" and has called the death toll in Gaza "staggeringly high".
According to a 2 October 2024 letter to president Joe Biden, vice president Kamala Harris, and others by 99 American healthcare workers who had served in Gaza since 7 October 2023, the most conservative estimate based on the available data was that at least 62,413 people in Gaza had died from starvation (based on starvation standards by the United States-funded Integrated Food Security Phase Classification), most of them young children, and at least 5,000 people had died from lack of access to care for chronic diseases.
On 26 February 2024, Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International both released statements declaring Israel had failed to comply with the International Court of Justice's 26 January ruling to prevent genocide by blocking aid from entry into Gaza. Both statements reference the 16-year-long blockade of Gaza, which has intensified since 9 October 2023. A Refugees International report found that Israel had "consistently and groundlessly impeded aid operations within Gaza". Historian Melanie Tanielian argues that starvation, famine, and blockade should be foregrounded as methods of genocide alongside mass bombing. She references A. Dirk Moses's appeal not to ignore less spectacular forms of violence in the destruction of populations, and highlights multiple other genocides where famine and starvation were used as methods of destruction. In an April report, B'Tselem called the unfolding famine "the product of a deliberate and conscious Israeli policy".
In October 2023, the World Food Program warned of Gaza's dwindling food supply, and in December, alongside the United Nations, it reported that more than half of Gaza's population was "starving", fewer than one in ten were eating every day, and 48% were suffering "extreme hunger". Palestinian Foreign Minister Riyad al-Maliki, who is part of the Palestinian Authority, said Israel was using starvation as a weapon: "they are starving because of Israel's deliberate use of starvation as a weapon of war against the people it occupied". An Israeli official called the charge "blood-libellous" and "delusional". In December 2023, Human Rights Watch similarly found that Israel was using starvation as a weapon of war by deliberately denying access to food and water. On 16 January 2024, U.N. experts accused Israel of "destroying Gaza's food system and using food as a weapon against the Palestinian people". In February 2024, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich personally blocked U.S.-funded shipments of flour from entering Gaza, in violation of promises Israel had made to the U.S. government.
Law professor and United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food Michael Fakhri said that Israel is "culpable" of genocide because "Israel has announced its intention to destroy the Palestinian people, in whole or in part, simply for being Palestinian" and because Israel was denying food to Palestinians by halting humanitarian aid and "intentionally" destroying "small-scale fishing vessels, greenhouses and orchards in Gaza ... We have never seen a civilian population made to go so hungry so quickly and so completely, that is the consensus among starvation experts. Israel is not just targeting civilians, it is trying to damn the future of the Palestinian people by harming their children." After the ICJ ruling, the number of aid trucks Israel allowed into Gaza dropped by 40%. In the ICJ's March reaffirmation of provisional measures, the court highlighted the "unprecedented levels of food insecurity experienced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip over recent weeks, as well as the increasing risks of epidemics", acknowledging that since the Court's January order there had been a "lack of Israeli compliance" resulting in "the catastrophic living conditions" deteriorating further.
On 11 March 2024, 12 Israeli human rights organisations signed an open letter accusing Israel of failing to abide by the ICJ ruling to prevent genocide by facilitating the delivery of humanitarian aid. In April, U.N. special rapporteur on the right to health Tlaleng Mofokeng said it was obvious that Israel was "killing and causing irreparable harm against Palestinian civilians with its bombardments", adding, "They are also knowingly and intentionally imposing famine, prolonged malnutrition and dehydration" and accusing Israel of "genocide".
In October 2024, Israel had reportedly adopted a modified version of the Generals' Plan. The proposed plan included orders for all residents of northern Gaza to leave within a week; the implementation of a full siege on water, food, and fuel; and then the arrest or killing of all who remained. By mid-October 2024, Israel had ordered the evacuation of northern Gaza and prevented the entry of humanitarian aid for almost two weeks. According to Stephen Devereux, avoidable deaths due to starvation as a result of Israeli policies "almost certainly constitutes a war crime and a crime against humanity".
On 21 November 2024, the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant, asserting that the two "bear criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare".
Israel lifted restrictions on aid flowing into Gaza in January and February 2025 during the first stage of the January ceasefire. But on 2 March, Israel announced that all humanitarian aid would be blocked indefinitely unless Hamas agreed to alter the terms of the ceasefire deal, which Hamas refused to do. Within four days of the decision, food supplies in Gaza had rapidly depleted while the price of food had more than doubled. Aid agencies such as Oxfam and UNICEF warned of mass starvation if the aid freeze continued. Oxfam policy lead Bushra Khalidi predicted "the total collapse of systems that sustain life". Lawyer and human rights activist Salah Abdel-Ati said Israel's actions were illegal under Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits the destruction or withholding of essentials such as food in combat zones.
Mark Levene and Elyse Semerdjian locate the mass destruction of infrastructure within Israel's Dahiya doctrine that has been implemented against Gaza since 2006, with Levene calling it urbicide and a tool of genocide.
In October 2024, after monitoring and analyzing Israel's war conduct in Gaza for more than a year, Forensic Architecture published a map detailing Israel's campaign in Gaza titled "A Cartography of Genocide", accompanied by an 827-page text report that concludes that "Israel's military campaign in Gaza is organised, systematic, and intended to destroy conditions of life and life-sustaining infrastructure".
In a December 2024 report, Human Rights Watch accused Israel of committing acts of genocide in Gaza by targeting water and sanitation infrastructure and depriving Palestinians of adequate access to water. The report alleges that Israel intentionally damaged and targeted solar panels powering treatment plants, a reservoir, and warehouses, while blocking repair materials and fuel for generators, cutting electricity supplies, and attacking workers. Over the winter, at least 15 children died of hypothermia due to Israel's destruction of housing and power facilities.
In its investigation, Amnesty International notes that "while the destruction of historical, cultural and religious property or heritage is not considered a prohibited act under the Genocide Convention, the ICJ has established that such destruction can provide evidence of intent to physically destroy the group when carried out deliberately."
Amnesty identified at least four instances in which there was "no imperative military necessity" for the deliberate destruction of Gazan cultural and religious sites. These were the destruction of the Al-Mughraqa campus of Al-Azhar University in Gaza City, the Al-Zahra campus of Israa University, the Al-Dhilal mosque and the adjacent Bani Suheila cemetery in Khan Younis, and the Al-Istiqlal mosque in Khan Younis. Amnesty pointed to the attitudes and behavior of Israeli soldiers involved in the demolitions of these sites in videos posted on social media as evidence that these actions demonstrated genocidal intent. Amnesty also noted in its report the overall volume of destruction of Gazan cultural, historical and religious sites, including Gaza's central archives and a number of archaeological sites, museums, and monuments. Amnesty was not able to verify the lawfulness of the attacks on these sites at the time of the report.
In articles published in November 2023 in The Lancet and in February 2024 in the journal BMJ Global Health, multiple doctors detailed how, in their professional opinions, the targeting of Gazan health infrastructure and medical personnel coupled with various Israeli politicians' openly genocidal rhetoric amounts to genocide. Legal scholars have also supported this assessment. Gaza's healthcare system faced several humanitarian crises as a result of Israel's assault: hospitals faced a lack of fuel and began shutting down by 23 October as they ran out of fuel. When hospitals lost power completely, multiple premature babies in NICUs died. Israeli airstrikes have killed numerous medical staffers, and ambulances, health institutions, medical headquarters, and hospitals have been destroyed. Médecins Sans Frontières reported that scores of ambulances and medical facilities were damaged or destroyed, including the deaths of Médecins Sans Frontières staff. In late October, the Gaza Health Ministry said the healthcare system had "totally collapsed".
In April, U.N. special rapporteur on the right to health Tlaleng Mofokeng said, "The destruction of healthcare facilities continues to catapult to proportions yet to be fully quantified."
As of 25 August 2024, the United Nations estimated that most of Gaza's 2.2 million people were confined to a humanitarian area of roughly 15 square miles (39 km), which causes crowded conditions and a critical lack of basic services, like clean water, and diseases spreading widely across the population, such as Hepatitis C.
On 13 March 2025, a UN investigation concluded that Israel had committed genocidal Acts in Gaza by systematically destroying its reproductive healthcare facilities while at the same time imposing a siege preventing necessary medications for deliveries, pregnancies, and neonatal care, causing "irreversible" harm to Palestinians' reproductive prospects in Gaza. The commission also found that Israeli forces intentionally attacked and destroyed Al-Basma IVF Centre, Gaza's main in-vitro fertility clinic, which served 2,000 to 3,000 patients a month, including all its reproductive materials stored for future Palestinian babies. No evidence that the building was used for military purposes was found. The commission concluded that the destruction "was a measure intended to prevent births among Palestinians in Gaza, which is a genocidal act".
