UN investigative committee: "Israel has committed genocide in Gaza"
Geneva, Switzerland - UN investigators on Tuesday became the latest international body to conclude that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza in a bid to "destroy the Palestinians."
Navi Pillay, chair of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry, told AFP that "genocide is occurring in Gaza and is continuing to occur."
She added: "The responsibility lies with the State of Israel."
The commission, tasked with investigating the rights situation in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories, published its latest report nearly two years into Israel's destruction of Gaza, launched after the October 7 attacks.
The COI concluded that Israeli authorities and forces had since October 2023 committed "four of the five genocidal acts" listed in the 1948 Genocide Convention.
These are "killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, and imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group".
The investigators said explicit statements by Israeli civilian and military authorities along with the pattern of Israeli force conduct "indicated that the genocidal acts were committed with intent to destroy... Palestinians in the Gaza Strip as a group".
The report concluded that Israeli President Isaac Herzog, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and former defence minister Yoav Gallant have "incited the commission of genocide and that Israeli authorities have failed to take action against them to punish this incitement."
UN experts warns of "complicity"
The Independent International Commission of Inquiry is not a legal body, but its reports can wield diplomatic pressure and serve to gather evidence for later use by courts.
Pillay told AFP the commission was cooperating with the International Criminal Court, which last year issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant.
"The international community cannot stay silent on the genocidal campaign launched by Israel against the Palestinian people in Gaza," insisted Pillay, presenting her final report.
"The absence of action to stop it amounts to complicity," she warned.
Human rights organizations, legal experts, and genocide scholars have provided mountains of evidence that Israel is committing the "crime of crimes" – as genocide is sometimes called" – against Palestinians.
It has done so with the full military, economic, and diplomatic backing of successive US administrations. Most recently, Secretary of State Marco Rubio pledged his "unwavering support" to Israel in its destruction and ethnic cleansing of Gaza.
Cover photo: Collage: REUTERS & Stefano RELLANDINI / AFP