Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, leading scholars’ association says

An elderly Palestinian man waits to get rice from a charity kitchen providing food for free in the west of Gaza City, on August 28, as the war between Israel and the Hamas militants movement continues. The UN declared a famine in Gaza governorate the previous week, blaming "systematic obstruction" of humanitarian deliveries by Israel. Photo / Bashar Taleb, AFP

Israel’s nearly two-year military campaign in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of people and left swathes of the enclave in rubble, meets “the legal definition of genocide”, the oldest and largest association of genocide scholars said in a resolution passed by the group’s members yesterday. .

The resolution, by the International Association of Genocide Scholars, added to a growing chorus from human rights organisations and academics concluding that Israel is committing genocide.

It is a crime outlined in a 1948 convention and defined by acts intended to “destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such”.

An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, in a message posted on X, called the resolution “disgraceful”, and said it was based on an unverified “campaign of lies” by the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Israel’s Government has reacted angrily to any suggestion its military campaign amounts to genocide, a crime defined in the aftermath of the Nazis’ systematic murder campaign against Jews during the Holocaust.

The resolution states that the October 7, 2023, attack by Hamas against Israel that killed more than 1200 people and prompted the Israeli military campaign in Gaza “constitutes international crimes”.

It also concludes that Israel’s response violates all five conditions set out in the 1948 convention, including “killing members of the group” and “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”, according to Emily Sample, a member of the association’s executive board.

Any one of the conditions would be sufficient for a finding of genocide.

The association has roughly 500 members.

A large majority - 86% - of members who voted on the resolution approved it, Sample said.

“We were very surprised at the level of consensus there was,” she said, adding that the board had refrained from issuing statements on the question of whether Israel’s conduct amounted to genocide, as it has in other conflicts, given the fraught debate over the issue.

The resolution accused Israel of carrying out “indiscriminate and deliberate” attacks against civilians and civilian infrastructure in Gaza, deliberately attacking medical and aid workers as well as journalists, forcibly displacing the enclave’s entire population multiple times and killing or injuring more than 50,000 children.

“This destruction of a substantial part of a group constitutes genocide,” the association concluded, of the attacks on Gaza’s children.

Smoke rises over residential areas after the Israeli Army's attacks on a neighbourhood in southern Gaza City, Gaza, on August 27. Photo / Getty Images

More than 63,000 people in Gaza have been killed, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between civilians and combatants.

Israel has repeatedly said it does not intentionally target uninvolved civilians and accuses Hamas of fighting from populated areas.

Throughout the war, Israel has barred independent human rights groups and journalists from traveling to Gaza.

Palestinian journalists in the enclave have been killed in numbers unprecedented for media workers in a modern conflict - the vast majority in Israeli air or drone attacks, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.

The resolution nodded to the growing number of organisations finding Israel is committing genocide.

Among them are Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Israeli rights group B’Tselem, along with United Nations experts.

The International Court of Justice is currently hearing a case brought by South Africa alleging that Israel is violating international law by committing and failing to prevent genocidal acts.

Sample said the timing of the association’s resolution - long after the war started, on the eve of the second anniversary of the conflict - may have owed to a fear of “personal and professional consequences”.

Members of the association had lost jobs in the United States and been denied visas to travel there for speaking out, she said.

For scholars, “coming out against a genocide like this was difficult to weigh personally”, she said.

In Israel, where there has been broad support for the military offensive, but splits among academics regarding the nature of the war, the small number of Israeli experts who specialise in genocide studies nearly all agree that Israel’s actions amount to genocide, said Shmuel Lederman, an Israeli genocide scholar and political theorist at the Open University and University of Haifa.

In recent months, particularly after Israel announced a near-total blockade of humanitarian aid in March, more of Israel’s academics, particularly international law experts, began to consider the genocide label, Lederman said.

After famine was declared in parts of Gaza last month by the global authority on hunger, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attacked assertions that Israel’s role in the famine bolstered the case for genocide.

“If we wanted to commit genocide, it would have taken exactly one afternoon,” he told Israeli reporters in August.

“What we’ve been seeing is since late March, because of the starvation, the declaration of ethnic cleansing as an official aim, it’s not just genocide scholars - there seems to be a broader and broader agreement with legal scholars that we are seeing [genocide],” said Lederman, who recalled that he personally reached a similar conclusion in the spring of 2024.

“The bottom line is, there is a reason why so many people in this field of study agree. It’s very hard to be a genocide scholar and not say it’s not a genocide,” he said.

Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.