On 6 October 2024, Israel designated all of northern Gaza as a combat zone and ordered the entire civilian population to evacuate. Both Israeli military analysts and the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights alleged that this was the first stage of the "Generals' Plan", a policy proposed by former Israeli general Giora Eiland to force Palestinians out of Gaza on pain of death.
Human Rights Watch reports that Israel's systematic forced displacement of Palestinians in Gaza amounts to war crimes and crimes against humanity. Since October 2023, Israel's evacuation orders have displaced 1.9 million people—nearly Gaza's entire population—through unclear, inconsistent directives, often issued amid bombings, leaving civilians with no safe routes or destinations. Humanitarian zones like al-Mawasi and Salah al-Din Road evacuation routes were repeatedly attacked, while Israel blocked humanitarian aid, leading to starvation, destroyed infrastructure, and uninhabitable conditions. Senior Israeli officials openly declared intentions to reduce Gaza's territory and push Palestinians out, reinforcing policies of ethnic cleansing and permanent displacement. The UN Human Rights Office said that Israel may be causing the "destruction of the Palestinian population in Gaza's northernmost governorate through death and displacement." South Africa and others have criticised the Gaza Strip evacuations as a key component of the genocide.
Israel has been accused of indiscriminate mass arrests and detainments and has been documented making threats of mutilation, death, arson, and rape; and torturing Palestinians detained without legal charges.
In August 2024, the UN OHCHR reported being in receipt of testimony from Palestinians imprisoned at Sde Teiman detention camp about rape and sexual assault perpetrated on detainees. The Lemkin Institute considers this and other, similar reports to be indicative of "Sexualized Violence During Genocide", or sexual violence being used to destroy a group.
In its December 2024 report, Amnesty wrote that the pattern of abuses inside Israeli prisons "underscores the systematic dehumanization and mental and physical abuse of Palestinians in Gaza and may also be taken into account with a view to inferring genocidal intent from pattern of conduct."
As of February 2025, at least 160 healthcare workers from Gaza were believed to be detained by Israel, with another 24 missing after being taken from hospitals in Gaza. Al-Shifa hospital director Mohammed Abu Selmia, who was detained for seven months and released without charges, detailed many of the abuses he faced and said that "no day passes without torture" in Israeli prisons.
In March 2025, United Nations experts reported that they had found that Israel had targeted and systematically destroyed women's health care facilities and used sexual violence as a war strategy, therefore carrying out genocidal acts against Palestinians.
Since 7 October 2023, the IDF has been accused of using excessive force against dozens of schools and hospitals; theft; cruel and unnecessary desecration and mutilation of deceased Palestinians; and making no, or an inadequate, distinction between Hamas forces and civilians. The targeting and destruction of a variety of cultural and educational sites have also been cited as genocidal acts, as has the use of unconventional weapons such as white phosphorus.
On 18 April 2024, UN experts in Geneva condemned Israel for its "scholasticide" in the Gaza Strip, finding that Israel had destroyed more than 80% of schools, killed 5,000 students, 261 teachers, and dozens of university professors.
As part of the case Defense for Children International-Palestine et al v. Biden et al, Holocaust historian Barry Trachtenberg testified that there is a consensus among genocide historians that the situation in Gaza is a genocide, mainly because Israeli officials' statements make this clear. He said: "We are watching the genocide unfold as we speak. We are in this incredibly unique position where we can intervene to stop it, using the mechanisms of international law that are available to us."
In an open letter published on 15 October on Opinio Juris and the website of the Third World Approaches to International Law Review, scholars wrote that Israeli officials' statements since 7 October indicate intent to commit genocide. On 11 June 2024, the official Israeli X (formerly Twitter) account tweeted that "Gazan civilians participated in the horrific events of October 7", later citing a statement in a clip that "there are no innocent civilians there".
On 7 October, Netanyahu said that Israel would "exact a huge price from the enemy" and turn Hamas hideouts "into rubble". Omer Bartov, a Holocaust and genocide professor, interprets these statements as genocidal intent. In discussing genocidal actions and intent since 7 October, genocide scholar Mark Levene noted the increasing rhetoric of genocide and ethnic cleansing under the preceding Netanyahu governments. This was supported by Tia Goldenberg in AP News, who highlighted statements by Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich as increasingly genocidal rhetoric under Netanyahu's government. Israeli historian Raz Segal and legal scholar Luigi Daniele also pointed to increasing genocidal rhetoric before October 2023, highlighting a May 2023 Times of Israel article that said that the only way to achieve peace is to "obliterate" Palestine and that Palestine's existence is "an affront to society, morality, humanity". The article further calls for re-education of Palestinians and declares that they can enjoy rights only if they no longer exist as a nation. Segal and Daniele draw parallels between that article's rhetoric and scholarship that points to Russian media outlets' equivalent rhetoric in the Russian invasion of Ukraine as genocidal. Segal and Daniele also point to previous comments by National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, former Knesset member Ayelet Shaked, and Smotrich, who in February 2023 called for the destruction of Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Genocide scholar Shmuel Lederman detailed how these comments by Smotrich, alongside others denying Palestinian nationhood and calling for their destruction or removal from territory claimed by Israel, was in the forefront of political discussions by Hamas leadership in Gaza before the events of October 2023. News outlets at the time of Smotrich's comments also highlighted their genocidal nature.
Anatomy of a Genocide, a report presented to the UNHRC on 26 March 2024 by Francesca Albanese, Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, concluded that Israel was committing acts of genocide. Israel rejected the report. In a second report, Genocide as colonial erasure, released on 28 October for the UNGA, the rapporteur accused Israel of "carrying out a systematic campaign of forced displacement, destruction, and genocidal acts against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank". In the ICJ's Rohingya genocide case, several states (including the UK and Germany) supported a looser standard of evidence for supporting genocidal intent than the ICJ has used in the past—which is often the most difficult part of proving genocide in a court of law. The states contended that the ICJ should "adopt a balanced approach that recognizes the special gravity of the crime of genocide, without rendering the threshold for inferring genocidal intent so difficult to meet so as to make findings of genocide near-impossible".
According to scholars Mark Levene and Abdelwahab El-Affendi, since 7 October 2023, a variety of official and semi-official sources and outlets have engaged in rhetoric suggestive of genocidal intent. Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard told The New Arab that the 7 October attacks, the Gaza war hostage crisis, and Hamas's war crimes "generated rage that transformed what has been the rhetoric of marginalised groups into a flood of statements now made by politicians, journalists and celebrities, ... provid[ing] a tailwind" for others to find such speech acceptable. He added, "We have become accustomed to genocidal rhetoric that comes from Hamas. The Hamas covenant has obvious severe antisemitic articles, and also some that could be interpreted as expressing desire to eliminate the Jews in Israel. ... In the past, it was seen inside Israel as something that was beyond the borders of legitimacy to talk that way about Palestinians. ... But October 7th broke that red line."
On 9 October 2023, Israeli Minister of Defense Yoav Gallant said,
The statement was characterised as an example of dehumanisation. According to Kenneth Roth, while some excuse this remark as referring only to Hamas, the context makes clear that "human animals" refers to everyone in Gaza. The remarks have also been connected to the Gaza famine. On 10 October, Gallant said: "Gaza won't return to what it was before. There will be no Hamas. We will eliminate everything."
Israeli Minister of Agriculture Avi Dichter called for the war to be "Gaza's Nakba" on Channel 12. Minister of Heritage Amihai Eliyahu called for dropping an atomic bomb on Gaza. Minister of Communications Shlomo Karhi advocated for the forced removal of civilians from Gaza and for Israel to settle the region, a position that other ministers such as Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich endorsed. Dov Waxman, director of UCLA's Y&S Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, said that some of the rhetoric right-wing ministers use can be seen as "potentially genocidal" in its dehumanisation of Palestinian civilians. He added that these statements can have only limited impact on Israeli policy as they were made by ministers "not in the war cabinet", but that the suggestions were still concerning.
Israeli energy minister Israel Katz said: "All the civilian population in Gaza is ordered to leave immediately. We will win. They will not receive a drop of water or a single battery until they leave the world."
