Reuters. A United Nations commission of inquiry concluded on Tuesday (September 16) that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza and that top Israeli officials including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had incited these acts.
The 72-page legal analysis cites examples of the scale of the killings, aid blockages, forced displacement and the destruction of a fertility clinic to back up its genocide finding, adding its voice to rights groups and others which have reached the same conclusion.
“Genocide is occurring in Gaza," Navi Pillay, head of the Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and a former International Criminal Court judge, told Reuters during an interview on Monday (September 15).
“And we named the three individuals that we felt were responsible. And we said, and the one is the prime minister, the other the president, and the third is the former minister of defense. And we said that since they acted as agents of the state, then the state of Israel is responsible,” she added.
Israel is fighting a genocide case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the Hague. It rejects such accusations, citing its right to self-defence following the deadly October 7, 2023, Hamas attack that killed 1,200 people and resulted in 251 hostages, according to Israeli figures.
The subsequent war in Gaza has killed more than 64,000 people, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, while a global hunger monitor says part of it is suffering from famine.
The 1948 U.N. Genocide Convention, adopted in the wake of the mass murder of Jews by Nazi Germany, defines genocide as crimes committed "with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such".
It says that one or more of five categories must have been committed for violations to count as genocide.
The U.N. Commission found that Israel had committed four of them: killing; causing serious bodily or mental harm; deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about the destruction of the Palestinians in whole or in part; and imposing measures intended to prevent births.
It cited as evidence interviews with victims, witnesses, doctors, verified open-source documents and satellite imagery analysis compiled over the nearly two years since the war began.
The Commission also concluded that statements by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other officials are "direct evidence of genocidal intent."
It also names Israeli President Isaac Herzog and former defense minister, Yoav Gallant.
South Africa's Pillay, who formerly headed a U.N. tribunal for Rwanda where more than 1 million people were killed in 1994, said the situations were comparable.
“In the Rwandan genocide, the group were the Tutsis, and here, the group are the Palestinians," she told Reuters.
While the ICJ referred to other Israeli officials' statements in regard to Gaza and Palestinians in its January 2024 emergency measures order, it did not name Netanyahu.
The Commission of Inquiry's finding is the strongest U.N. finding to date but the body, set up by the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2021, does not officially speak for the United Nations. The latter has not yet used the term genocide but is under mounting pressure to do so.
Pillay, 83, will retire in November. She has been told to expect U.S. sanctions as a result of the Gaza finding and condemned such moves against other critics of Israeli policy.
