Two leading Israeli human rights organizations, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), have affirmed that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, and that the US and Europe are complicit.
The two groups, in reports published on Monday, said the Israeli regime has targeted civilians in Gaza only due to their identity as Palestinians since the beginning of the war in October 2023, inflicting severe and in some cases irreparable damage on Palestinian society.
The reports detailed crimes such as the killing of tens of thousands of women, children, and elderly people, mass forced displacement and starvation, and the destruction of homes and civilian infrastructure, including healthcare, education, and other essential services.
“What we see is a clear, intentional attack on civilians in order to destroy a group,” said Yuli Novak, the director of B’Tselem.
Calling for urgent action, Novak said, “I think every human being has to ask himself: what do you do in the face of genocide?”
As the United Nations' top court, the International Court of Justice, has yet to rule on whether genocide occurred, Novak stressed the need to recognize that a genocide is underway.
“Genocide is not just a legal crime. It’s a social and political phenomenon.”
The PHR report also detailed a chronological account of the Israeli targeting of Gaza’s health system.
The group’s director, Guy Shalev, said the destruction of the healthcare system alone makes the war genocidal under Article 2c of the Genocide Convention, which defines genocide as the deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to destroy a group “in whole or part”.
While the report details other genocidal aspects of Israel’s war, Shalev said, “You don’t have to have all five articles of the genocide convention to be fulfilled in order for something to be genocide.”
Many international and Palestinian groups have already termed the war genocidal, but the reports from two of Israel’s prominent human rights organizations, which have for decades documented systemic abuses, are likely to add to pressure for action.
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Both B’Tselem and PHR stressed that Israel’s western allies are complicit in the genocide in Gaza, with Novak emphasizing that “it couldn’t happen without the support of the western world.”
“Any leader that is not doing whatever they can to stop it is part of this horror,” she said.
Meanwhile, the director of PHR called on the US and European countries to shoulder their legal responsibility and take stronger action.
“Every tool in the toolbox should be used. This is not what we think, this is what the genocide convention calls for,” Shalev said.
As genocidal intent is a key element to classify a crime as genocide under international law, PHR and B’Tselem cited statements from Israeli politicians and military leaders, and a chronology of well-documented impacts on civilians after nearly two years of war is proof of that intent.
The PHR report details how “genocidal intent may be inferred from the pattern of conduct”, citing legal precedent from the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda.
“We don’t need to guess what Israel is doing and what the Israeli army is doing, because from the first day of this attack, Israeli leaders, the highest leadership, political leadership, including the prime minister, the minister of defense, the president of Israel, said exactly that,” Novak said.
“They talked about human animals. They talked about the fact that there are no civilians in Gaza or that there is an entire nation responsible for 7 October.”
“If the leadership of Israel, whether the army leadership and the political leadership, knows about the consequences of this policy and keeps going, it is very clear that it is intentional.”
B’Tselem warned that the genocidal campaign in Gaza may spill over into the West Bank, which has seen intensified deadly Israeli attacks since October 7, 2023, with almost 1,000 Palestinians killed and more than 40,000 displaced from cities, including Jenin and Tulkarem.
“The Israeli regime now has a new tool that they didn’t use before – genocide. And the fact that this tool or this policy used in Gaza is not yet in other areas is not something that we can count on for long,” Novak said.
“What we worry about and want to warn about is the fact that any small trigger might make the genocide spill over from Gaza into the West Bank.”
The regime’s bloody onslaught on Gaza has so far killed at least 59,921 Palestinians, mostly women and children.
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