On 29 April 2024, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said, "There are no half measures ... Rafah, Deir al-Balah, Nuseirat – total annihiliation. 'Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.' There is no place for them under heaven." The Israeli newspaper Haaretz described his comments as a call to genocide. In August, Smotrich said that "it might be justified and moral" to "starve 2 million people", lamenting that the world would not allow it.
President of Israel Isaac Herzog blamed the "entire nation" of Palestine for the 7 October attack. He added: "It is not true, this rhetoric about civilians being not aware, not involved. It is absolutely not true." Herzog later claimed that his remarks had been taken out of context, saying that he was attempting to highlight "the involvement of many residents of Gaza in the slaughter, in the looting, and in the riots of October 7" and that he accepted that there are innocent Palestinians in Gaza.
Deputy Speaker of the Knesset Nissim Vaturi wrote on social media that the government was allowing too much aid to enter Gaza and that the IDF should "burn Gaza now". In a separate post he remarked that Israel's goal was "erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the Earth." When asked to clarify his statements by Kol BaRama, Vaturi reiterated that Gaza and its inhabitants must be destroyed, saying: "I don't think there are any innocent people there now... If there is an innocent person there, we will know about them. Whoever stays there should be eliminated, period." In 2025, Vaturi called Palestinians "scoundrels" and "subhumans" and called for the adult men in Gaza to be separated from women and children and killed.
Yitzhak Kroizer, who represents the extreme-right Otzma Yehudit party in the Knesset, said in a radio interview that the "Gaza Strip should be flattened, and for all of them there is but one sentence, and that is death." Tally Gotliv of the Likud party called for the use of nuclear weapons against Gaza. Moshe Saada, also of the Likud party, approvingly quoted an acquaintance who told him that everyone in Gaza should be killed. Ariel Kallner, MK for the Likud party, wrote on social media that there is "one goal: Nakba! A Nakba that will overshadow the Nakba of [1948]. Nakba in Gaza and Nakba to anyone who dares to join".
In January 2025, eight members of the Knesset's Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee signed a letter to Defense Minister Israel Katz proposing that Katz order the destruction of all of Gaza's food and power supplies and "kill anyone without a white flag". Palestinian official Rawhi Fattouh said of the letter, "The Knesset has become a den for bloodthirsty extremists...now they are astonished that Palestinians in Gaza are still alive".
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's repeated invocation of Amalek during the war has been considered evidence of genocidal intent by many critics, including South Africa. In a speech on 28 October 2023, Netanyahu said (in Hebrew) "You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible", quoting from Deuteronomy 25:17 in the Hebrew Bible. The phrase "Remember what Amalek did to you" is used in Holocaust memorials, including Yad Vashem and the Hague Jewish Monument. Netanyahu used this phrase again in a 3 November 2023 letter to soldiers.
Critics have connected Netanyahu's allusion to Amalek with 1 Samuel 15:3: "Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass." Noah Lanard of Mother Jones called verses discussing Amalek among the Bible's most violent and wrote that they have a long history of being used by Jews on the far-right, such as Baruch Goldstein, to justify killing Palestinians. Amalek was "the foe that God ordered the ancient Israelites to genocide", and scholars have called the verse an instance of 'divinely mandated genocide'.
Major General Ghassan Alian, Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, said: "There will be no electricity and no water [in Gaza], there will only be destruction. You wanted hell, you will get hell."
Former IDF Major general Giora Eiland wrote, "Gaza will become a place where no human being can exist" and "Creating a severe humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a necessary means to achieving the goal." Israeli historian and Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov noted that no Israeli politician nor anyone in the IDF denounced this statement.
Of Israel's bombing of Gaza, Israeli army spokesperson Daniel Hagari said, "while balancing accuracy with the scope of damage, right now we're focused on what causes maximum damage". Legal scholars interpreted this as intention to destroy Gaza.
Far-right politician and former Knesset member Moshe Feiglin said: "There is one and only solution, which is to completely destroy Gaza before invading it. I mean destruction like what happened in Dresden and Hiroshima, without nuclear weapons." Minister of Economy Nir Barkat later said, "I don't remember Britain or the United States, at the tail end of the Second World War bombing Dresden, thinking about the residents." Academics, non-Israeli politicians, and news organisations have also invoked the bombing of Dresden in justifying Israel's bombing of Gaza.
Israel's UK ambassador Tzipi Hotovely, a close ally of Netanyahu, was accused of inciting genocide for comments she made during a radio interview with Iain Dale. Hotovely said the IDF was targeting "every school, every mosque, every second house" to destroy the Hamas tunnel network in Gaza. Dale objected that this was an argument for destroying all of Gaza. Hotovely replied, "Do you have another solution?"
Legal scholar Nimer Sultany highlights statements by various Israeli army commanders leading ground operations in northern Gaza that call for depopulation and a "scorched earth" approach. Soldiers have echoed such sentiments on social media. Historian Yoav Di-Capua also points to the increasing number of officers and soldiers who are part of Hardal, which Di-Capua identifies as following a genocidal ideology.
Former Israeli defense minister Moshe Ya'alon said, "The path we are currently being led down involves conquering, annexing, and ethnic cleansing."
Speaking with the Austrian Jewish community in March 2025, Israeli ambassador to Austria David Roet suggested that Palestinian children in Gaza should be executed and dismissed concerns over civilian casuaties in Gaza.
Amit Halevi, a Knesset member from the Likud party, said that he want to "cleanse" the Palestinians before they could launch another attack. In March 2025, he said on Radio 103fm, "We want to occupy the territory to cleanse it of the enemy; otherwise, it will kill your children and kidnap your grandchildren again."
Maryam Jamshidi, a professor at University of Colorado Law School, cites Israel's stated goal to "destroy Hamas including both the extermination of its political and administrative leadership and the annihilation of its civilian police force and military wing", and its actual targeting of the "intellectual, cultural, and religious leadership of Gaza". Citing previous arguments made relating to the Bosnian genocide, she writes that genocidal intent can be proven "through evidence that the protected group's civilian leadership, as well as its military and law enforcement, have been targeted for elimination" when this renders the rest of the group more vulnerable to various illegal abuses such as forced migration. Targeting civilian organisations controlled by Hamas is illegal under international law.
Elsewhere, Jamshidi argues that "the long-standing pattern of Israeli conduct towards Palestinians generally and in Gaza"—such as the blockade of Gaza, and destruction of civilian infrastructure during previous wars—high number of civilian deaths during the war, "mass forced displacement and ethnic cleansing" under the guise of humanitarian safe zones, "IDF practices that undercut Israel's claim that its 'war' is only against Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups rather than against Palestinian civilians", the abundance of atrocities recorded by smartphones and published by media, and UN expert reports supporting a finding of genocide increase the likelihood that the ICJ will rule in South Africa's favor.
In an article for the blog of the European Journal of International Law, John B. Quigley, a professor of law, argued that the conditions of life the war has inflicted on Gaza could be used as proof of genocidal intent in the absence of direct evidence, as they are so destructive that Israel should have known they would result in the extermination of Palestinians in Gaza.
In late 2023, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reported that "A growing number of academics, legal scholars and governments are accusing the Israeli government of carrying out a genocide against Palestinians in Gaza." Human rights lawyer Susan Akram, commenting on a May 2024 report by the University Network for Human Rights and on the resistance to labelling Israel's actions as genocide, said, "The opposition is political, as there is consensus amongst the international human rights legal community, many other legal and political experts, including many Holocaust scholars, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza".
While Israel and its supporters, including the U.S., deny the accusation, "a growing list of genocide scholars and international law experts" use the word genocide to describe Israeli actions. A December 2024 Amnesty International report "adds an influential voice to a growing list of players that have accused Israel of committing genocide", reflecting how "human rights groups and international lawyers increasingly believe its actions in Gaza constitute genocide under the narrowed definition adopted in 1948" Law professor Adil Ahmad Haque has said that the report describes serious violations of international humanitarian law, that Amnesty "correctly applies existing law", and that "Amnesty's legal conclusions can only be fully assessed in light of its extensive factual findings, which readers should carefully examine for themselves". Following the Amnesty report, Human Rights Watch became "the latest among a growing number of critics to accuse Israel of genocidal acts" in Gaza, but it did not say definitively whether the intent required for the crime of genocide existed.
The opinions of many scholars of Holocaust and genocide studies (HGS) who specialised in the Holocaust expressed in late 2023 were different with others in the field as well as those in other academic fields. In late 2024, The Guardian reported a continuing split in the field with "many keeping to the sidelines". Raz Segal, who called Israeli acts a "textbook case of genocide" early on, said the war "exacerbated the fundamental fissure that has long divided the community."
Other academics also called Israel's attacks on infrastructure, food, and water genocidal. On 19 October 2023, 100 civil society organisations and six genocide scholars sent Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court Karim Khan a letter calling on him to issue arrest warrants to Israeli officials for cases already before the prosecutor; to investigate new crimes committed in the Palestinian territories, including incitement to genocide, since 7 October; to issue a preventative statement against war crimes; and to remind all states of their obligations under international law. The letter said that Israeli officials' statements had shown "clear intent to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity and incitement to commit genocide, using dehumanizing language to describe Palestinians". The genocide scholars who signed the document were Raz Segal, Barry Trachtenberg, Robert McNeil, Damien Short, Taner Akçam, and Victoria Sanford. In October 2024, Segal, Adam Jones, Ernesto Verdeja, and Michael Becker said there was evidence of genocide in Gaza, while Dov Waxman said there was not enough evidence of an "intent to destroy", though the Vox Media journalist who interviewed him noted that he was the only scholar who still held this opinion.
In a 3 November 2023 interview on MSNBC, Holocaust and genocide scholar Omer Bartov said, "the possibility of genocide is staring us in the face", and on 10 November 2023 he wrote: "My greatest concern watching the Israel-Gaza war unfold is that there is genocidal intent, which can easily tip into genocidal action." In a response to Bartov's article, a group of five Holocaust scholars, while acknowledging Israeli officials' "despicable statements that cannot be ignored", said that only a few officials made such statements and justified them by pointing to Hamas's crimes. The five scholars argued that the dehumanising language was "not evidence of genocidal intent". Bartov later said that since May 2024 it was "no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions", while noting that very few people in Israel (apart from Palestinians) were willing to entertain this view. In November 2024, Bartov called recent operations in Jabalia "blatantly genocidal".
Sociologist and genocide scholar Martin Shaw argues that the term "genocide" was underused as states wish "to avoid the responsibilities to 'prevent and punish'" the convention imposes; moreover, he argues, there is "a special aversion to investigating its implications for Israel's conduct. Western states continue to protect it out of a misplaced belief that Jews, having been prime historical victims of genocide, cannot also be its perpetrators." In January 2024, Shaw's article "Inescapably Genocidal", published in the Journal of Genocide Research, noted that while the application of the framework of genocide to Palestine had, in the words of one commentator, "habitually evoked fanatical pushback", the nature of Israel's assault on Gaza "represented a strategic choice" rather than an inadvertent consequence, and thus calling it genocide was both warranted and inescapable.
Victoria Sanford, a professor at City University of New York, compared the events in Gaza to the 1960–1996 killing and disappearance of 200,000 Mayans in Guatemala, known as the Guatemalan genocide. Sanford and the Holocaust and genocide scholars Barry Trachtenberg and John Cox detailed the similarities between statements Israeli government officials and ministers made and those made during the genocides in Guatemala, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur, northern Iraq, and Myanmar.
Shmuel Lederman has called Israel's actions genocidal violence, but does not use the term "genocide", critiquing the simplification of intent in the term. He locates the situation in Gaza within a long and ongoing history of oppression, including mass surveillance, collective punishment, restrictions on travel and work, and settler-colonialism. He cites sociologist Eva Illouz's discussions of Gaza and human rights attorney Rabea Eghbariah's determination that Israel is conducting a genocide to highlight that even specialists using the same frame of analysis (the U.N. genocide convention) can disagree. Lederman has been criticised for not citing specialist genocide scholars' analysis of whether there is disagreement about whether Israel is conducting a genocide.
The anthropologist and sociologist Didier Fassin highlights three rhetorical formations that he identifies as repeatedly occurring: presenting 7 October 2023 as the beginning of events, ignoring any history before that; hyperbolic claims, such as calling the events of 7 October "a new Holocaust"; and distortion, where actions taken in Gaza are disputed and the statement that Israel has "the most moral army in the world" is frequently repeated. Holocaust historian Tal Bruttmann [fr], sociologist Luc Boltanski, and others have criticised Fassin's arguments.
Holocaust historian Amos Goldberg has said that Israel's actions in Gaza exhibit all the elements of genocide, citing explicit intent from high-ranking officials, widespread incitement, and a pervasive dehumanisation of Palestinians in Israeli society. He also said, "Yes, it is genocide" of Israel's actions in Gaza. In an interview, Goldberg said, "What is happening in Gaza is a genocide because Gaza does not exist anymore." His colleague Daniel Blatman agreed.
Genocide scholar Mark Levene applied A. Dirk Moses's analysis that "absolute securitization lends itself to collective targeting of human groups, more precisely civilians, regardless of issues of ethnos or genos". In January 2024, Levene detailed how Israel's actions are ethnic cleansing at the very least, in line with the Israeli intelligence ministry's policy paper for a forcible and permanent transfer of all Gazans, supported by Netanyahu's government. Levene also argues that Israel's actions and its politicians' and officials' statements show that it is engaging in genocide.
Holocaust historians Norman J. W. Goda and Jeffrey Herf reject claims that Israel is perpetrating a genocide and consider them a tactic to delegitimise Israel as a state. Goda claims that the charge of genocide against Israel is laden with anti-semitic tropes, calling it the "The Genocide Libel".
In March 2024, the Middle East Studies Association released a statement condemning the "accelerating scale of genocidal violence being inflicted on the Palestinian population of Gaza" while also saying that Israel's conduct constitutes cultural genocide.
A 23 May to 6 June 2024 Brookings Institution survey asked 758 Middle East scholars and experts, most in the U.S.: "How would you define Israel's current military actions in Gaza?" The responses were: "major war crimes akin to genocide", 41%; "genocide", 34%; "major war crimes but not akin to genocide", 16%; "unjustified actions but not major war crimes", 4%; "justified actions under the right to self-defense", 4%; and "I don't know", 2%.
The sociologist and genocide scholar Uğur Ümit Üngör views the 2023 Israeli assault on Gaza as continuation of a history of "asymmetrical power relations, and annihilatory attitudes towards civilians". He calls Israeli actions "unmistakably counter-genocidal in terms of the quantity, quality, and dynamic of mass violence". Norman Finkelstein has argued that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's description of the Palestinians as "Amalek" was a call for genocide; he accused Israel of engaging in "genocidal war".
British-Israeli historian Ilan Pappé said, "What we see now are massacres which are part of the genocidal impulse, namely to kill people in order to downsize the number of people living in Gaza." Historian Yoav Di-Capua charted a history of increasing genocidal ideology among Hardal, identifying Smotrich and Ben-Gvir as politicians who seek the adoption of this ideology as national policy and are using the Gaza war to implement their plan.
Israeli historian Benny Morris contended that Israel was not committing genocide:
But Morris added that given the dehumanisation of Palestinians by the Israeli civilian populace and dehumanisation of Israelis by Palestinians, genocide against Palestinians was possible in the future unless certain steps were taken.
In November 2023, international law scholar David Crane argued that Netanyahu had not expressly stated an intent to destroy Palestinians in whole or in part, and without this, it could not be considered a genocide.
In December 2023, Luis Moreno Ocampo, former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, told Al Jazeera that the siege of Gaza was a form of genocide due to Israel's imposing conditions of life on Gaza that would lead to the deaths of Palestinians. In January 2024, a number of prominent Israelis, represented by human rights lawyer Michael Sfard, sent Israel's attorney general and state prosecutor an open letter detailing examples of "the discourse of annihilation, expulsion and revenge". The signatories said that the Israeli judiciary was ignoring incitement to genocide in Gaza.
William Schabas, an expert in international criminal law, wrote in January 2024: "To me it is increasingly clear that Israel is not aiming to defeat Hamas, but rather to uproot or erase the population of Gaza." In June 2024, Schabas said that of all recent genocide cases at the International Court of Justice, the case brought by South Africa was the strongest, citing the destruction of Gazan infrastructure and statements made by Israeli politicians that Gazans are inhuman or "human animals" and that Israel would deny them electricity, water, and medical care.
In a May 2024 interview, Human Rights Watch co-founder Aryeh Neier detailed how Israel's blocking of aid and the subsequent starvation of the Gazan population is indicative of genocide. Barry Trachtenberg, a professor at Wake Forest University, said, "What Israel has been doing since October 7 is clearly in strong violation of international law—of the Conventions on Genocide, and Geneva Conventions on the pursuit of war." A June 2024 joint report by the University Network for Human Rights and Boston University School of Law found that "Israel has committed genocidal acts, namely killing, seriously harming, and inflicting conditions of life calculated, and intended to, bring about the physical destruction of Palestinians in Gaza." In May, the legal scholar Nimer Sultany detailed and supported Forensic Architecture's assessment that Israel had weaponised international humanitarian law into "humanitarian violence".
In April 2024, the German legal scholar Stefan Talmon told Süddeutsche Zeitung that Israel was not committing genocide in Gaza, but conceded that Israel had committed war crimes. International law professor Sabine Swoboda also argued that although Israel may have broken international law, it had not committed genocide because its intent was not genocidal. In January 2024, lawyer Eugene Kontorovich called the genocide allegations "absolutely absurd" and a "farce", and called for Israel to immediately end its acceptance of the ICJ's jurisdiction in response to South Africa's case. In an August 2024 op-ed in the New York Daily News, lawyer Eli Rosenbaum wrote that Israel's actions in Gaza are not genocidal but in fact seeking to "prevent genocide" by Hamas.
In December 2023, Kai Ambos, a professor of international and criminal law in Göttingen and judge at the Kosovo Special Tribunal, warned that statements by politicians, while potentially beneficial for proving specific intent, could not necessarily be applied to the evaluation of military decisions. In January 2024, Christian Walter [de], a professor of Public Law and Public International Law at the LMU, argued in the Verfassungsblog that the extent of harm to both civilians and infrastructure were inconclusive, and that attempts to evacuate civilians were an indication against genocidal intent.
Marco Sassoli and Oliver Diggelmann, professors of international law in Gevena and Zurich, argued in May 2024 that while some statements by politicians may be genocidal, the same did not apply to the actions of the Israeli military; Diggelmann believes a conviction for genocide is unlikely. Andreas Müller [de], a professor of international law in Basel, said that the term "genocide" was being used as a criticism instead of according to its legal definition, adding, "there was no sufficient ground of genocide if one takes the legal term seriously". Daniel-Erasmus Khan, professor of international law at the University of the Bundeswehr in Munich, said in June that there was no clear evidence of a special intent among Israeli leadership.
On 13 November 2023, the German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas and three of his colleagues at Goethe University Frankfurt published a statement in which they said that attributing genocidal intent to Israel's actions in Gaza was a misjudgment, triggering public debate in Germany. Also in November 2023, historian Verena Buser argued that "The IDF is building corridors for the civilian population and allowing aid supplies into Gaza. This is not genocide."
In December, in correspondence published in The Lancet, multiple specialists in international medicine and humanitarian aid reiterated warnings of the risk of genocide, while detailing how Israel's blocking of humanitarian support and aid were leading to unnecessary deaths, and how the death rate would only continue to worsen. They called signatories to the Genocide Convention to enforce a ceasefire on Israel. Nimer Sultany argues that, by mid-2024, a growing consensus among legal scholars suggested that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Multiple public declarations from various journals and academic organisations have been released warning of a potential genocide and declaring opposition to an ongoing genocide.
Others, such as the historians Michael Berenbaum and Polly Zavadivker, claim that discussing the Israeli assault on Gaza as a potential genocide is a threat to the future successful prosecution of the crime of genocide and a threat to Holocaust and genocide studies as a field, and that describing the assault as "engaged in ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity or has genocidal intentions" actively inhibits the ability to resolve the conflict. In an interview with the editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents on her decision to publish Raz Segal's work, the New Left Review opined that disagreement over use of the term "genocide" stemmed partly from tensions between the goals of being "emotionally powerful" and "analytically precise".
According to intellectual and Holocaust historian Enzo Traverso, the Genocide Convention's definition of genocide "describes exactly what is happening in Gaza today". Holocaust historian Tal Bruttmann has criticised Traverso's analysis saying he lacks expertise on the subject.
American political scientist and international relations scholar John Mearsheimer wrote in January 2024 that, while in the first two months of the war, he believed Israel was "guilty of serious war crimes", once the 2023 Gaza war ceasefire ended, it "became clear" to him "that Israeli leaders were in fact seeking to physically destroy a substantial portion of Gaza’s Palestinian population."
South Africa has instituted proceedings at the International Court of Justice pursuant to the Genocide Convention, to which both Israel and South Africa are signatories, accusing Israel of committing genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity against Palestinians in Gaza. South African president Cyril Ramaphosa compared Israel's actions to apartheid. South Africa's application was brought pursuant to Article IX of the convention. Several human rights organisations, international organisations, and other nations supported South Africa's suit.
In an application filed on 29 December 2023, South Africa argued that Israel's actions "are genocidal in character because they are intended to bring about the destruction of a substantial part of the Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group". South Africa requested that the ICJ issue a legal order on an interim basis (i.e., before hearing the merits of the application) requiring Israel to "immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza". Adjudication of the merits of the case may take years, but such an order could be issued within weeks. In a statement to the ICJ during the proceedings, the South African ambassador to the Netherlands argued that the current assault on Gaza is not an individual event but the escalation of "Israel's 25-year apartheid, 56-year occupation, and 16-year siege imposed on the Gaza Strip".
Balkees Jarrah, associate international justice director at Human Rights Watch, notes that the ICJ case is not a prosecution of individuals, and does not involve the International Criminal Court, which is a separate body. Jarrah said that the case presents an opportunity to "provide clear, definitive answers on the question of whether Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinian people".
On 26 January 2024, the ICJ issued a preliminary ruling finding that the rights asserted in South Africa's filing were "plausible", and issued an order to Israel requiring it to take all measures in its power to prevent acts of genocide, to prevent and punish incitement to genocide, and to allow basic humanitarian services into Gaza.
On 6 March 2024, South Africa asked the ICJ to order additional measures against Israel because Gazans are facing mass starvation. In May, the court issued what some experts considered to be an ambiguous order but which was widely understood as requiring Israel to immediately halt its offensive in Rafah. Israel rejected this interpretation and continued with its offensive operations.
Israeli government spokesman Eylon Levy rejected the allegations "with disgust" and accused South Africa of cooperating with Hamas, calling South Africa's claims "blood libel" that abets "the modern heirs of the Nazis". On 2 January 2024, Israel decided to appear before the ICJ in response to South Africa's case, despite a history of ignoring international tribunals. On 13 January, Netanyahu said, "No one will stop us. Not The Hague, not the Axis of Evil, no one." Israeli officials called the court antisemitic. Israel's position is that "while unfortunate, the mass killing of thousands of Palestinian civilians is necessary, unavoidable, and justifiable self-defense." South Africa's actions found support from some Israeli politicians, including Ofer Cassif.
On 20 May 2024, Khan applied for arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant, saying he had reasonable grounds to believe they bore criminal responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in the Gaza strip from at least 8 October 2023. The list of crimes did not include genocide, which is legally distinct from extermination. The arrest warrants against Netanyahu and Gallant were issued on 21 November 2024.
As part of a December 2024 report accusing Israel of genocide, Amnesty International called on the ICC "to urgently consider the commission of the crime of genocide by Israeli officials since 7 October 2023 in the ongoing investigation into the situation in the State of Palestine". Also in December 2024, Israeli law professor Omer Shatz filed a complaint with the ICC naming eight Israeli political and media figures he believed were responsible for incitement to genocide.
On 13 November 2023, the Center for Constitutional Rights sued U.S. President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. The suit alleges that Israel's "mass killings", targeting of civilian infrastructure, and forced expulsions amount to genocide, writing: "As Israel's closest ally and strongest supporter, being its biggest provider of military assistance by a large margin and with Israel being the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since World War II, the United States has the means available to have a deterrent effect on Israeli officials now pursuing genocidal acts against the Palestinian people in Gaza." Genocide expert William Schabas supported the lawsuit, saying he believed there was a "serious risk of genocide" and the U.S. was "in breach of its obligation, under both the 1948 Genocide Convention to which it is a party as well as customary international law, to use its position of influence with the government of Israel and to take the best measures within its power to prevent the crime taking place". On 16 November, the scholars Victoria Sanford, Barry Trachtenberg, and John Cox filed a declaration in support of the CCR's lawsuit. During the court case, Trachtenberg testified that the U.S. must act and not repeat its failure to take a stand against the violence against Jews in Nazi Germany leading up to the Holocaust.
A federal judge dismissed the case Defense for Children International-Palestine et al v. Biden et al on 31 January 2024, saying the Constitution prevented his court from determining foreign policy, which is reserved to the government's political branches, but he wrote that "as the ICJ has found, it is plausible that Israel's conduct amounts to genocide" and also commented that he would have preferred to have issued the injunction and urged Biden to rethink U.S. policy, writing that the court "implores defendants to examine the results of their unflagging support of the military siege against the Palestinians in Gaza".
In the legal consequences arising from the policies and practices of Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory including East Jerusalem, Qatar said, "Israel's genocidal war on the people of Gaza has shown that the situation in Palestine is the most pressing threat to international peace and security".
In February 2024, lawyers representing Palestinians in Germany filed a criminal complaint against various senior politicians, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, Economic Minister Robert Habeck, and Finance Minister Christian Lindner, for "aiding and abetting" genocide in Gaza.
On 1 March 2024, Nicaragua initiated proceedings against Germany at the ICJ under the Genocide Convention concerning Germany's support for Israel in the Gaza war. It sought the indication of provisional measures of protection, including resumption of suspended German funding of the UNRWA and cessation of military supplies to Israel.
In March 2024, Sydney-based firm Birchgrove Legal referred Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Foreign Minister Penny Wong, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton, and others to the ICC as accessories to genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, citing the defunding of UNRWA, the provision of military aid, and "unequivocal political support" for Israel's actions during the Gaza war.
Third states are obliged "to employ all means reasonably available to them, so as to prevent genocide so far as possible" and must not provide "means to enable or facilitate the commission of the crime".
In January 2024, former UNRWA spokesperson Chris Gunness said that the U.S. and U.K. are complicit in genocide against Gaza. In March, OXFAM released a statement detailing its intention, alongside several other NGOs, to sue Denmark to prevent arms sales to Israel, warning that by selling arms Denmark is "complicit in violations of international humanitarian law ... and a plausible genocide". In August, legal academic Shahd Hammouri said there was a "very strong" case for Western countries, particularly the U.S., being complicit in genocide against Palestinians.
Legal scholar Matiangai Sirleaf has written that Gaza "is the first 'live-streamed' genocide in history" but that clear information about what is happening has not translated into effective action by the international community. The Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Palestine said, "States may be complicit in failing to prevent genocide if they do not act in compliance" with the International Court of Justice's orders, or if they directly aided or assisted in "the commission of genocide". Other journalists and scholars around the world have written that the actions of the US and other western countries are giving implicit permission for genocide.
In November 2023, critics of President Joe Biden nicknamed him "Genocide Joe" for his support for Israel. National Security Council spokesman John Kirby, described by Israeli media outlet Ynet as "an exceptionally accomplished Israeli advocate", said: "Israel's trying to defend itself against a genocidal terrorist threat. So if we're going to start using that word, fine, let's use it appropriately." On 13 November 2023, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) sued Biden for allegedly failing in his duty, defined under national and international laws, to prevent Israel from committing genocide in Gaza in the Gaza war.
In February 2024, the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention said the Biden administration was complicit in genocide in Gaza: "None of the Biden Administration's tactics to deny genocide and avoid accountability will withstand the test of time. President Biden and key administration officials are on a path to be remembered as the principal enablers of one of the worst genocides in the 21st century." Ali Harb wrote, "US weapons have continued to flow to Israel to arm a military carrying out a suspected genocide in Gaza. At the same time, Biden is pushing to secure $14bn in additional aid for the US ally." In February 2024, after the U.S. vetoed a U.N. ceasefire resolution, Cuban president Miguel Diaz-Canel Bermudez said, "They are accomplices of this genocide of Israel against Palestine." Karen Wells et al. also point to the $14.3 billion in their article in the journal Children's Geographies as evidence of U.S. complicity in Israel's "genocidal war". Research conducted in 2024 showed that Israel's military relies heavily on fuel imports from the U.S. for its operations in Gaza. Francesca Albanese said that America's provision of fuel to Israel after the ICJ's provisional ruling was "a breach of the Genocide Convention".
In the Florida legislature, Democratic Representative Angie Nixon sponsored a resolution calling for "de-escalation" and a ceasefire to end the killing of Palestinians. She said: "We are at 10,000 dead Palestinians. How many will be enough?" Republican Representative Michelle Salzman replied, "All of them." Nixon then interrupted her speech, saying, "One of my colleagues just said 'All of them'. Wow." Some commentators have called Salzman's remark a call for genocide. Nixon and the Florida chapter of the Council on American–Islamic Relations called for her to be censured or resign. CAIR-Florida Executive Director Imam Abdullah Jaber said: "This chilling call for genocide by an American lawmaker is the direct result of decades of dehumanization of the Palestinian people by advocates of Israeli apartheid and their eager enablers in government and the media." Executive director of the U.S. Campaign for Palestinian Rights (USPCR) Ahmad Abuznaid said, "There is a bipartisan effort to dehumanize the Palestinian people", referring especially to Biden voicing doubt about the accuracy of the Palestinian death count and attacks on Palestinian-American Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib for her criticism of Israel's military offensive.
Republican U.S. Representative and former Donald Trump aide Max Miller said that Palestine is "about to get eviscerated... to turn that into a parking lot". He previously called on the Biden administration "to get out of Israel's way and to let Israel do what it needs to do best" and said there should be "no rules of engagement" during Israel's bombardment of Gaza. Miller also questioned the accuracy of the Gaza Health Ministry's claim that 10,000 people had been killed in Gaza, saying he believed many of those killed were "Hamas terrorists", not innocent civilians, and that the U.S. does not "trust an entity that puts munitions in mosques, and churches and in hospitals".
In December, former Republican U.S. Representative Michele Bachmann said on The Charlie Kirk Show: "So it's time that Gaza ends. The two million people who live there, they are clever assassins. They need to be removed from that land. That land needs to be turned into a national park. And since they're the voluntary mercenaries for Iran, they need to be dropped on the doorstep of Iran. Let Iran deal with those people." She received a round of applause from the audience. Kirk replied: "I look at Israel and Israel says we never want another person into our country that doesn't share our values. They said they don't want refugees. They don't want any of these people. I want American immigration policy to be like that."
Republican U.S. Representative Brian Mast compared all Palestinians to Nazis in November on the House floor. On 31 January 2024, he said that Palestinian babies are not innocent civilians but "terrorists" who should be killed, that more infrastructure in Gaza needs to be destroyed, and "It would be better if you kill all the terrorists and kill everyone who are supporters."
When asked by an activist about the deaths of Palestinian children, Republican Representative Andy Ogles said: "I think we should kill 'em all...Hamas and the Palestinians have been attacking Israel for 20 years. It's time to pay the piper." Supporters of Palestine, including the American Muslim Advisory Council, denounced his comments as a call for genocide. Ogles responded that his remarks were directed at Hamas rather than Palestinians in general.
In an interview with Fox News on 5 March 2024, former president and presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump said that Biden "dumped Israel" due to being overly influenced by pro-Palestinian protests, that "the Democrats are very bad for Israel", that he supports Israel's ongoing offensive in Gaza, that Israel has to "finish the problem", and that the Biden administration "got soft", which some commentators viewed as a call to continue and "double down" on genocidal acts. Trump's campaign also said that, if elected, he would bar Gaza residents from entering the U.S. as part of an expanded travel ban.
In a town hall meeting on 25 March 2024, Republican U.S. Representative Tim Walberg said that Palestinian civilians should have nuclear weapons used against them, "like Nagasaki and Hiroshima", to "get it over quick".
Democratic U.S. Representative Rashida Tlaib accused Biden of supporting "the genocide of the Palestinian people". Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene sponsored a resolution to censure Tlaib. Craig Mokhiber of the UN High Commission for Human Rights resigned, criticising the organisation for its response to the Gaza war. He later said that Israel's actions against Gaza are a "classic case of textbook genocide".
In an op-ed in Newsweek calling for an arms embargo on Israel, U.S. Representative Bonnie Watson Coleman wrote: "We are not merely witnessing a genocide in Gaza. We are participating in it. We are complicit."
On 12 December 2023, Human Rights Watch said that selling weapons to Israel could make the UK complicit in war crimes. UK law says that licences cannot be granted where there is a clear risk that the items might be used to commit or facilitate a serious violation of international humanitarian law, for example a complete siege of Gaza or indiscriminate shelling of civilians. The human rights groups Al-Haq and Global Legal Action Network have applied for judicial review of the government's export licences for the sale of British weapons capable of being used in Israel's action in Gaza. Additionally, James Denselow, Head of Conflict and Humanitarian at Save the Children UK, said, "By failing to push for a permanent end to the fighting or speak out against the weaponisation of aid, Rishi Sunak and his government are complicit in the horror that is unfolding." In December, Scottish First Minister Humza Yousaf condemned the UK's abstention from a draft UN resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, saying this would lead to the deaths of more children.
In April 2024, Guy Goodwin-Gill said: "There is a serious risk of genocide, as the International Court of Justice has found. If the UK, with that knowledge in mind, carries on exporting arms to Israel, there is a risk that those arms will be used in the conduct of aggressive activities and in the conduct of genocide." The same month, more than 600 lawyers and legal academics, including Jonathan Sumption and Brenda Hale, published a legal opinion warning that the government risked complicity in genocide by continuing to arm Israel. The opinion was eventually signed by 1,101 lawyers.
On 2 September 2024, British foreign secretary David Lammy announced that the UK was suspending approximately 30 arms export licenses, including aircraft and drone components, to Israel after a government review concluded that there was a high risk that these exports were being used for severe violations of international humanitarian law.> At the time of the suspension, Israel had around 350 arms export licenses in the UK.
In October 2023, political analyst and PhD candidate Lena Obermaier argued that Germany is complicit in Israel's war crimes against Gaza. She detailed how most of Germany's most prominent news outlets have "been silent on Israeli genocidal policies in the past" and still are. She also highlighted police suppression of pro-Palestine protests throughout Germany as evidence of state complicity. According to Germany's Federal Commissioner for the Fight against Antisemitism, accusing Israel of genocide is antisemitic. Publicly accusing Israel of genocide can lead to arrest in Germany, even when the accusers are Jewish or Israeli. In February 2024, a criminal complaint was filed in German courts accusing various senior politicians of complicity in genocide. In March, Nicaragua sued Germany for complicity at the ICJ.
In February 2024, African Union president Moussa Faki said: "Gaza is being completely annihilated and its people are deprived of all their rights. We denounce the Israeli operation, which has no parallel in the history of humanity." The official communiqué of the 38th summit of the African Union, which represents 55 member states, stated that "Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians and must be prosecuted internationally."
In March 2024, the EU's top diplomat, Josep Borrell, told the U.S. Secretary of State, "The very survival of the population in Gaza is at stake today."
On 26 March, Pakistan's OIC representative said that Israel's desire for a "final solution to the Palestinian question is plain for all to see, as its forces encircle Rafah like vultures and its ravenous land grab continues unabated". In May 2024, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation called on member states to end "the export of weapons and ammunition used by its army to perpetrate the crime of genocide in Gaza".
On 2 February 2024, it was reported that more than 800 civil servants from the U.S., U.K., and the European Union, including many senior officials, had signed an open letter criticising their governments' "public, diplomatic and military support" of Israel as "given without real conditions or accountability", and warning that their governments' policies on Gaza "are contributing to grave violations of international law, war crimes and even ethnic cleansing or genocide".
On 5 April 2024, Elizabeth Warren became the first senator from the United States, Israel's closest military ally, to publicly say that the assault on Gaza would be legally ruled a genocide. According to her office, Warren was expressing a legal analysis rather than her personal view. U.S. Representative Ilhan Omar said that she feared the U.S. government and its citizens were "going to be complicit in genocide". In May 2024, Senator Fatima Payman became the first member of the Australian Labor Party to call Israel's actions a genocide, saying, "This is a genocide and we need to stop pretending otherwise."
After Israel started its military operation against Hamas, both Genocide Watch and the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention issued statements warning of the imminent risk of genocide. In December 2023, the Lemkin Institute said that it viewed Israel's continuing actions as genocide. In December 2024, Genocide Watch said that Israel was conducting genocide against the Palestinian people.
In November 2023, Defence for Children International (DCI) accused the U.S. of complicity in Israel's "crime of genocide". In March 2024, DCI addressed the famine affecting Gaza: "The starvation of children is a hallmark of genocide and a deliberate political choice by Israel, backed by the Biden administration." Three Palestinian rights groups, Al-Haq, Al Mezan, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, filed a lawsuit with the International Criminal Court (ICC) urging it to investigate Israel for apartheid and genocide and issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders. In a statement commemorating Land Day, the Arab Parliament wrote that Israel "aims to destroy the identity of an entire people".
In December 2023, the International Federation for Human Rights said Israel's actions in Gaza constituted an unfolding genocide. In February 2024, ahead of Israel's announced military assault on Rafah, Amnesty International head Agnes Callamard wrote: "Amnesty is reiterating that Palestinians in Gaza are at grave risk of genocide. The international community has an obligation to act to prevent genocide." In March 2024, Callamard said the international community "must uphold their obligations under the Genocide Convention and take concrete measures to protect Palestinians in Gaza today". In October 2024, Medical Aid for Palestinians released a statement calling for the protection of Palestinians against potential genocide that said, "Gaza is being erased in front of our eyes." Later that month, Oxfam and 37 other humanitarian organisations warned that Israel was failing to comply with Article II of the Genocide Convention as it wiped Northern Gaza "off the map". Oxfam added that it was "impossible not to believe" that Israel's aim was the forced displacement of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip.
Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor documented evidence of executions committed by the IDF. It submitted the evidence and documentation to the International Criminal Court and the U.N. special rapporteur. Jewish Voice for Peace said: "The Israeli government has declared a genocidal war on the people of Gaza. As an organization that works for a future where Palestinians and Israelis and all people live in equality and freedom, we call on all people of conscience to stop imminent genocide of Palestinians."
On 5 December 2024, Amnesty International concluded its investigation into Gaza and issued a 296-page report declaring that Israel had "committed and is continuing to commit genocide against Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip". The report, using evidence gathered over nine months, asserted that in multiple instances Israeli forces and government authorities had committed three of five acts prohibited under the United Nations' Genocide Convention, "namely killing, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting on Palestinians in Gaza conditions of life calculated to bring about their physical destruction" with the "specific intent to destroy Palestinians". Law professor and senior fellow of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies Orde Kittrie claimed that Amnesty had altered or otherwise made up a new definition of genocide, while law professor Amichai Cohen and human rights scholar Yuval Shany called the report an "attempt to move the normative goalposts regarding these evidentiary standards". Other experts defended the report, telling TheJournal.ie that Amnesty was using the term consistently with international law. Genocide scholar A. Dirk Moses called the accusation against Amnesty International "vexatious". The Israeli branch of Amnesty International rejected the report and a "group of Jewish employees, in Israel and in several branches around the world" said that its authors "reached a predetermined conclusion". A minority of Amnesty Israel members said that "according to the available information, it can be determined that Israel is committing or has committed genocide in Gaza". In January 2025, Amnesty International suspended its Israeli branch for two years, in part because of disagreements about research and findings Amnesty published.
On 10 December 2024, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights announced that it had been investigating the question of genocide in Gaza and concluded that there was a "legally sound argument that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza".
A December 2024 Médecins Sans Frontières report said its "firsthand observations of the medical and humanitarian catastrophe inflicted on Gaza are consistent with the descriptions provided by an increasing number of legal experts and organisations concluding that genocide is taking place in Gaza."
In November 2023, a group of UN special rapporteurs wrote, "We remain convinced that the Palestinian people are at grave risk of genocide." UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Rights to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation Pedro Arrojo said that based on article 7 of the Rome Statute, which counts "deprivation of access to food or medicine, among others" as a form of extermination, "even if there is no clear intention, the data show that the war is heading towards genocide". A group of U.N. human rights experts said there was "evidence of increasing genocidal incitement" against Palestinians.
In response to a January 2024 Times of Israel report that the Israeli government was in talks with the Congolese government to take Palestinian refugees from Gaza, U.N. special rapporteur Balakrishnan Rajagopal said, "Forcible transfer of Gazan population is an act of genocide."
In May 2024, UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women Reem Alsalem said that Palestinian women "are experiencing a full-blown genocide. They are being exterminated. There are few places in the world where we've seen something like this." The UNHCR Special Rapporteur on adequate housing, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, said that Israel's destruction of Gaza "constitutes an act of genocide as well because the purpose of that destruction, exceeding 70 to 80 percent across Gaza, is to make the place uninhabitable for the people of Gaza".
In October 2024, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights released a report that accused the Israeli military of "the crime against humanity of extermination" for killing health workers and targeting health facilities.
On 8 November 2024, the United Nations human rights office condemned many violations of international law that "could amount to war crimes, crimes against humanity and possibly even 'genocide'", calling on third states to prevent "atrocity crimes". On 14 November 2024, the UN Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices published a report for presentation to the UN General Assembly, concluding that Israeli practices in Gaza are consistent with the characteristics of genocide.
In February 2025, UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Michael Fakhri said that Israel is committing a genocide and is working to "slow down its genocide through a starvation campaign," concluding that the United States and Germany were complicit in the ensuing famine.
Various public figures have said Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, including Kid Cudi, Macklemore, and Summer Walker. Melissa Barrera was fired from the Scream franchise for reposting on social media an article accusing Israel of genocide. Time mentioned Barrera's firing in the context of a "growing divide" within Hollywood over the war. Raz Segal's "textbook genocide" verdict has been quoted approvingly by climate activist Greta Thunberg and BBC football presenter Gary Lineker.
In December 2023, Olly Alexander, who represented the United Kingdom at the Eurovision Song Contest 2024, signed a letter by the LGBT association Voices4London that accuses Israel of genocide against the Palestinians. The Israeli government and the Campaign Against Antisemitism (CAA) condemned his views and asked the BBC not to allow him to perform at the contest. The BBC rejected Israel's request to cut ties with Alexander over his views.
When asked whether what is happening in Gaza is a genocide, Russian-American author Masha Gessen said, "I think there are some fine distinctions between genocide and ethnic cleansing and I think that there are valid arguments for using both terms." When pressed further, they said, "it is at the very least ethnic cleansing". Controversy surrounded Gessen's reception of the Hannah Arendt Prize over remarks in a New Yorker article critical of Israeli actions in Gaza in which Gessen compared them to Nazis liquidating an Eastern European ghetto.
At the 96th Academy Awards, after accepting the award for Best International Feature Film for The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer drew parallels between the depiction of the Holocaust in his film and Israel's ongoing bombardment and siege of Gaza. Journalist Naomi Klein expanded on the parallels between Gaza and the film's depiction of the Holocaust, highlighting the normalisation of genocidal action.
Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai said: "When we see alarming signs of genocide, we cannot wait to take decisive action. We must work together to urge our leaders to stop these war crimes and hold perpetrators to account." Nobel Peace Prize winner Tawakkol Karman said, "The world is silent in front of the genocide and the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people in Gaza."
The case against Israel in the ICJ has drawn some criticism from publications and individuals who argue that claims that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza cheapen the term and undermine its serious nature as defined by the UN Genocide Convention.
In January 2024, The Economist argued that South Africa's charge of genocide against Israel at the ICJ weakens the legal definition of genocide and diverts focus from the actual humanitarian crisis in Gaza, calling it "a mockery of the ICJ". It emphasised that Israel's actions, while destructive, are aimed at Hamas militants rather than targeting Palestinians for their ethnicity. The article criticised South Africa's legal case as politically motivated, warning that such claims undermine genuine efforts to prevent genocide. It added that the court's potential rulings could overshadow legitimate concerns about breaches of international war laws. "Genocide requires that Israel is killing people in Gaza simply for being Palestinian", The Economist wrote, adding that Israel is instead targeting Hamas fighters.
In a 12 January 2024 NPR interview, former US ambassador for war-crimes issues David Scheffer acknowledged Israeli war crimes in Gaza and claimed that Israel was not committing genocide but "responding to a genocidal act in order to prevent further genocide against Israel". Writing for The Times of Israel, Jeremy Sharon claimed that Israel's actions are defensive responses to Hamas, characterizing calls for Gaza's destruction and other statements by Israeli officials (later found by the ICJ to be "incitement to genocide") as "intemperate comments of some of its political leaders". Meanwhile, writer Susan Abulhawa wrote about going to Gaza, stating, "Israel is committing the holocaust of our time."
Israeli media outlets like Channel 12 and Channel 14 have been accused of incitement to genocide. In September 2024, Zulat for Equality and Human Rights and two other Israeli organisations compiled a list of statements made on Channel 14, which included over 50 advocating for genocide against Palestinians and more than 150 calling for or supporting war crimes and crimes against humanity, including ethnic cleansing, mass expulsion and the use of starvation as a weapon of war, and submitted it to Israel's Attorney General. The channel frequently referred to Gazan civilians as terrorists and legitimate targets in its broadcasts and on social media, with its website displaying a statistic labeled "the number of terrorists we've eliminated", reflecting the total number of Palestinians reported killed by Gaza's Health Ministry. Shimon Riklin [he], a Channel 14 journalist and anchor, publicly advocated for Israel to commit more war crimes. This rhetoric has been referenced in South Africa's genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
Various, mainly western, media and news outlets have been accused of complicity in genocide against Gaza through media imperialism. Others have situated the biases of western media outlets within a long history of downplaying and excusing the oppression of Palestinians. According to a report published by the Muslim Council of Britain's Centre for Media Monitoring analysing the language used in coverage of the Israeli assault on Gaza, "occupied territories" appeared more often in Al Jazeera English's coverage than in all U.S. or U.K. news outlets combined, and that emotive language was 11 times more likely to be used in descriptions of Israeli victims than of Palestinian victims. On 14 March 2024, protesters blocked access to the offices of The New York Times, accusing the paper of complicity in genocide. Sultany highlights that, despite a preponderance of Israeli statements that amount to incitement to genocide, mainstream commentary has portrayed the destruction of Gaza as "an incidental outcome of urban warfare rather than the predictable outcome of a policy".
A Tel Aviv University poll of 502 Israeli Jews conducted during the second week of January 2024 found that 51% believed the IDF was using an appropriate amount of force in Gaza and 43% believed it was not using enough force. In an Israel Democracy Institute survey of 510 Israeli citizens in early February, 68% of respondents supported preventing all international aid from entering Gaza.
In an interview with The New Statesman, the Israeli journalist and author Gideon Levy, a former aide and spokesman for Shimon Peres and longstanding writer for Haaretz who has reported on Israel's settlement policy for 35 years, said: "Israel is deteriorating horribly. The most important thing, and you mentioned it, is how unanimous it is. It's not only the right-wingers. You cannot even show some empathy to Gaza, to the suffering of Gaza, which Israel doesn't see at all. The average Israeli saw nothing [of what has unfolded in] Gaza, only the soldiers there see it. The bravery, the sacrifice, the hostages and families, this is shown nonstop, but not a single image of the suffering of two million people in Gaza. I think it's the darkest time of Israel, maybe ever."
Antisemitism scholar Matthew Bolton has argued: "It cannot be antisemitic to carry out genuine investigations into potentially genocidal activity. But the speed and eagerness with which the genocide concept was settled upon as the most appropriate for describing Israel's actions in the war, rather than lesser charges of 'war crimes'–with the evidence often resting on mistranslated or incomplete statements by Israeli politicians, rather than the actual military campaign itself—coupled with the fact that, as noted above, the genocide concept had been used by anti-Israel movements long before the 2023–24 war, indicates that the choice of this concept was not one driven by dispassionate analysis."
Israeli ministers responded to the ICJ's genocide ruling by accusing the court of "antisemitic bias". Antony Lerman, writing in Declassified UK, pointed to this claim being echoed by some of Israel's supporters, noting the officials' "deployment of weaponised antisemitism to deflect criticism" and that "using past experience of anti-Jewish persecution to neutralise criticism of, and generate sympathy for, the Jewish state [...] is decades old." Netanyahu has frequently "compared accusations that Israel's war is causing starvation in Gaza or that the war is genocidal to blood libels"; critics say this is to deflect blame or for political ends.
Some argue that this is a weaponisation of antisemitism, intended to shield Israel from such allegations. Raz Segal says that in calling anti-Israel protestors antisemitic, pro-Israel advocates "weaponize antisemitism" to "shield Israel from criticism of its attack on Gaza" that he and other scholars have said is a genocide.
On 15 December 2024, citing Ireland's decision to join South Africa's genocide case, Netanyahu ordered the closure of Israel's embassy in Ireland and Foreign Minister Gideon Sa'ar accused Taoiseach Simon Harris of antisemitism. Harris said that Netanyahu was using the closure as "a ploy to distract attention from the thousands of children killed by his armed forces in Gaza" and a spokesperson said that Harris would not respond to "personalised and false attacks".